Construction Business Owner, December 2006

Put yourself in the shoes of your human capital manager. A project has just come in for a hotel, and you need to hire or allocate 200 people in a month. Many of these people are finishing other projects, and the most qualified people, while willing to relocate, need as much advance notice as possible. If you are lucky, the project is in a city where you already have substantial activity, and you can shift people over to the new project. If not, an even larger than usual recruiting effort is already late.

Now imagine you found out business development has been working on signing up this project for a year.

The culprit is running more than one pool of information on projects. Most companies in this industry run some form of human capital management system, some form of customer relationship management (CRM) and some form of cost and budget management. These applications are commonly seen as imperative software for the continued and successful operations of a company. 

However, despite that in many cases, they have been viewed as point solutions, a staffing manager needs to know the demands of the client from the CRM system, as well as the timing and budgeting for each project. Point solutions can miss the point. People or technology need to connect this information to eliminate surprise data, such as a new project, for a business to run as it should.

The stakes are likely familiar enough. The wrong person hired for the wrong job at the wrong time, or any combination of the three, can be a costly headache at best and at worst, can sidetrack an entire project. Construction companies, maybe more than companies in any other industry, need to build these paths between the financial, business development, project management and human resource functions.

Through our findings, we discovered that the vast majority of construction companies have no less than three customer databases for accounting, project management and marketing. From the perspective of the IT department, they are ensuring that the needs of each of those individual departments have been met, to the detriment of the whole. The companies appear to be running fine, but at the cost of potentially millions of dollars because there is no link between opportunities and human resource requirements, no link between opportunities and project management responsibilities and no link between opportunities and estimating.

Connecting these data pools is not impossible. First and foremost, you need to consolidate the data into one database. Believe it or not, that's the easy part. You simply have to enforce a single system. With one data element to track, the information can now be properly indexed. 

Second, build a regularly administered customer satisfaction questionnaire that is automatically sent to your owners on a regular basis. This is to accurately reflect the success of projects in process, but also to create an information backlog to track qualitative information about experience, expertise and success levels of the staff on each project.

Finally, do something with the data. One of the primary goals is to avoid or insure replication of a specific outcome, and one of the primary contributors to the success of that endeavor is proper staffing. Does the experience in a person's work history equal success for the company, the client and the person themselves? Has this person's talents been matched accurately with the assignments? What kind of work history tends to indicate success in the future? Finding answers to these questions is the starting point for a data-powered business.