Brian Stamper
Vice President of Business Development
Advantic LLC
Dayton, Ohio
Synergistic collaboration does not work unless the team is completely honest, and everyone knows they can truly trust the entire team. This cannot be forced; it has to be an ingrained value within all members of the team.
At Advantic, we use the saying CPCS, which stands for Cool People Cool Stuff. CPCS means that when you work with people who you like, trust and share common goals with, anything can be accomplished, and that includes changing the construction industry.
In our experience of delivering projects this way, we set up common goals in safety, quality, schedule and costs, and continue to communicate the goals to everyone throughout the duration of the project. We have a very high success rate of achieving all goals set by working to solve all issues immediately as they come up, and we do this as a team, which continues to drive that collaboration.
If you put your ego and personal agenda aside, you will realize how much better it is to work together in this manner.
Peter Dumont
Vice President of Global Strategic Projects
nVent
Houston
Cost, schedule, quality and safety are insufficient to measure the asset development process. What really matters is the ROI of the built facility. If we start thinking more like businesspeople and less like engineers, then we will start making much better decisions relative to how we select project partners and structure agreements that work for mutual benefit. All too often, our dysfunctional purchasing practices buy based solely on low initial cost, and this can create significant barriers to collaboration.
If we don’t engineer trust back into the construction industry and structure commercial arrangements that facilitate collaboration, then we will continue to disappoint the C-suite. Data recently published by the Construction Industry Institute (CII) revealed that 94.5 percent of projects fail to meet one or more of their business objectives.
I strongly encourage everyone to investigate Operating System 2.0 (OS2), which is being co-led by CII and the Construction Users Roundtable. To learn more, visit curt.org/resources/os2.
John C. Murphy
Senior Vice President
GZA GeoEnvironmental, Inc.
Bedford, N.H.
Engineers, contractors, subcontractors and owners that don’t coordinate, collaborate or communicate will likely end up in adversarial relationships that can lead to conflict, delay and project cost overruns.
Project teams are usually comprised of firms with competing interests that may never have worked together, so synergistic collaboration is critical. A communications strategy along with safety, quality and schedule requirements should be part of early discussions and reinforced with all project participants throughout all phases of the work. These key requirements should be clearly specified in the contract and regularly reviewed with the project team.
Smartphones, cloud computing, mobile apps and smart tools have made collaboration on construction projects easier, but nothing beats face-to-face communication.
Focused collaboration along with in-person meetings build a more meaningful connection, incubate creative solutions, build credibility, and establish a level of trust and loyalty that will result in continuous improvement and long-term
relationships.
