One of the common themes you’ll hear these days when talking with people in the AEC industry, particularly firm leaders, is that the reputation around the sector is deservedly changing. After years of a (sometimes exaggerated) reputation of being technological laggards, that is clearly no longer the case, and really isn’t how even forward-thinkers in the industry think about their colleagues anymore. Today, construction firms are extremely willing to try new tools to streamline their work and keep up with growing demand amid growing workforce challenges.
As this change has taken place, though, new problems have started to arise. In conversations with those leaders and people working with technology within the AEC industry, one of the biggest challenges we will hear is that people are still struggling with the most effective processes to adopt these new technologies. It’s one thing to have a willingness to invest in new tools, but quite another to actually choose the best option, run a pilot program, evaluate that program, and communicate to leaders why and how they can scale the usage.
Since every organization is structured slightly differently and varies in how it operates, there is no one magic recipe that can be applied across the board, but Skanska USA has developed a procedure for this very question that has been working well. Recently, Geo Week News spoke with Danielle O’Connell, a senior director of emerging technology with the company, and Mike Zeppieri, their vice president of emerging technology, about this procedure, why it’s important to have it in place, and some of their most important takeaways around this technology adoption process.
The procedure itself is a fairly simple eight-step process that runs all the way starting with the point at which a problem that can be solved with a new tool is identified to the recommendation of scaling following a pilot program, with steps including vendor research, funding, contracting, pilot kick-off and evaluation, and more. According to Zeppieri, a primary impetus for setting up this company-wide procedure was what was discussed above, with workers in the field becoming more adept at finding potential solutions. For Skanska USA, though, with 28 offices across the country, that could lead to different kinds of problems without a set plan in place.
“We live in a world now where the people in the field are in many ways the catalyst for innovation,” Zeppieri said. “They are quite capable of finding the vendors, finding the solutions, and building those relationships. But we didn’t want to end up in a world where you’ve got every project team, or every office, signing their own agreements with various vendors.”
One of the most important pieces of this procedure starts right at the top, and how they even begin to think about the potential adoption of a new tool. In their eyes, it shouldn’t be a process of a team seeing a new technology and thinking about how they can adopt it into their workflows. Rather, they say, they’re trying to have their team think about the problem that needs to be solved, and then explore the multiple paths that can be taken to solve the problem. Sometimes, particularly for an organization like Skanska, they may already have a tool in-house that can address the problem.
“That education piece is really important, to let them know, Hey, we already have these tools,” O’Connell said. “This is not all about just introducing new tools over and over and over again.”
In listening to O’Connell and Zeppieri, it’s clear that much of this work of identifying, piloting, and ultimately scaling new tools is that it’s all about balancing acts. For instance, particularly for an organization like Skanska that works all around the world and has to deal with global compliance regulations, they need to balance that compliance and also address the needs of your teams in the field. You can’t ignore the compliance, but you also can’t be the “Department of No,” as Zeppieri puts it.
There is also a tremendous amount of relationship balancing and building in all directions throughout this process. A big part of this, of course, is working with your internal teams who are actually using these tools, finding out their needs and how they are using it. This often becomes part of the piloting process, finding the teams who are willing to be the first to use a new tool, and then moving to other teams to see if the tool can truly be scaled across all teams, or if it’s just something a more tech-friendly unit may be in favor of.
Interestingly, O’Connell also talked a lot about the piece of working with vendors, which comes into play through a variety of factors. For instance, they will often pilot a few different options for a solution before landing on the right one, but even if one vendor doesn’t necessarily meet the compliance needs, for example, that doesn’t mean they’re automatically ruled out.
“It just means we’re going to work closely with them for the next several months until they get there, and then hopefully we’ll be able to pilot and compare,” she said.
This is all without even getting into the ultimate decision on whether or not to scale a new tool after a pilot program, which involves speaking up the company ladder with leadership. According to Zeppieri, this is often the most difficult part of the process, and it requires really leaning into lessons learned and giving honest assessments.
“The planning and implementation of technology is the easy part - finding the use case, bringing in the vendor, bringing it on a job site, piloting, and evaluating the success of the pilot. That’s the easy part,” he said. “The hard part is the part that no one likes to do, which is the discipline on the tail end. This is the lessons learned, assessing implementation, trying to grow from that beachhead to a broader implementation.”
For Skanska, this means finding solutions that will solve problems across the organization for a variety of projects and team styles. Zeppieri mentioned that early successes can, in some cases, be misleading. Sometimes, these successes work for a specific team and then start spreading “almost like weeds,” and it’s decided that they must scale. Then, a few years down the line, it becomes apparent that the ROI didn’t transfer across the company, and the value wasn’t really there.
Ultimately, construction is always going to be a more complex industry for piloting, evaluating, and scaling new technologies. Every project is unique, and teams operate more uniquely even across single organizations. But, O’Connell says, they have this procedure in place to help make that process at least somewhat simpler, and they believe that this process combined with the right relationships with vendors can help them stay on the cutting-edge and keep their projects running smoothly with the best tools available.
“I spend hours of my week trying to onboard new vendors and familiarize them with Skanska and our processes,” O’Connell told Geo Week News. “It’s the ones that want to build a partnership that are going to be successful. We are a decentralized business, and we really need to figure out how [tools] work on different projects in different locations with different teams before we make scaling decisions. And so we want to work with partners that can figure that out with us.”
