Transcript: Game Plan User Experience - With David De Yarza

Hello, I'm Brittany Campbell-Turner and this is the Constructor Podcast, session number 10. Hello and welcome to this episode of Constructor. My name is Brittany and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about the construction projects. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining me today.

I'm so excited to bring to you this interview and share with you an excellent approach to achieving better collaboration amongst construction teams. If you haven't checked it out yet, in episode 7, found at Constructor.com slash 07, we talked about bringing on a game plan user to discuss how game plan has helped them in their business. If you go back into that episode, I wanted to understand how project teams could collaborate and report in the software just by a byproduct. Because I promised that we'd follow up and talk with Vishal and one of his customers, I did my first interview with two people.

I spoke with Vishal and a game plan power user and board advisor. For my first couple of questions, I do want to make sure to get to know how you guys met and how you guys encountered each other and decided to, yeah, to use game, like you, David, how you decided to use game plan after having encountered that. Right. Yeah, actually, I think it's a very compelling story and one that repeats itself throughout our industry because of some of the things that you mentioned earlier about how mindsets are changing.

I find that it's mostly out of frustration that people really are trying to find something else. So I can give a little bit of a background on myself. I've been in the AEC industry for a little bit over 20 years. Even though I started in architecture, I never really intended to practice as an architect. My focus has always been technology, implementation of tools, and trying to make the process better.

And my evolution has taken me to work for a general contractor over the last eight years or so, or a couple of different general contractors. But as part of my role, I look for tools to make our teams better, manage risk as best as we can, and deliver the projects to our clients in the best possible way. And that has often made me overlap with IT departments a lot and get involved in purchasing of software and other tools. And I've had this sort of love-hate relationship with Autodesk for the last 20 years where I've been really trying to break up with Autodesk for 20 years.

You just can't because there's such a monolithic environment. And software is always something that I thought of as somebody else that has a very different set of skills, does something, puts it in a box, and you buy it. And I was really on the lookout for solutions to do things like punch lists, things like field communications. And I really was very frustrated because I realized that my digital life worked very, very well. I like to tell the story of how I was climbing Mount St.

Helens with some friends. And we used Google Maps to figure out how to get there. We used Facebook to communicate with one another as to when we were going to be there and when. We used Amazon to get some supplies for the trip. And we all used Flickr and YouTube to share our experience and had it up online.

And we're sharing with our families, our friends, anybody that was caring enough to look at our experience. Before we got back from the trip, really, we had been able to upload things. And then the following Monday, I got back to work and I had to fire up Outlook and deal with email attachments. And that was really the aha moment. And I said, there's a better way these tools work already in my digital life.

Why don't they work in my digital work life? I attended an AAC hackathon. I believe it was the second or third AAC hackathon put together by Greg Howe and his group, which is now going to take it on life on its own. That's the subject of another podcast that's going. But it was down at Menlo Park at Facebook headquarters.

And in the hackathon format on Friday night, you get an opportunity to have an open mic complain session, if you will. And I got up on stage and I told that story of climbing Mountaintown and my digital life really working well. And Vishal came up to me right after I got off the podium and he said, hey, I've been working on a little something that sounds somewhat like what you're describing. Do you want to join forces? And we, you know, a weekend later, a good prototype and a couple of awards from the AAC hackathon group later, we had a working prototype of something that sort of looked and felt like social media and the way that it behaved.

But it dealt with project data. And we focused on sort of a BIM model, a viewer and implementation. But we realized that it could have a lot of other implications. And Vishal and I kind of looked at each other. And I believe that he asked me if I wanted to join him and go change the world.

And I jumped at the chance. Wow. That's an excellent recount of how you guys met and after hearing Vishal's story, which you guys can hear on the previous podcast. You can find it at constructor.com slash zero seven. So yeah, you'll be able to hear that.

But yeah, I think it sounds like your experiences have been similar. And that, Vishal, it sounds like, you know, social media, the use of that, it's very easy to use. Everything is user friendly. And then when you come into the opportunity to use software in the industry, a lot of that A lot of them tend to be very clunky, not user friendly. You're having to back up onto servers where things are taking a lot of time.

It's not cloud based. And there are lots of scenarios that I've encountered that are similar. So I think that more and more, especially the younger generations, are really adapting to software. They're understanding that user interface experience is really, really important. And you really, you can't deny that it needs to transition over into all industries.

But definitely our industry because technology is advancing in other ways. And we need to be able to keep up with that as well. So yeah, thanks. I think our industry is somewhat unique in the potential that exists. I mean, we all, you know, anybody that has anything to do with BIM, VDC, or technology implementation always loves to show the slide of how productivity has remained stagnant in our industry as related to everybody else.

So we've got a huge opportunity, a huge gap to fill in this industry. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. So I guess the next question that I wanted to ask was, so what is the involvement that you have basically taken up in working with Vishal? Right now you're an advisor, it appears, for the company.

So what does that entail? Right. So like I said, Vishal and I met at a point when he already had something started. He already had a cloud platform that did certain things. I had a particular need to fill and was able to use his platform and start to really develop the way that it behaved around certain workflows.

I haven't touched everything that Gameplan has to offer, but just certain things that were my immediate needs. And I was able to offer Vishal real-time feedback in actual projects going on with dozens of people as end users. And I was willing to be very involved and I had a group of people as end users that were understanding of the fact that it was work in progress and that we were developing something. So I think that that worked very well for both of us. So early on Vishal and I were communicating almost constantly, I mean a couple of times a week at least.

So out of that, we put together, Vishal put together an advisory board, which I became a member of. And since, you know, we've not necessarily formalized a relationship, but I'd like to think that I've become a product evangelist, if you will. And I've been very involved in the design of the way the product works and the way that the product looks and feels. I mean, ultimately, Vishal and his team are the ones developing the interface and developing the... We've been able to give nearly real-time feedback and requests from different project teams doing things differently.

And we've built a great deal of flexibility in the system thanks to that. So I like to think of myself as the chief cheerleader for Gameplan and product evangelists really. As far as talking it up to people and bringing it up to people. And I'm happy to even get on calls to help other clients of Vishal's to successfully deploy the product. So, David, how many projects have you used Gameplan on thus far?

So we've used Gameplan on a variety of different types of projects and scopes. And I think we might have done eight or nine. Okay. All right. Could you give us a general sense of what the size and scope of those projects were?

Well, it's varied a lot. But we've got the...I think the smallest project that we did was an ER remodel that was pretty small in size. I think it was an $8 million job, if I remember correctly. And all the way up to a ground-up 12-story office building with five stories of garage that was in the $3 million range. And we do...the company that I work for, we do a lot of different projects, but our sweet spot tends to be the $15 to $25 million tenant improvement for high-tech or pharmaceutical or biotech type of clients.

So things happen very quickly. And, for example, our project that we're working on right now is a $25 million project that's supposed to be done in five months. So our project life cycle is relatively short. So I'm able to test a system beginning to end relatively quickly. Okay.

So that leads me to a couple of other questions that I may not have prepared you for. But I guess I'm thinking through, are you guys using integrated project delivery methods for these particular projects? Not on every project and not in the true sense of an IPD contract. We've done a number of true IPD, free-party agreements using the IPD forms from AGC. But most of our work is for private clients, so it's usually a private GMP type of contract.

But it's all relationship-based. We don't do any low-bid work. We tend to work for repeat customers. So even though we don't have a true IPD contract on most of these jobs, we're in early. We have our subcontractors tend to be the same from project to project.

The design teams tend to also be, if not the same from project to project, certainly familiar and familiar faces and people we've worked with in the past. So we try to leverage a lot of the behaviors of IPD and really try to behave as if we were in an IPD. We've got projects where we're co-locating, projects where we're sharing information across the board early on. And that's one of the things that where the flexibility of game plan really has given us an advantage. Because we can't take a one-size-fits-all approach to the workflow of information.

A lot of times, even though we're collaborating on a project as if it was an IPD, the reality is that there's a contractual obligation. And we still have to segregate the information flow, say, through the general contractor and not have a subcontractor talk to an architect directly. We try to make that barrier as low as possible and as small as possible, but it still exists. So we have to address that, and game plan gives us the ability to create a workflow that allows for that. Okay.

So game plan, would you say that you rely heavily on that to create the coordination that takes place, especially in a virtual sense? So the coordination, you mean more like the VDC coordination or just in general? Well, I would say just in general throughout the project, during design, during construction, I would say in a general sense. Yes, I mean, I think that the reality is that we still have, during the design stage of projects, we still have teams that are not entirely abandoning email, if you will.

And a lot of times the architects already have something like New Forma or a product like that or an FTP site that they have used with their consultants. But as soon as we get involved in the project, we start steering things towards game plan on the projects where we are using it. We found it very advantageous for just tracking information and tracking communication. Also, I've not been fully successful in getting people to abandon email, which is what I would like to happen for project-specific information. But we're getting there.

That's great. I think that's great news. I think that more people need to understand that just because you don't have the contractual obligations or agreement that is integrated project delivery, that doesn't mean that you can't make the discussions really easy and collaborative, similarly to how you would in that sort of a project, even if it's more traditional GMP. So that's really helpful to know. I think that one thing I'm trying to do is let people know that you don't have to change a whole lot from a paper standpoint and agreement standpoint in order to make a huge impact on how the project is run.

I would make the argument actually that if you're a contractor or an architect or engineer or subcontractor that's working on a very traditional low-gauge project where the contracts are completely segregated and it's completely traditional, you almost have more of a need for an effective communication tool that tracks things in a way that can be tied to the project and searched and discovered later on. I mean the management of information, let's face it, most litigation that contractors get into has to do with communication that was not clear or that cannot be readily pulled up.

Nobody's ever gotten sued on an issue where somebody was able to pull out the email and find out exactly what somebody said and went. Those things get resolved at that very moment. Unless for some reason it was incriminating and it was deliberate. But most of the time that's not the case. You're absolutely right.

As long as the information is present and there are no gray areas, yeah, you're right. It's definitely resolved quite quickly. Okay, very cool. Thanks for giving us a little bit of detail about how your projects are. You are director of innovation.

Is that what you consider your role at B&B? Yes, we don't really use titles at B&B, but you have to say something, so that's what we came up with. It's deliberately vague. It's really anything that we need it to be, but the focus really is on making sure that teams have the tools that they need. So I can act as a liaison to software developers or to an IT group.

I'll get involved in creating the IPD contract if there is one or creating the project specific plan that's going to lead to success. So I get to touch every project in an interesting way, I think. Great. Vishal, I wanted to ask you a question on how it's been for you to work with David and get a sense of the project idiosyncrasies. I know you've also worked in the industry, but is there anything in particular that you've learned by having David implement these into his projects here?

Yeah, sure. We actually have been pretty fortunate to have David with us. As David described earlier, we have been working together to build the platform, and we have been solving different kinds of problems, specifically focusing on collaboration and communication needs on the project that David just described. Having him, especially being someone who can influence a lot of projects and who has these big teams of construction professionals and project managers, engineers, and everybody from subcontractors to architects using the platform and educating them, getting feedback, and continuously working with our team to make sure that the end goal meets and people get what they want when they want, and the collaboration is successful on these projects.

So in a lot of instances, there are small feedbacks that we don't see, our designers don't see, even sometimes David brings up that this is a very well-pointed coming right from the job site, and that feedback is gold. That is really feedback that helps us solve the real problems and build the tools to solve those problems. Any major specific problem that has been solved that you were surprised about when he basically shared the information with you? Just curious if there's anything specific that you can recall.

Well, yeah, let's say for instance in every construction project there is this review process, and there are various documents including RFIs, submitters, change orders that need review from different people, and the system needs to address different workflows. It turns out that different project teams decide to do things a little bit differently, and that requires a lot of flexibility in the software. So that is something that turned out to be a really good feedback and really good learning thing for us that you cannot have one size fits all software.

There is a lot of flexibility that needs to be built into the software. So when it came to RFI and sub-metal management on some of the projects that David was working on, we extensively discussed the workflows and why things had to be one way or the other, how contracts also play important roles in setting up the workflows, and you cannot always impose the software on a project saying, hey, the software does this functionality, so you have to do it this way. But you have to be flexible to incorporate workflows that are there on the projects described in the contracts, and there are very valid reasons for those workflows as well.

That makes a lot of sense. At this point it sounds like you have adapted to the workflow based upon how the project is being executed, how it is actually taking place versus making the project fit to how the software works, which is what I have experienced quite a lot. A lot of times you have a software that is available to you and this is how you must use it, and that may not be how the project is going, but you have to use it this way.

Those software are not going to go very far moving forward because David and I never took the approach where we were imposing the software on users. Our primary objective always was to make the users happy in the way they used to work, and there is always this thing that in a collaborative environment people have to change, but even though people are collaborative, the processes and the automation needed at different projects is different because of how the contracts operate or maybe because of who the leader is on the projects.

Sometimes it is architect who is driving how the RFIs and the sub-vitals should be routed, sometimes it is general contractors, and it changes all the time. It is about adapting and having an intelligent software that is not only flexible, but it actually is able to automate certain things for people. Very cool. I think it is really cool to know the perspective of the developer for any software because as soon as you know that it is geared towards the user and making sure you understand exactly how they are working, you know that the software is going to be a lot more flexible and a lot more customizable.

It may not necessarily be a customizable software, but it is going to be a solution that works for you because you are constantly getting user feedback. I think that is the best way to approach developing a software. Just from that perspective, it is always helpful to know that. Also, knowing that the people that are involved in developing it are from the industry, that is also helpful. You can rest assured.

They have perspective and they can understand the ins and outs of my needs. Very cool. Thanks for sharing that, Vishal. Well, I think that this is a good transition point to look at Gameplan and look at how it can actually be utilized to solve some of our everyday challenges that we may typically run into and basically see the major benefits of it. So I don't know, is it David, are you going to be the one to share your screen at this point?

Yes, I certainly can. Vishal, did you have anything in specific that you wanted to share? I can certainly walk through a couple of things on projects and share my screen. Yeah, go ahead. You can share your screen.

I think we can cover a lot of ground with the projects that we have worked on. So go ahead and share your screen. Okay, so I am going to go ahead and share. You will have to tell me if you see my screen. I basically just have Chrome open up.

I will put full screen on it. Yep, I can see it. Okay. So I won't get too much in depth on settings and how you set up workflows, but I did want to just address a little bit what Vishal mentioned about the flexibility. You know, that's really the big differentiator.

The market right now, I would say, is flooded with solutions that some of the workflows that Gameplan takes care of. There's a lot of document management, a lot of collaboration solutions with a lot of overlap, but there really isn't anything out there that does everything really well and has a philosophy of integration with the things that they don't. And also on top of that, it's very difficult for somebody in my position to forecast what it's going to cost the project or an enterprise for that matter to deploy a particular solution on a project.

So it's very, very difficult. And early on we took the step of saying philosophically, this is a product that we are going to be high touch on for our clients. We're going to customize it. We're going to integrate it with anything they need. We're going to give them the ability to integrate in it if they have a development team of their own.

And we're going to treat people like adults when it comes time to the pricing. So maybe Vishal will talk about some of the pricing models a little bit later, but it's definitely something that you can think of. Okay, this is the project that I have. This is the number of people I want working on it. This is what I want to do with the system.

So this is roughly what's going to cost me. And you can do that just by going to the website as opposed to having to call Autodesk or the reseller. And three days later you get a proposal and it's something completely out of the blue with no real relationship to the pricing we got on the last job, which happens a lot with these systems. But anyway, what you're seeing on the screen then is right now you're looking at my project dashboard for a project. It's a project that actually was finished fall of last year.

And the reason why I'm showing you that is because I want to show you how easy it is to find information after the fact. So the dashboard for the project has it's a little bit different than what a lot of solutions referred to as the dashboard. A lot of products get very hung up on metrics. And while metrics are great, metrics is something that you really start to get advantage of after you've used the product for a couple of years and you have a lot of product information in it.

And quite frankly, it's garbage in, garbage out. So even though Gameplan can look at data and show you metrics, it's not what it shows you right off the bat. Right off the bat what you have is a activity stream, which is what's going on on the project. And I can scroll back and as I get down to the bottom of it, it'll reload and continue loading more and more information. And I can literally go back to day one of this project just by scrolling down on the activity stream.

So anything that happens in Gameplan is going to get captured and shown here. And again, going back to those social media behaviors, I can do things directly on the activity stream here. I can interact with the data. I can go look at it. So for example, I see here that Lindsay has commented on an RFI.

Well, I can click on it and I can go see that RFI in particular, but I can also follow this item so that any further comments on this RFI generate notifications for me. So that's something that, you know, if I was, let's say that Lindsay had sent this comment back to the general contractor via an email, I would never know. And maybe this is an RFI that I'm interested in for whatever reason. So the data is available to everybody in the project. Everybody can go look at something.

Everybody can comment on something. Everybody can follow. One of the things that I like about the interface is that it is very easy without even getting into the RFI itself. I can make a comment and I can, you know, using social media behaviors, I can type in at and it'll give me a list of people that are in the project. Now it's not everybody.

I can start typing the name of anybody that was a part of this project. So Jessica, for example. So there's Jessica. So I can click on Jessica's name and I can type a comment and post it. And not only will be available here on the activity screen, but Jessica will get a notification.

And Jessica, by the way, can choose whether she gets notifications via email directly on the notification system and the system here. Or, you know, even if she's using Chrome, a notification can pop up even if she doesn't have the browser open on her desktop if she's using the game plan Chrome plugin. Oh, wow. So there is a Chrome integration plugin. Okay.

Very cool. Yes. So, you know, everybody knows through using Twitter that if you start, or Facebook, you start typing somebody's name, their name pops up, you're tagging them, right? So everybody knows how to do that. Everybody knows what that means.

Nobody needs to be trained on that after you say that. So I can also, like I said, I can follow an item or I can get into the item. Let's see. So Lindsay answered an RFI. Let's go look at what she said.

Let's click directly on there. And it takes me to the RFI itself. Now, again, to kind of differentiate, this right here is the RFI. There may very well be something attached to it, but the RFI is the database entry. It's not that it's just logging that somebody uploaded a PDF RFI, which is what a lot of systems like Seminole Exchange do.

So the beauty of that is that now I can search for this, right? So it's much more powerful. Of course, there's an attachment. You know, there's a sketch that was part of this response. So it's attached there.

So you can still do that. But you basically have the subject of the RFI. You have some general information. And it's worth mentioning, these forms, when you generate an RFI, are completely customizable. The fields, what the fields are called, I can change those per project.

And I can decide what fields are important to me and what fields are not important to me. That's really useful. Oh, go ahead. No, I was just saying that's really useful. I'm just kind of thinking through.

Sometimes I find that between an architect and a contractor, depending on who is managing the system, right? One may regularly document in a PDF format. And if you needed to, you could simply attach it here. But you also have an RFI. You have data points specific to this RFI that's literally in the software that you can search.

That's hugely valuable, especially if they're customizable fields. Very cool. Right. So something that you can also see in here is what people got involved in this. Who's following this?

So you can see who was responsible for assigning or for responding to the RFI. Well, that's Lindsay. That was assigned by the workflow. But all of these people either by workflow or because they chose to, all of these people are following that item. And in this particular project, that was a very simple workflow because this was closer to an IPD.

So there were only two steps. But you can actually see visually what the workflow, what the lifecycle of this item was, as well as seeing who's approved, who's answered, when. So everything is timed and date stamped. And then at the very top, the right-hand side, what we have here is any sort of comment thread. So if there was not just the activity, but if anybody had carried out a conversation, instead of doing it by email, had they done it here in the comments?

Say, for example, an architect and a consulting engineer could have been discussing this item and to arrive to the answer. And that conversation would be captured here on the right-hand side. So not only is a general contractor or an owner down the line, not only you can come over here and see that it's answered and actually come and look at the answer. You can also see the context that led to that answer. And that's very important.

A lot of times, you know, we just do things because the plans say to do something. But to have the ability to dig deeper and see why is this wall here? Why did that cabinet move? Why did we change this light fixture? That sort of context, especially down the road, is really important.

I can give you an example, and this is the reason why I showed you an old project. If I go to the submittals, which notice that now I'm actually going to go into the submittal module. I didn't click on the submittal from the activities team. I'm actually going to the submittals themselves. This is all the projects and middles.

I can filter this. I can choose what columns are important to me. Like, for example, maybe, you know, ball and cord is not important to me, so I can get rid of it. Or status. Or let's say that it is.

I can add it, but put it at the end. All this is user specific. As an administrator, I can set it to start thing view, but users themselves can set this up to view the information in a way that makes sense to them. So I can also filter, of course, to just look at things that are in my cord, things that are just for my company or things that are just from a particular subcontractor. But beyond that, here's the submittal log.

I can sort by ID. I can sort by date. I can sort by status. But also something that I can do, and this is something that in a previous job, we had an actual issue with an adhesive for a resilient base that didn't work. And we actually had to spend money fixing the issue because nobody could find the communication between the architect and the superintendent that led to us using a particular type of adhesive that failed.

So I just wanted to show you this very powerful thing right here that we all know. Anybody that searched the web knows that you can search for stuff. So why can't we search email and actually find for stuff? Even though Outlook has a search function, the way that most email servers are set up, good luck. I think I'm really good at managing my emails.

It's still a nightmare to find something from three months ago. Well, let's see what happened to the resilient base on this project. All I have to do is type resilient, and it immediately focuses down this list and filters to anything having to do with resilient base. So I know that my question was about resilient base RB1. You know, we've got an accepted submittal.

Well, let's go look at it. Let's go see what happened there. It was accepted. I know that somebody uploaded probably a cut sheet as the original submittal, and I see that there's an approved or appended submittal. I can see all the steps.

So it came from the project engineer. It went to somebody at the architecture firm. There were three people that could have answered that question or approved it. I can see who did it, and I can see that the PE accepted it as it came back in. And I've got the whole lifecycle of this submittal, and I can go look and immediately get into the submittal itself, see that it's got a stamp from the architect, and I can go search through it.

I know that this has the information here that I'm looking for. Now, it took me about 15 seconds to find this submittal. Now, I will admit to you that I've used this example before, so maybe I'm a little bit quicker with it than some others, but the fact still remains that I can come in here and I can search anything having to do in just plain English. So if there's an issue with ceilings, type in ceilings. See if there's acoustical ceiling tiles.

As long as people are using natural language and the way that they tile things, you will find it. It's not really that complicated. You know, one of the things that we've had our teams come back and certainly is something that I've mentioned to Vishal and Anurag, you know, it's in the works. It's a global project search or global search where you can actually type this at the root level and see across all your projects what RFIs, what submittals, what job walk items, what punch list items had the word ceiling in them.

So that's really powerful when you start to think about leveraging knowledge from one project to the other, but when it comes to managing risk on a construction project and mitigating the possibility of somebody suing you for something, having this sort of access to information is a complete game changer. I couldn't agree more. I think that's such a useful feature. I mean, just even thinking of, okay, well, we want all the information in regards to ceilings, for instance, using your example, so that we know how best to address this in our next project that happens to just be with the same client.

I think that would be helpful information so you can see if there were issues with the previously specced out product. I mean, yeah, you may remember, but not all the details. If you can go down back into the history line and see, you know, all of the correspondence about it, know who answered, you know exactly. If you need to pick up the phone for any reason, ask that question. Okay, so, you know, I know you approved it.

I know I can see the total correspondence about this, what took place. The conversation does come a lot more quickly and gets to the point more effectively, and you don't have to really go down that wild goose chase like I've encountered before. The game really changes. You know, when you're picking up the phone and you're calling somebody up, or say that you're conferencing in the architect when you're talking to the owner, if the conversation starts with, do you remember when we did this, that or the other, and you email me that, you've already lost it.

You might as well pay up. But if the conversation starts with, hey Bill, or hey Tom, or whoever the name happens to be, I see here in the system that you approved this submittal on such and such date, and you gave us this instruction. That's, nobody ever gets sued when they start talking like that. Right. Obviously, we're in my general contract I have right now, thinking of, you know, risk management from a litigation standpoint, but that is, that is a really big driver in our industry of solutions.

So I think that's why I'm a little bit hung up on that right now. But the reality is that when you have this access to information and this ability to communicate and collaborate, you don't even get close to that step. Yeah, absolutely right. I think that having the information available helps in multiple areas. And those are just two that we can, you know, pay attention to right now, but I think the possibilities are endless.

And the searchability really makes a big difference. I think that's a game changer too, yeah. So obviously that, that sort of, as Michelle alluded to, submittals and RFIs and ASIs are something that we were very focused on. But there's, there's other aspects of the system that I wanted to show you unless you have any further questions on this, I wanted to jump to a little bit of a different side of the platform and show you a little bit about coordination and collaboration. Sure.

Yeah, please go right ahead. Okay, so I'm going to go out to my home, which is going to show all the projects that have active right now. I'm going to go into another project that we've been working on. And again, activity stream, I can, I can come in here and I can see all the different comments, people have actually linked things. This is a good example.

There's somebody that made a comment on a submittal and actually linked a file from Box. So they didn't even upload something, they just linked something that they have on a different system. So when you talk about integration, a lot of offices have adopted cloud storage solutions like for example we use ShareFile from Citrix. And that's completely replaced our in-office servers and we no longer have mapped drives. Per se, I mean there's still a couple of legacy mapped drives, but for the most part project information lives in ShareFile.

And we're able to simply link something that already lives in ShareFile into an item here in Gameplan. There's no need to upload a duplicate copy. And what that means is that that link will always go to the latest and greatest version of that document, which is great. But in this particular project, I mean we managed the submittal, Scenarify, SaveSize, all the communication on the job through Gameplan. So the timeline towards this part here shows mostly that type of communication.

But something that we did is we used our punch list. You know, Vishal had developed this job block feature, which is basically like quality control and punch list. Well, I thought that that would be a great thing to use for the BIM collaboration or class detection, if you will. So on this job, for example, what we did is we used Navisworks from Autodesk to do all of our 3D model coordination. Well, we actually developed a system in which just by using a code, and this is something we developed is very simple.

It's just a date. So it's a year, month, day of the meeting, numerical, and then the responsibility matrix. And there's a screenshot directly of the clash. And anybody that's used Navisworks knows that there's some clash reporting tools within Navisworks, but they're kind of clunky. And again, they make you work a certain way rather than be able to work the way you want to.

And they have a ton of noise. They report way too much. So I asked, I believe that I saw it on Google Docs or something like that, and I saw there was a way to paste something from the clipboard directly into a website. So I called Vishal up and I said, hey, could we have something like that for the job block module? So that's what you're seeing here.

You can simply use snag it or snipping tool or whatever to grab a screenshot of a clash. You put it into your clipboard and you click into this gray bar and you hit command V or control V and it dumps that image directly in here without me having to save an image and then upload an image. So my ability to sort by items that are open and closed, that's just huge. And it allowed me to use this system to also assign responsibility for who is responsible for a particular item and close it up.

And just the same way that I would do a punch walk, do a virtual punch walk. It's the same thing. It's just in the computer instead of in the field. So one of the things that I really like to from an interface standpoint is that you can accomplish all these things directly into the activity screen. You don't have to drill down into the job walk to do that.

You can just come in here, click job block, start typing. And as soon as you do, you get the ability in here in the timeline to add a further description, tag assigned people that are responsible for this. You can determine when the due date of this particular item is. You can, in addition to the due date, you can provide a reminder that it's a few days ahead of the due date. You can attach files.

You can associate it with a location from the database of say what room number it's in or what level all that. And I can also paste that screenshot of the capture directly in here. And it will generate the job walk or the RFI or the submittal or whatever it is that you're creating without having to go into that specific module. So I don't have to come into field, job walk and create it there. I can just have my activity screen running through the meeting, cut and paste my items directly in here and they get logged.

So that's a really easy workflow. I mean, it'd be great in the future to integrate and maybe create a plug-in for something like Navisworks. But then you're assuming people are using Navisworks. This can work with anybody that's using Binsight from Tecla or Solibri or whatever. This is completely platform agnostic.

So from a user standpoint, it's really, really easy to do that. And I would say really satisfying from an interface standpoint. Now, I won't post anything here because that will generate notifications to a project manager and an architect. They're going to start scratching their heads. So I can't actually demonstrate it.

Although I do have a project that's not in use that I could if you want to see it. You know, it still happens sometimes. We developed a project for a client for Swedish Hospital. And after we had the project set up, lo and behold, the owner came back to us and said, we need you to use a different product because this is what we use to submit a prize for all of our products. So fair enough.

You know, we sometimes have to do that. So I have a little bit of a test that if I needed and I've kept that project up there just specifically for that reason so that I can kind of experiment with what different workflows and show people how it works. But, you know, by and large, our partners, whether it be owners or design teams, they've been really, really supportive. I mean, I would say you have to know your audience because there are times when if you started training by saying you're going to love this, it works just like Facebook or it works just like Twitter or social media.

You might lose the room, depending on who's there. So you have to know your audience a little bit. By and large, I don't find it to be a generational thing. Although it seems that way. It seems that way sometimes.

It's more about a sophistication level and whether they use it in their lives or not. But we had, and this particular project, the architect kept being very critical and kept getting a hold of me and telling me, hey, I thought I would do this or I thought I would do that. I couldn't get it to do this. I couldn't get it to do that. And I would look into it and I realized I probably should have done a little bit better training.

It's a user error sort of an issue. But at one point, the project manager actually asked the question, well, John, you sure seem to be complaining about game plan a lot. Would you? It's not too late. We could switch this to a new format.

Do you want to do that? And he came back immediately without missing a beat. Oh, God, no. I think that, you know, he he was a high touch sort of a client. We needed to really walk him through it.

But the reality is that he was he was liking the interaction. He was finding it a lot easier to use and he was finding the information a lot more readily. I've had a couple of other subcontractors. We've got a project or two that we're currently running where we're not using game plan just at the choice of the project executive on the particular job. Or like I said, because of a client requires something else and just started a project working with somebody that was involved in one of these projects with game plan.

And she had great feedback for us and was saying, hey, how come they're not using it on this other one? It's it was great to find everything in one spot. I can't do that anymore. So it's been really great validation. Well, I must say that this has actually helped me quite a bit to understand how it works and then also understanding from from your perspective how easily integratable it is to to just start using it in your own teams.

I think that you're right. It's interesting to to note that you really do have to know your user, your audience or your user base and understand what level of touch they may require. But yeah, training training is is huge. But at the same time, there's so many things that are intuitive, especially if you use social media platforms. So the the learning curve is is a lot.

It's a lot less steep. So I will say the key to it, though, is people will learn it if they have to. And a lot of times they won't if it's not something that is required of them. So strong project leadership that has the mindset that we cannot lose project information due to emails or anything else like that. If you make the commitment that you're going to use a different system, you're going to use a platform to communicate.

That's a matter of your project. You have to tell your team this is what we're doing. The idea of typing in the the what is it called work stream similar to like a Facebook wall? It really makes a big difference to just make it very easy to walk through the process. So what is it that you're showing me here?

David. So I just wanted to show really quick just because this is I mentioned this earlier, something that's much more flexible. You know, at the project level, this is not the entire enterprise. This is actually at the project level. The ability to customize all the fields that go into an RFI form or a submittal form.

I can show, for example, the trade discipline. I can show it. I can hide it. I can change this list. Those are things that most software out there either do not let you do or they make you go through the vendor to change them.

And then you can only really do it at an enterprise level. So all of your projects will have to be will have to have the same trade disciplines in this particular case. We were only interacting with mechanical fire protection and electrical simple, you know, the remodel of a storage space in the hospital. Don't have to deal with anybody else. So I don't want that clouding up for so we're pretty lean organization.

So, you know, anybody that's familiar with lean construction, you probably know about the five s. No way of sorting and standardizing this. This really goes to the heart of that. You get rid of any fodder in your forms that you don't need. You can make your five forms extremely simple.

One or two fields and everything else is out there. And being able to do that at project level as an end user, as a project administrator and without having to go back to the vendor, that's huge. Yeah, absolutely. You don't have to jump through the hoops in order for that to take place. You just you eliminate the waste at your level and just keep keep moving forward.

Have the only the pertinent information that you need. Well, this has been a great demo, if you will, using your past projects and even current projects to show us how this has benefited you, how Game Pound has benefited you. But really, it is it's more than anything. It sounds like it has just enhanced your the way you guys already choose to work. And it allows the collaboration to to be second nature throughout the project.

It's the way Vishal described to me before. The reporting is what is it? The reporting is a byproduct, right? The byproduct of actually working and I can absolutely see that that is that is taking place here. I think if there's anything that's a no brainer about this product, it's that.

You can absolutely go back to whatever piece of information that you're looking for, whether it's a submittal RFI or just that correspondence going back and forth about it. I think that's hugely, hugely great. So I did want to give the opportunity if you wanted to talk through the pricing model here, Vishal, just so people understand what what it what it takes to get bank game plan up and running. I don't know if you wanted to share your screen and or just talk about it, whatever you whatever you think is most effective at this point.

So it is available on our website. The pricing is pretty simple. We price by different packages and different products. So there are six different products for collaboration, contract management, scheduling, lean construction, project planning, document controllers and so on. People can choose to buy any combination of this.

They can start with a change user package. And the unlimited projects come with it. And the pricing starts at $200 per month for one product. I think that's it's a simple model. It's it's easy to understand.

And I think that's that's great for what you're what you're offering. So game plan cloud dot com is the website. So OK, great. So anybody can can find find this information there out of the six categories. So that's great.

Last question I wanted to just ask you both before we wrap up the interview here slash demo. How can people get in touch with you if they want to reach out and talk a little bit more about game plan or just your experience using using game plan or what have you. So shall how can how can they get in touch with you. So they can write me an email. We shall be.

I. Or they can follow me on Twitter. Twitter and I use for a while. My last name. Yeah.

Great. How about you, David? How can one get in touch with you? Yeah. My name is.

You can also reach out to me via email. I do realize that's been the last hour. Railing against. No, but you know, non-project specific communication still has a place in the president. My email address is Diaz and David at game plan cloud dot com.

Great. Well, thank you both. And I look forward to talking with you soon again. And I hope that this is beneficial to the constructor audience. I'm looking forward to to feedback from the audience there as well.

So I guess I'll talk to you guys soon. Thank you very much. Thank you guys. I hope you guys enjoyed this interview with the Shaw and David. You can find the resource links and this podcast at constructor dot com slash one zero.

You heard a lot about game plan and more info can be found at game plan cloud dot com. If you are listening to this podcast and there's no YouTube video link posted at this time, please just be patient. The YouTube video is coming out any moment. You can certainly access it in the show notes when it's available. Thanks, guys.