GP: Well, this starts with individuals, rather than the business. And then, as individuals, where we thrive is in communities of like-minded people. Nearly three years ago, we helped to establish the project data analytics community.

When SRM got involved, there were about 250 people in the community. At regular events, we’d hear from people working across the data and project delivery spectrum. We’ve heard from the Tour de France data team, delivering analytics for each stage of the race and explaining how they can predict the winner before the race has finished. We’ve heard from people who work in aviation, telecoms, banking and energy companies. We’ve heard from many start-ups and businesses large and small who see construction as the place for them to operate because the scale of change is the greatest, it’s got the furthest to go and is steadily building momentum. The community now boasts a membership of more than 6,500 and continues to rise.

One of the biggest benefits that came out of the very early meet-ups was a sense from the community that everyone didn’t want to just listen to other people talk about what you could do with data - they wanted to play for themselves, they wanted to learn, they wanted to see what they could do with their own data to change the way they did their jobs and open up new career opportunities. So, together with Projecting Success, the SME behind the community, we put some of our data and real challenges into our first weekend hackathon at the end of 2018.

Fast forward to now, and the seventh hackathon has a prize fund of £3,000. And there are some brilliant examples of what you can achieve in a short space of time in a weekend. They are truly inspirational and the one place that I’ve seen someone’s jaw drop as it dawned on them what they were witnessing!

My biggest frustration last year was that we weren’t really leveraging the learning and the understanding of the art of the possible back into our business. We didn’t have the internal capacity and capability to capitalise on this pipeline of ideas.

So, again I went back to Projecting Success to see how it could help. They came up with a project data analytics apprenticeship programme. Now I know that many people hear the word apprenticeship and think 16- to 18-year-olds and switch off. Don’t! The average age of a Sir Robert McAlpine project data analytics apprentice is 32. These apprentices are pioneers of a big and bold data frontier. I am so excited to see the things they are doing to make their own future.

DIQ: Is there potential for a major cultural change? Will iPads with dashboards become as commonplace as hard hats on construction sites?

GP: Absolutely. It’s already starting to happen. I’d recommend the whitepaper produced by the Project Data Analytics Task Force (PDATF) that lays out the ambition for a step change in use of data to improve project delivery. A 10x improvement would be a transformational cultural shift, but it still means that, as an industry, we’re only delivering 1 in 20 projects at cost, on time and inside the required benefits envelope. That’s mad!

“A 10x improvement would be transformational, but it still means we’re only delivering 1 in 20 projects at cost. That’s mad!”

Ipads and dashboards as commonplace as hard hats is certainly one way of looking at it. There’s definitely a learning curve that construction companies need to take with respect to dashboarding. Other, similar sectors are a long way ahead in terms of personalised, or role-based, dashboarding, with push notifications linked to ML models that highlight the highest priorities for that individual to do today.

When that happens, you’re moving a long way beyond dashboards - it has to be all about the insights you’re getting from your data and how people are best able to make intelligent decisions on the back of that insight. So ultimately, while the digital tools are important, for me it’s much more about the data that those tools give us and how we leverage it to ensure the next project is the best. Currently, that deep and federated learning simply doesn’t take place. It’s going to take a monumental effort to get construction moving in the right direction, but when it comes, it will be a seismic shift. It has to be.

DIQ: In some respects, you already doing things that reflect a high level of data maturity, such as hackathons. Do you see these as a way of fast-tracking cultural change?

GP: It all comes back to using data to inspire. People need to be inspired to realise the possibilities and the scope of what’s possible very, very quickly. We need a critical mass of people who have the desire and the skills to make change happen at a personal and project level. Only with that critical mass can we change the sector.

Hackathons are an incredibly powerful way to demonstrate the art of the possible and show people just how much can be achieved with only the skills that you’re able to pick up in a weekend. These hackathons started out as community activities, with only one or two SRM staff in attendance. It has also opened our eyes to the power of pooling data, future data access challenges, and the need for things like differential privacy to make sure that data can be made available to the right people. This is one of the reasons that we’ve stepped up to lead the data access workstream for the PDATF, but that’s probably a whole other conversation!

DIQ: Tell us about the opportunities you have identified in the talent management and development space.

GP: Here, we think we’re really onto something special because it’s so simple. The SME I mentioned earlier, Projecting Success, is passionate about disrupting the way projects get delivered by making better use of data. Its vision evolved from our support of the PDA community, the hackathons, and the realisation that if we’re really going to make a difference, we need to move from enthusiastic amateurs to seasoned professionals.

It developed a level 4 apprenticeship for project data analysts - a way to get hands-on, practical data and analytics skills into people. People who already have experience in a project delivery discipline can therefore make use of the data skills they’re building to change the jobs they do on a daily basis. For us, that’s predominantly planners, quantity surveyors, document controllers, BIM managers, engineers. For others, it’s their project controls and PMO teams. Because it’s paid for by the apprenticeship levy, it’s being taken up by more and more people who recognise that data will play a huge role in their future and if they don’t learn more about this and control their own destiny, then the change will be done to them.

Destiny is a big word and I don’t use it lightly. But I, and many others who are on this journey with us, truly believe the eco-system we are building has the properties of transformational change for the UK. From small beginnings, we are helping to answer the challenge to bring UK plc to the forefront of the AI revolution.

DIQ: And what about the opportunities for construction as a whole if it becomes more data literate - what would you hope to see in three years’ time?

GP: In three years’ time, I’d like to see:

• Data pooling and access conversations being a key part of contract negotiations - currently, it’s nowhere near. There’s lots of people getting into discussions about whether it’s my data or your data, or client data, or contractor data, all of which misses the point. We are all stewards of a dataset, we have an obligation to find a way to share what we can to contribute to building Britain’s future heritage. In some cases, that’s obvious - we already share health and safety data, sustainability data, sometimes performance data, through various informal or bounded mechanisms. I’d argue there’s a moral obligation for us to come up with a better, long-term solution to save lives and assist with meeting sustainable development goals. In other cases, government has a much bigger role to play due to the size of its procurement pool - imagine if we were to pool the project delivery data from every one of the 40 new hospitals that are touted by the government. How much quicker and more productive will the 40th project be compared to the first? To me, that’s an obligation we have to ourselves, as taxpayers, to find a better way to see our money well spent.
• Innovation really starting to take off, kickstarted by greater data access. So many small firms are going cap in hand from company to company, scrabbling together project data that helps them build their machine learning and artificial intelligence models. As a nation, that’s not the way we’re going to lead in this space. It needs to be far more joined-up, with the industry setting the challenges, putting up the data to enable new learning, and reaching out to the eco-system to find collaborative solutions. And, by the way, how much of that would be democratised? If you can build an app in a weekend, where’s the value in selling it as a tool? The opportunity is in the high-end capability, with specific niche expertise, and great track records of adoption. There are very few organisations who can claim to do that well today.
• The productivity dial starting to move. We should be delivering projects demonstrably better than we do today, with clearly articulated and results-based benefits cases that create a virtuous circle of more refined requirements, better data, and more intelligent solutions.