Benefits, Challenges and Takeaways
Power tools are amazing, but can be dangerous if used without training.
It's the same when automating your construction processes with software. You're unleashing real power which will lead to real change. In the spirit of full disclosure, this page presents the benefits that will result from proper implementation, the challenges and potential pitfalls you will face, and the takeaways that will guide you to consistent success.
1 — Clarity for the project team
C-Birt answers the question, "What do I need to do now?" for everyone on the project team, whether they are a contractor, project manager, procurement manager, warehouse clerk or sales representative. This sounds simple but is rarely achieved in the world of construction. C-Birt achieves this by automation, real-time data capture, and integration across departments.
Not only does this real-time integration of human effort across the organization make the project run smoother, but it improves the quality of life of each team member by giving them a sense of order, control and predictability over their area of responsibility. It also reduces the need for meetings or manual feedback between departments, allowing each department to "run with the ball" with a minimum of fuss.
- Real-time task assignment for every role
- Fewer meetings, less manual handoff between departments
- A clear sense of order and control over each person's area
Having tasks assigned to you in real time can feel relentless: no sooner you get one thing done, and another pops up.
And just because you don't need to have meetings to keep the team coordinated, doesn't mean meetings aren't still important. People need community, to express their concerns and to feel the support of the team.
And while synchronization of the efforts of everyone in the company is amazing when everyone is crushing their duties, having just one or two persons who are not on their game can be a disproportionate drag.
Responsibilities need to be narrow enough to ensure that when the project is moving at full speed, each person can keep pace with the number of new tasks that pop up on their dashboard each day.
Have regular, short meetings to keep the team spirit alive and show people how their individual work is contributing to the progress of the project as a whole.
Monitor performance of each person on your team and give extra support to those who are struggling. Apply rules fairly and consistently and hold everyone to the same standard.
2 — Transparency for stakeholders
C-Birt captures every task in real-time, at source, without any redundant data entry. Project performance is transparent for the project, within departments and right down to the level of each project manager or contractor.
C-Birt's scheduling algorithm predicts start and complete dates for every task based on resource limitations and historic performance, thus enabling detailed cash flow predictions and timelines, while capturing present performance in real time. At the beginning of a project C-Birt provides utterly realistic estimates of project execution time and depth of financing needed, based on desired speed of build and expected sales inflows.
Because C-Birt completely automates payroll, "discretionary pricing" of work is prevented. Rates are locked in and can only be changed with stakeholder permission.
The crucial performance metrics of
- construction speed/adherence to timeline
- quality control
- actual material and labour costs, and
- ability of procurement and warehouse teams to keep pace with production
are captured in real time and not subject to manipulation, thus providing financiers and owners real visibility and confidence.
- Real-time capture of build speed, quality, and cost metrics
- Automated payroll locks in rates, preventing discretionary pricing
- Realistic financing and timeline estimates before the project starts
The challenge with transparency is that it exposes performance, which means it exposes people. How the company culture handles this vulnerability of its staff makes all the difference. I'll admit right away that I failed big time in this in my first years of implementing C-Birt. Preserving humanity in your corporate culture as you automate with software will probably be one of your biggest challenges. This is ironic, because my main motivation for creating C-Birt was improving the quality of life for everyone on the project.
Fairness is important for morale. Good performance must be recognised and rewarded; poor performance must be recognised and corrected. To fail at either of these will destroy morale. The software enables both. It's the flavour of how you actually carry out the rewarding and correcting that will make the difference. It absolutely must be done in an atmosphere of nurturing support, where there is at the heart of every decision the genuine desire to promote the success of each person who genuinely wants to succeed.
If there is an atmosphere of fear and intimidation, people will go into safe mode and the vitality of the team will be robbed.
When using C-Birt to predict project duration and costs, be mindful that the system is going to assume that every working day is productive, which we all know is not the case.
Go the extra mile to ensure your staff feels seen and appreciated. Have regular and frequent performance reviews--don't shy away from these. In your performance reviews, never miss a chance to recognise good work. You definitely don't want people to feel that they are only seen when they mess up.
Where performance is sub-standard or rules are broken you should intervene promptly, but with the intention to help the person succeed, and with openness to hear their side of the story. Point out the problem and try to draw out the underlying cause by expressing genuine interest, giving a safe space for feedback and listening well. Nothing is more valuable than honest feedback. If changes are needed on your end, implement them promptly.
Then, give the person a reset, a clean slate to go out and succeed.
But there are people who will never comply, no matter how supportive you are. Go through the process, give them their chances to be heard and to improve; if it's clear they are not able or willing to comply, do your duty to the team and set them free.
When using the software to predict project duration (which determines overall cost, cash flow, and depth of financing) build in downtime. One simple way: if you plan to work 22 days per month, do your plans assuming 18-20 days per month.
3 — Integration across departments
The Project Management, Procurement, Warehousing, Sales and Payroll/Back Office teams are all connected through C-Birt to one source of truth. Teams can execute their functions confidently, knowing that the information they are working with is real.
As an example, let's say that there is an optional Solar Electricity upgrade available for homeowners, but to avoid expensive retrofitting the project management team must know if this option has been chosen before the walls are poured for the unit. Because C-Birt tracks the build of each unit in real time, the system provides deadline dates to the sales team. Should a sales rep try to sell this upgrade after the walls are already poured, the system will block the upgrade. Conversely, if the sales rep does sell an upgrade for a given unit, when the project team comes to build that unit they will know that the Solar upgrade has been chosen and must be installed. Similarly, the procurement schedule will be updated to include the purchase of everything related to that upgrade for that unit.
The same pattern applies to the many other changes that happen all the time on construction sites: changes are allowed or prohibited based on policies; successful changes are propagated seamlessly into the tasks of each department and team member. To say that this reduces the communication burden of running a construction project is an understatement. In fact, the system coordinates the efforts of the team so well, that the daily productivity of the project becomes something that is taken for granted.
- One shared source of truth across all departments
- Policy-based rules automatically allow or block changes
- Successful changes propagate into every affected team's tasks
Integration across departments is easily the most transformative benefit of C-Birt. But it's a double-edged sword. Misinformation propagates through the system just as readily as truth. Now that everyone is interconnected, mistakes have greater potential to cause harm. If transactions are logged inaccurately--or worse yet, done entirely outside of the system--then C-Birt goes from being a single source of truth to a single source of lies!
C-Birt is an all or nothing kind of guy. Every person, in every department, needs to be fully on board. Otherwise, it simply will not work. Having said that, every time I've shown C-Birt to people who have been working with construction companies--whether as project managers or in procurement, warehousing, sales or payroll--their response is "How soon can we start using this?!" Convincing the entire company team to embrace C-Birt should not be difficult: the system is designed to facilitate people's existing workflows, not create new ways of doing things or require artificial bending of real-world workflows to match the software.
But the adoption of C-Birt has to be driven by the highest level of the company, with nothing less than 100% compliance tolerated.
4 — Quality control
C-Birt is built to enforce one cardinal rule: Never pay for incomplete work!
There is no more effective way to control quality on a job site that withholding pay for incomplete or substandard work. But enforcing this rule eludes most.
C-Birt makes enforcing this rule possible by
- splitting execution into discrete tasks, typically of 1 or 2-day duration
- providing detailed checklists
- tying payroll to meeting checklist criteria.
This feature alone is a game changer. Paying for incomplete/shoddy work slows down the project, wastes material, requires expensive re-working and exponentially increases the management burden. Ultimately, this extra time and effort increases cost and reduces profit. Doing it right the first time makes life so much simpler: the project team has a better quality of life, the stakeholders make more money, and the customers get a better product.
- Discrete 1–2 day tasks with detailed checklists
- Payroll gated on checklist completion
- Rework, waste, and re-inspection drop sharply
Splitting work into discrete tasks and creating detailed meaningful checklists that will guarantee the work is done right will mean extra time and effort in the planning phase. The C-Birt team will do the heavy lifting on this, but we'll need your input and feedback on refining this for your specific operation.
Anything outside of the contractor's control that prevents him from completing the task will negate your ability to not pay him for incomplete work. For instance, if you run out of grout, you will still have to pay the tiler for his work, even if he has not grouted yet.
Project Managers tend to become friends with their contractors and may let work pass inspection that should have failed.
It's difficult to enforce this rule when you have vendor supply and install (S&I) contracts. The installer is paid by the vendor, and gets paid whether you are satisfied with the job or not.
Plan to spend a little longer on planning. (The good news: once you've gone through this once for a given building type, you get to skip this step, or make only minor tweaks, on any future projects where you reuse this building type.)
Stay on top of everything you are responsible to provide to the contractor: procurement, delivery of materials to the field, permits, equipment, electricity, etc., so that there is no excuse for not completing a task 100%. (The good news: C-Birt fully automates both procurement and field-delivery logistics.)
Double-check completed work to keep project managers honest. C-Birt is designed for mandatory checking of work by the Project Manager and then by Quality Control Enforcers; then optionally by the Head Project Manager or even by Senior Management. When work fails inspection, it is immediately struck from payroll, and the team is suspended from getting new work. And passing work that later fails inspection becomes part of that Project Manager or QC Enforcer's performance review.
Avoid vendor supply and install S&I if possible. Actual mileage may vary, but I've never been satisfied with S&I. Quality control is not the only problem: instead of coming on site to install when the first house is ready, they are going to wait until you have 5 or 10 houses ready. That makes sense for the vendor, but it plays havoc with your schedule.
5 — Logistics breakthrough
Getting material from the warehouse to where it is needed on site when it is needed is hard.
If you go for speed of production, you will drop out material ahead of time. The problem with this is loss of control: with material at hand, contractors may begin a task before it is fully ready for execution, or before they have completed their work-in-progress (work hoarding). This will lead to loss of quality control, which is a disaster. Goods may also be damaged or stolen.
If you go for control and only deliver goods on the day when they are needed, you will create a bottleneck and production will suffer. C-Birt solves this problem in a way that preserves both speed and control.
Again, this one benefit alone is a game changer. On a Jamaican project, production time for a 900 sq ft. home went from 200 days to 90 days upon implementation of this system.
- Material delivered against real task readiness, not guesswork
- Prevents work-hoarding and out-of-sequence starts
- Preserves both production speed and site control
Part of the secret of this logistics breakthrough is that Project Managers share the responsibility along with the warehouse team for delivery of material to their crews. This is outside the traditional responsibility of project managers, and they may push back against it.
Sell your project managers on the benefits of this system to their productivity (which are huge) and incentivise them as needed. If that doesn't work, hire a few extra persons on the warehouse team and let them relieve the PMs of this responsibility. Either way, it is worth it.
6 — Subsidiarity: distribution of responsibility
You have better productivity, profitability and reliability when responsibility is delegated to the lowest level possible in the organization. There is also the added benefit of each person in the team--even those on the lowest level--having a concrete sense of their significance to the operation. It's a win-win situation when each team member has a discrete and fairly narrow area of responsibility in which their tasks are clearly defined, success is predictably achievable, and performance is both objectively measurable and consistently recognized and rewarded by their supervisors. It's a win-win because in this scenario, managers can truly be managers: no longer in crisis mode, they have the liberty to observe the team in action, catch the exceptions, and reinforce the wins. And for the stakeholders, it's a much more comforting position: instead of being dependent on a "Super Project Manager" to hold the operation together (which is both inefficient and vulnerable to disaster should that person leave) they have the assurance that because the system is delegating tasks in real time to each person, the system will continue to work, regardless of who may come or go from the team.
Also, it is easy to onboard new players, because the system provides such clear delineation of each person's role.
- Clearly defined, achievable responsibility for every role
- Managers freed from crisis mode to actual management
- No single point of failure if one person leaves
Automated task creation is the heartbeat of C-Birt, and it just plain works, hands off! However, there are a couple things to watch for: if you define someone's responsibilities too broadly, they will get more tasks assigned than they can handle. And if someone in the team is not completing their tasks, the persons downstream of them will not be issued their new tasks.
Assign responsibilities carefully and keep checking in on relative workload of each person on the team and redistribute responsibilities as needed to keep things fair and attainable.
Monitor performance and give support to any team member who is missing completion deadlines on their tasks.
7 — Predictability & replicability
Which brings us to the benefit of predictable and repeatable performance. It's not enough to successfully complete a project. We should also be able to repeat the performance with absolute confidence. The things we learned on the project should be permanently captured and become part of the company's DNA. And when we move to the next project, we should be able to start with a completely new team and still have the same confidence and predictability. All these benefits are guaranteed by C-Birt. Not only do stakeholders have confidence in taking on new projects, but management focus can now be lifted from managing the operation (read "daily trying to make order out of chaos!") to improving the operation: reducing costs, improving designs or reworking processes.
- Institutional knowledge persists beyond any one team
- New teams onboard with the same playbook, not tribal knowledge
- Management time shifts from firefighting to improvement
Structure and predictability are great, and they build team confidence. And having a clearly defined set of responsibilities and being able to keep on top of them all the time is also great. However, people like to keep learning, and while it's great to keep banging out your tasks week after week, it can get boring to have such a narrow focus.
Consider rotating responsibilities within the team, so that each person ends up with wide experience and doesn't numb out on one specialty.
8 — Scalability
By reducing the management burden and providing real-time transparency to stakeholders, C-Birt allows for scaling up of operations. Scaling can be done by increasing the build speed of a project, or by running multiple projects simultaneously.
The integration and automation of procurement with project execution leads naturally to optimization. The same procurement team can now serve the needs of multiple projects at once. Payroll automation implies the same for the back-office team.
Ease of onboarding new team members, preservation of knowledge within the system, and transparency of performance allows for replication of teams and confident oversight of multiple simultaneous projects.
- One procurement and back-office team can serve multiple projects
- Faster onboarding preserves quality as headcount grows
- Confident oversight of several simultaneous projects at once
The only practical way to speed up a project is to have parallel teams working on different sections of the project at the same time. Build speed within each team remains the same, but overall speed doubles if you add a second team. Typically, your financing needs will more than double, because you'll have a lot of unsold inventory on the ground. Your overheads will be higher, so any delays will be more painful.
Warehouse space is another potential choke point.
The logistics of running parallel projects are less demanding than those of speeding up one project, provided you have strong, well-trained teams on both locations.
C-Birt brings scalability within reach, and gives you an accurate preview of your financing, labor, procurement and warehousing needs. If all of these resources are available, go for it.
There's more than we can list on a page.
Elimination of payroll fraud, easier access to financing, less material waste, cleaner sites — the details are where C-Birt's benefits become credible. Let us show you on a real demo.