New Data Shows Collaboration is Still Construction’s Central Challenge

The modern construction industry tackles projects of enormous complexity and risk. To grapple with that challenge, our industry has evolved a landscape of design and construction specialists, each able to bring incredible depth of expertise to a particular aspect of the project. The strategy has served well—there’s no question that many of the industry’s modern achievements were simply unthinkable even a few decades ago.

But there’s a second edge to that sword: in a big team, collaboration is often the hardest part of the job. Individual professionals engaged in the same project are spread across multiple companies; are separated by months of project schedule; do their work based on conflicting information; and find themselves dispersed across multi-stakeholder workflows with flow charts like mazes. 

Dodge Construction Network has published a new study of that challenge. As you’ll read in the report, the stakes of meeting this challenge are high, and our level of success as an industry is mixed. But there’s good news too. Read on for some of our key findings; better yet, download the full report.

Construction Quality Issues are Experienced by Almost Everybody, and Poor Collaboration Is a Root Cause

Construction quality problems are not the exception—they’re the norm. General and trade contractors alike widely acknowledge that it’s critical they invest in improving construction quality, but far fewer are actually making those investments at scale.

Furthermore, it’s clear that poor collaboration is a key aspect of the problem, with a third citing cross-trade coordination as a frequently contributing factor to quality issues.

The Stakes Are High

Poor coordination can have a devastating impact on project and company performance. The report finds that, on average, budgets increase by 9% and annual profit margins are eroded by 10% as a result of poor coordination. Other impacts include high levels of stress and conflict on site, schedule noncompliance, degradation of company reputation, and safety risk on the jobsite.

Trade Contractors and Field Professionals Lead the Cross-Trade Coordination Effort—But Need Better Tools

A great deal of coordination is handled directly by trade contractors, on the jobsite. And there are important opportunities to set field professionals up for better success in this effort.

The status-quo in the industry is that field professionals are separated from the information they need to build; only 11% of field personnel can always access the data that they need to build. Complicating the matter is that company leadership—where the decisions are commonly made around adoption of new processes, tools, and technologies—is less aware of the problem. In fact, 36% of company leadership believe field professionals can always access the information they need, overestimating what field professionals themselves say by a factor of more than three.

In this, our study exposes a major challenge. The industry has broadly accepted the value of a robust preconstruction and VDC process, investing heavily in the use of BIM technology to deconflict and de-risk the project early. However, that investment stays locked in the model. Fewer than one third of field personnel are using BIM for coordination in the field or to better understand what to build. 

The Good News: Better Tools Exist, and the Industry Wants to Adopt Them

The industry’s investment in BIM-driven design and coordination signals that we’re at the beginning of a movement towards effective and productive collaboration. There’s much left to do, but contractors stand poised to continue improving.

At Dusty Robotics, we’re excited to contribute by building solutions that collapse the gap between design intent and action in the field. The industry has already invested significantly in tools for virtual design and construction, enabling project teams to collaborate in de-risking the project before anyone sets foot in the field. But when the coordinated model isn’t leveraged by the field, all we’re actually doing is de-risking the model. The next phase in this transformational journey is bringing the power of VDC out to the field, bridging the gap between the office and the field and creating clear lines of communication between all stakeholders–making the invisible visible.

If you'd like to read the full report, you can download it for free here.

Collaboration is a central challenge today for the construction industry, but this study illuminates impactful solutions. As an industry, we can see a path to successful—even exemplary—collaboration in the construction of more beautiful, functional, sustainable, and advanced projects than ever.