It is well known that managing construction projects requires intense concentration and accuracy. Engineers or architects' job is creative, challenging, and interesting all at the same time. If you're an engineer or architect, or anyone involved with a construction project, you should know what the pain points are.
In this article, we will discuss some of the daily pain points you encounter that prevent you from focusing on the creative aspects of your job and from enjoying all the challenges.
1. Documents
Architects and engineers, collectively known as designers, work primarily with technical drawings, also called documents. Given the nature of this work, it is difficult to count how many times a document can be edited, adjusted or updated. It is evident that the number of modifications is proportional to the number of times a document is renamed. If so, are you sure you never had a document named "Final 1, Final 2 or final final final"? It's so confusing to look at these files! Do you know which one is the most recent update? Considering the answer is "yes," how can you think people who work with you won't be "mad" to search for documents they need when you aren't around?
In this instance, it is not about losing time trying to figure out which one is the correct one, but about taking the risk of working on the wrong files, and you know what the consequences can be.
2. Task communication
In general, how many tasks you have to assign to one document, and how do you manage to remember them all? Writing them down on the paper, making a note on the desktop screen or phone, or posting a note on the computer or desk can help you to remember them. But, when you look around, do all the stickers and notes here and there don't make you feel overwhelmed by the chaos?
At the end of the day, manual reminders might be able to help you accomplish all of your tasks, but do you feel confident that you did not forget some tasks sometime and your project is not delayed, or a big mistake occurred because of a missed task?
3. Photo searching
We all know how much a photo can support your thought process, bring good execution to prevent mistakes and misunderstood what actually happens on the construction site. However, it can be frustrating to search for photos among thousands stored in folders and subfolders. Moreover, due to heavy storage, opening photos may be more time-consuming. Thus, As a result, it can take you 20-30 minutes, or you may already have given up on the idea before even starting to search it.
The problem is that you lose time searching for just a few photos instead of spending it on more time-consuming tasks.
4. Asynchronous information
It happens when many people are working on the same document at the same time, and the task of one may depend on the progress of the others. Problems occur when one doesn't know there is an update from others. It's because the late update or the person in charge forgets to inform about the update. Consequently, you waste time working on an outdated document. When you recognize this, you have to start over again from the beginning with the upsetting caused by the mistake of someone or poor communication.
5. Document history
Often you need to know what happened with the project, how did you go from point A to point C in a specific document. It's important to know where and when you may make a mistake, an inappropriate change. Worse case, it happens that many people work on the same document, how can you know who did what and when without asking around and waiting for checking?
Without a perfect organization of documents, you will feel like you're doing archeology. The fact is that you're just digging into folders and looking for what was going on. This is a big waste of time, and you lose track of why you or other people made this decision for the project. How can this give bad impacts on your working efficiency?
6. Collaboration
Construction project is not a project you can work on your own or only with your team, especially to the big project, it involves many parties into managing and monitoring the execution. This can lead to many issues with communication and collaboration.
How do you handle these effectively in terms of cost-saving, time economy and smoothness? If you are using Excel as your project management platform, it means that you have to use third-party tools to handle all the collaboration. It includes phone, email, chat apps like WhatsApp, Skype, cloud service to share and store documents like Google Drive, Dropbox and so on. By using all separate tools for collaboration, it's no more the best option because you have to set up each, and it ends up cost more. That, not yet mentioned, the less productivity caused by time-consuming of communication through many tools.
Ultimately, even though you love your job, but you don't always like it, do you? All these problems lead to repeated actions, mess up the workflow, and finally reduce working efficiency. Moreover, it challenges your patience and erodes your enthusiasm for your job.
If you care about getting rid of these pain points, let sign up for Goplan's Free Trial here , to experience how we can help to improve communication, reduce repetitive task, save time and bring you pleasure while working.