Construction management for SMEs in the construction industry

If you have an SME and you work in construction, you probably already know that managing works and projects is not easy. There are many parties involved, and the complexity only increases as the number of works increases.

Many times we have works that are geographically dispersed, which makes communication difficult, and the fact of not correctly coordinating shipments of materials or the necessary labor can delay a work, which has a cost.

Coordination between the technical office and the construction site is also often a challenge.

According to various studies conducted, it has been found that construction companies around the world face similar challenges when it comes to planning, organizing, and managing work on construction sites. According to McKinsey, large projects across all asset classes typically take 20 percent longer to complete than scheduled. Many factors contribute to this problem, but one of them is rigid, theoretical, top-down scheduling that doesn't take into account the realities of a construction site. There are several ways to address this problem, especially the use of lean construction and collaborative planning methodologies.

Keep in mind that working with excel, paper, or other means brings problems since the information is not accessible to everyone, you cannot know the status of the work without having to call the site or go there, the reports must be created manually, collecting information from various sources, etc. As we told you before, new digital tools have emerged that support these methods and allow you to have good planning and visibility of the progress of projects.

When construction production planning and scheduling are collaborative, and everyone working on a project is up to date, productivity increases. To achieve this, it is very useful to rely on easy-to-use digital tools. That's why I want to show you monday.com, a cloud-based tool for project planning and management, totally collaborative. It has features that make it an excellent option for any company, regardless of its size.

If we are talking about an SME, it is not always easy to develop an infrastructure and a digital support system for processes and projects. monday.com allows you to achieve this, at very affordable prices.

How to use monday.com to manage construction projects?

monday.com is a cloud-based task and project management platform, a Work Operating System. It is visual and easy to use, and you can easily modify it for the specific needs of each project. In other words, it doesn't force you to use a specific workflow or management model.

Integrating monday.com into your work routines can take just a few minutes as it is very intuitive, which is essential when you are involving clients and other users who do not necessarily use the product daily.

You can create tasks for different types of actions and organize them into weekly groups, for example. Each task can include: a description, completion date, responsible person, status, etc. Moreover, you can add notes and attach files for each task (deliverables), helping you to discuss each within the project team.
As you can give your customers access to view the progress of the project, among other tasks, you make the process transparent. For example, you can send email reminders to each of the participants with just a little configuration on the platform.

Adaptable functions

Organize your project tasks and group them into boards on monday.com. A board can be, for example, a project or a business process. In the default view, tasks are in rows that have multiple user-defined fields as columns. A typical set of columns might include a task description/name, team member, status, timeline, and completion date. You can also assign one or more tags to each task. Fields can have user-defined colors and labels. This allows you to put together a clear schedule of your project.

Organize tasks in groups. For some projects, you can group tasks for "this week," "next week," and "near future." You can then drag and drop tasks between groups as work progresses, (Better yet? You can create automatic tasks that allow you, with a single click and change of state, to send tasks to different groups). Alternatively, the groups can also correspond to the different stages of a work or project. Additionally, you can filter dashboard content using any combination of field values.

Templates to speed onboarding are available on monday.com, but designing your board isn't hard. There are many templates for project management, including one for construction scheduling. Either way, you can create a board that fits the particularities of your works, processes, or projects. From those boards, you can generate your templates and then go back to using the same structure.

One board, many views

In addition to the board view (default), there are other views such as Timeline, Kanban, Calendar, Chart, Map, Workload, Form, and Files. On the other hand, you can also see the information contained in one or more dashboards in the dashboards section, monday.com's graphical reporting tool.

A powerful feature, rule-based automation. The system can be configured to alert team members when a deadline is approaching and when the status of a task has changed. Rules can move items between groups if certain conditions are met. There are many pre-made rules or automation to choose from, which you can combine to create complex workflows.

No construction-related application is useful today unless it can be integrated with other systems, this is because, for example, it can delay data-driven decision-making as we don't have all of them in the same place, many times they are up to date on one software and not on the other. To address these issues monday.com offers a variety of integrations, including Microsoft Teams, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Jira, Trello, GitHub, Dropbox, Slack, and Google and Outlook calendars.

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Possible uses for projects and teams

monday.com helps teams and individuals communicate efficiently and see what they need to do at any time.

An architecture or engineering firm can organize workflows with monday.com and engage clients and partners in the process. Some engineering companies have adopted Scrum as a project management framework - monday.com supports that method perfectly.

Similarly, construction teams using traditional or lean project management methods can plan and monitor a project's progress better with monday.com than they typically do today.

With monday.com, project participants can collaboratively plan their work. This type of distributed planning is a way of turning the theoretical overall schedule into a life plan that will eventually shorten the completion of the project.

In addition to a web interface, monday.com has mobile apps for iPhone and Android phones; this makes it practical for use on the construction site.

Consistent use of monday.com allows companies to take their workflow management to the next level without making huge investments in training and software.

In short, what can you do with this platform?

• Create and manage project milestones.
• Create and assign tasks.
• Attach files (deliverables) to projects on the fly.
• Use of mobile applications to manage projects.
• Communicate with team members.
• Update team using the news.
• Keep customers informed.
• Organize tasks in and of teams.
• Creation of tables and detailed reports of each project.
• Track the time that members of each team spend performing assigned tasks.
• Manage project finances.
• Website, as well as a desktop app and a mobile phone app.
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monday.com aims to make each user feel empowered and part of something bigger than their tasks, and as a result, drives collective productivity and transparency, improving project management, saving resources, and lowering its total cost.