Transcript: Increase Success for Capital Projects with Advanced Work Packaging

The work packages or scope elements that are provided to superintendents and foremen on the site, relying on the first line of supervision and planning in the field to actually break that down, has been the source of unpredictability and the source of risk. The main challenge has been the way our business model works. So if you take a look at construction in general, typically in the early days of the project, not all the team members are already staffed. The project is still not confirmed to be perceived, not fully funded.

The natural way of looking at things is to try to minimize spending in the beginning and then keep spending after the decision to fund the project has been made. This is counterintuitive. The early decisions you make in a project do have a really big impact. You need to think of investing early on in the project so that you can increase the chances of the project succeeding in execution. Hello and welcome to the Constructor Podcast, the best way to build it, episode number 70.

I'm your host, Brittany Campbell-Turner, and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. We talk about fostering trusting relationships, help you to understand how to lower risk, be under budget and on schedule, and most importantly, exceed your end user's desires. In last week's episode, we spoke with Kevin Schatoffman, where he is a digital technology evangelist at Deloitte Consulting. He promotes blockchain robotics, cognitive automation, and machine learning in corporate real estate. Last episode, Kevin and I spoke about how real estate transactions where transferring funds from party to party could take just minutes on the blockchain.

Kevin also discussed many of the pilot projects that Deloitte is involved with, including releases on smart contracts and data hub document sharing. He covers four issues in corporate real estate that are making blockchain more relevant today. And lastly, he spoke with us about the three real estate buckets that are ripe for blockchain and real estate. So if you haven't listened to that episode yet, check it out at constructor.com slash EP69. In today's episode, I speak with Olfa Hamdi, founder and executive director of the Advanced Work Packaging Institute.

She's also the CEO at Concord Project Technologies. She and I will be talking about how advanced work packaging drives the definition and planning within the construction sequence at the beginning of the project. She argues that a more defined project execution plan is the key to managing complexity, and it provides more efficient, cost-effective construction on major capital projects. With that, let's get into the interview. So we are interviewing Olfa Hamdi, founder and executive director of the Advanced Work Packaging Institute and CEO at Concord Project Technologies.

She argues that owners and EPC contractors need to pay more attention to the PEP or Project Execution Plan and transform it into a live document that functions as a single source of truth on a project from beginning to end. So before we get into the live aspects of PEPs, we'll unpack that in during the interview. But first of all, thank you for joining us today, Olfa. Welcome to the Constructor Podcast. Thank you for having me.

So you've been doing quite a bit of research over the years since 2013 about advanced work packaging and basically how to improve PMOs, the EPC industrial construction perspective, through better upfront planning and team integration. So given that, I wanted to touch base with you about where we are from the business perspective. Let's discuss those correlations between AEC and industrial construction. Currently, the EPC market is going through an extraordinary consolidation of global engineering construction markets. If we take a look at the second quarter of 2017 alone, the markets saw about 49 mergers and acquisitions with a value of over $20 billion.

Jacobs Engineering acquired CH2M Hill or A. McPhoster Wheeler acquired by the Powerhouse, Wood Group. So these are just examples of a long and growing list of those business ventures that are driving the engineering and construction markets. Now these ventures have been driven by a business need of growing into different markets. So given a typical engineering and procurement and construction company, by going through these ventures, they've been able to expand to markets like war infrastructure, government work, transportation, and so on, in addition to oil and gas and petrochemical construction.

So by doing that, those companies are able to cover way bigger market scope. However, on the practical project delivery side, that is creating new challenges in terms of actually executing projects in a standardized way across all those construction segments. This is relevant to both those large engineering, procurement, and construction companies, but it is also relevant to the small and medium construction companies and even more relevant to the owner companies from the public to the private sector, as this requires from them who have stronger project management offices and project management capabilities to drive good project delivery.

Yes, absolutely. It's interesting that you're talking about the acquisitions that take place. Actually in my previous company, I was part of an acquisition like that and there was just lots of cultural change and there were a lot of challenges with just integrating the ways of working. And so I identified that clearly in the way that we were operating internally, but also the way that we approached projects. There was just, I can't say there was a whole lot of alignment in the way that we approached it from department to department.

And it was even hard to identify what another group did unless you set up a set of meetings. It was a little bit painstaking, if I'm honest. So it's interesting that you mentioned that. I can relate to your experience and this is where we see ourselves, my team and I, we'll basically say that we're in the business of making integration a reality and making integration a formal practice. And this is where I see the project management office of the future is heading.

It has to run that function of integration of people and systems. So it's not all about systems and it's not only about people, it's both. That practice has to be formalized, has to be developed, has to be built into an actual package of project integration practices that do cover the overall scope. One thing that we talk a lot about here is lean construction. And just quite naturally, we talk about integrated project delivery, but that is all the different partners that are contributing to a project.

It's not necessarily stepping back and talking about that internal organization, which is totally fine. I think there's a place for that. But I think even taking a further step back is how the pre-planning actually takes place. Now at MACE, we have project execution plans and discussed that earlier in the intro that we need to have more defined PEPs. That's going to help with the integration process.

That helps us when we do our projects. But I'd like to unpack this subject with you. What is your perspective on the characteristics of a PEP or project execution plan? Let me take a step back. What is the major challenge that has traditionally prevented this integration from pre-construction to project delivery and project closeout?

The main challenge has been the way our business model works. So if you take a look at construction in general, typically in the early days of the project, not all the team members are already staffed. The project is still not confirmed to be perceived, not fully funded. The natural way of looking at things is to try to minimize spending in the beginning and then keep spending after the decision to fund the project has been made. This is counterintuitive, knowing that the early decisions you make in a project do have a really big impact.

You need to think of investing early on in the project so that you can increase the chances of the project succeeding in execution. But this is not the way the business model is. So there is a misalignment between the life cycle of funding of projects and the proper way of delivering projects and ensuring that projects do achieve good performance in terms of cost, schedule, safety, quality, and operability. I kind of like compare projects to a Breitling Pilot Watch. All the moving parts in the projects need to be precisely aligned from day one so that the whole thing can work and get to the predictable outcome and give you the actual timing that's accurate.

But this is a difficult task. It is. Product managers can tell you about it. They kind of like get absorbed into so many moving parts that the actual job of aligning things sometimes gets out of hand. If you can look at the project execution plan as a central document, a central deliverable that is built and kicked off from day one of the project and then updated and serving as a central single source of truth for the entire project team and project stakeholders, that's an alternative that can provide a sense of alignment in a project that is lasting many months or sometimes many years.

Some projects last over 10 years. I had the chance to work on petrochemical complex, mega, multi-billion dollar projects that do involve many companies, many public organizations, many private organizations, many people from many countries that are working toward one goal. Well, people leave and come back. Turnover happens. So, how do you keep everybody aligned?

You can't rely on the project manager to have all the time in the world to be able to align everybody at any single point in time. You need that common system and common framework where everybody can go to and see the latest in terms of scope definition, in terms of safety procedure, in terms of roles and responsibilities, in terms of risk. All those pieces have them in one single place to serve as a single source of truth. Absolutely. And with so many people, it has to be so challenging for a project that could last up to 10 years.

Absolutely. The construction business is a people business. If we want to look at the next generation's project delivery system or project operating system that can bring a meaningful impact, actually provide serious changes in the way we deliver projects in terms of performance, that system has to be people-centered. We cannot ignore the people factor in our line of business. If you take a look at projects, one of the major sources of disruption in projects is the change in the project leadership.

When the project manager leaves or the chief engineer or the engineering lead or a key project controls member, when they leave the project unexpectedly or when there is no transition, and even with the transition, a turnover of staff is a serious problem and has major impact on project bottom line in terms of cost and schedule and performance, predictability and efficiency. So, we definitely need to consider the integration of people and systems and the continuity of those two components as a key factor in the next generation project management system.

Let's start unpacking what advanced work packaging is. That will clearly outline maybe a roadmap for us in order for that PEP to really have the value that you're discussing here. The basic idea behind advanced work packaging is the idea of driving definition and planning with the construction sequence. So traditionally, we take a look at project execution and the way the construction is going to turn out to be sometime in third stage of definition. With the advanced work packaging methodology, you would want to take a look at your planning and packaging of the work using your construction sequence from day one.

That's the basic premise to that. The word advanced there is saying, I'm going to do my work packaging in a form that is advanced in time. So, I'm going to do it even before I freeze my scope. So I'm going to do it while I'm discussing the scope with the owner, even before the signature of the contract. That's the premise.

Now, the advanced work packaging system as a formal terminology is a best practice in the industrial construction, industrial sector as identified and designated as a best practice by the Construction Industry Institute, the II. I actually was a member of the research team RT272. That was the team that put together the practice model for advanced work packaging that is now becoming a best practice in the industry. What the advanced work packaging is, turning out to be with more maturity as a project delivery system, that is one example of driving full alignment and full integration between the key stakeholders in a project from day one till delivery.

I think the term IPD, Integrated Project Delivery, is quite common in the AEC industry. It's a contracting form. Advanced work packaging is the equivalent of that from an execution standpoint in addition to the contracting side. That's kind of like the small summary of it. So let's talk about the process.

How do you set up the different components, the separate work packages in order to be fully prepared in advance essentially for really carrying out the project? Could you break that down for us? I would give a sort of an overview on how did the advanced work packaging system came to mature, and that would give a sort of an explanation on what's the practice model and how to do it. One of the challenges that was examined that very well documented in megaprojects and very large construction projects is that the work packages or scope elements that are provided to superintendents and foremen on the site, they were large enough that relying on the first line of supervision and planning in the field to actually break that down has been the source of unpredictability and the source of risk.

So the natural change that happened there, and this originated in some of the key oil and gas projects in Western Canada, was this practice that we want to deliver to the field on the first line of supervision, work packages that are ready to execute and liberate time for the first line of supervision to do most of the time supervision rather than do planning. So we're going to take out planning from the field, do it in a back end office or an office that's between the on-site and it's a number of planners that are helping that field execution, and we're going to focus on increasing the supervision time for foremen and superintendents.

When that happened, there were serious improvement in the numbers achieved in the field in terms of field productivity. So for example, tool time increased by about 25%, which is quite a change in construction projects considering that labor takes on a majority of the spending of a project budget. With the increased supervision, now we have better safety record, better quality, and so on. The idea was this practice of planning execution in the field and delivering to the crews ready to execute packages actually was called work phase planning, and that's the initial term for work packaging, it was work phase planning.

There wasn't a study conducted, and I was part of my academic research actually initially was to document what could we do in the office to help increase the accuracy of those field packages so that you know those packages when they arrive to the field, when they're ready to execute, they're quite complete. The material is ready, the equipment is ready, scaffolding is ready, all sorts of key information, safety plans, permits, everything ready so that those packages are executed on time and there is no wasted time in between.

So the study of what happens in the office to enable the field has led to the development of the advanced work packaging. And so one of the key elements there has been we want to define construction work packages and then break them down by discipline and then break them down following the path of construction and we want to tie all these to the project execution plan. And so this takes me back again to the idea that you would want all your stakeholders, all your departments from procurement to construction to permitting to environmental permitting to project controls to safety to engineering to construction management and all these you would want them to report back what common structure that is driven by the work package.

Absolutely and the integration of responsibility and the scope so that there's no redundancy or if there is need for overlap that takes place all of that can be included and I see how that's ultimately very valuable. You brought up the next challenge to making this happen, that's the responsibility part. When we have implemented AWP on a number of projects one of the things the industry right now is recognizing is that doing this has created the need for a function and a staffing function that has not been part of the traditional project management team which is interface management more of an integrator type of role.

Who does that? Do we expect the project manager to take on the second hat or maybe the fourth or fifth hat? Do we want the project controls department to do that while they're actually busy building all those numbers the work breakdown structures and so on. There has been this question of who does this job of the integration of all those key stakeholders into the project. The industry is looking right now to bring AWP or the advanced work packaging system as an integration framework to bring it under the project controls department which has been quite challenging because by doing that there is this risk that people would look at the AWP system as just another numbering structure rather than an actual delivery system and so my advice and this is the way we advocate for it at Concord Project Technologies and you know based on the

research that has been going across the industrial sector is when you decide to move forward with advanced work packaging this has to be a leadership decision and it has to be driven by the buy-in and the alignment of all the departments not just the project controls department otherwise it's going to become another numbering structure and you would not see the benefits that we've documented like savings and total installed cost of 20 percent that's a big saving for the construction industry. The things we advocate for is that we think that the technology providers those who are project centered and project driven they can play that role by being the central element or the team or the stakeholder that is able to connect all the data sources from multiple stakeholders and bring back relevant information to the project manager who is the ultimate owner of the project execution

plan. Okay I used to work in project controls developing the work breakdown structures and doing schedule management I do think just being in that controls perspective having the understanding of how the AWP data is pulled together and being able to tag what field is associated with what other fields sort of those intricacies from a database perspective I can certainly see how someone who is people focused who works in controls can really help to facilitate that process quite well. The practice of integration is not quite mature in the industry right now so it's in the early stages although we would expect that because construction is multidisciplinary and because it involves many people from many backgrounds we should have paid more attention to what it means to integrate and align everybody at different stages of the project but historically this practice even from a research academic research standpoint

not as documented as it should be. Now this has started to change and this is kind of like one of the key recommendations I would give to project executives and people who are in the business of driving efficiencies in owner and APC companies is to tell them take a look at your historical performance of project delivery talk to your people and find out who is the right champion within your organization that can sponsor and champion this practice of integration. Sometimes it has to be a new team or a new function or a new job that can support that sometimes it can fall under of the departments there is no direct recipe but the most important part is that you need to deliberately take a hard look at that and decide who can champion who is the best position to champion this function.

To be honest I'm envisioning your diagram and I can include it but I clearly see your diagram of how it's broken out planning your design and your construction and then I see all of the different steps and as they go along that's what I'm envisioning. So now that we have a person to champion this project to carry out advanced work packaging what are their first steps what do they start doing when they carry out the process? Premise behind the advanced work packaging implementation is this ability to align and integrate the various people and systems early on in the project based on the path of construction.

To get ready for advanced work packaging one of the very first things to do assuming of course the owner team and the project team and the contractor team are just kicked off the projects and they're starting as early as possible in definition. Very first step is to get aligned on what that process would mean. If you're breaking your scope by area or by system or using any type of criterion to define your boundaries you need to align that and get the buy-in of the owner and the contractor on that.

We call that the definition of construction work packages. One of the main errors that do typically happen when owners and EPCs come together to define construction work packages is that they do not account for the needed information and the needed data for each of those work packages early on. So you end up with construction work packages defined but you end up with packages defined that do not have all the sources of information at the right time. Not only you need to align what the packages are but you have to align early on what's the life cycle of the data when is that data needed by whom and the roles and responsibilities for each of the parties to make those construction work packages ready and accurate.

Make sure your process whether your in-house process the owner or the EPC process aligns with the other side under this AWP umbrella or the AWP guideline. The AWP champion can drive that. Oh yes. I take the example of what a technology provider we do at Concord Project Technologies which is because the construction industry has been characterized by multiple technology solutions that do not talk to each other that are not interoperable. That has created the challenge for integration and advanced work packaging in the industry.

Software vendors they have a responsibility in the way project performance issue we're facing. We cannot assume that we can achieve serious improvements in project delivery if we do not see technology also becoming integrated. Now other industries have already gone past that. There are standards, there are practices that are used elsewhere that do ensure that technology solutions talk to each other are interoperable. Construction industry has to become like that.

This is where I see the role of the owner and the role of the EPC as well into requiring a minimum interoperability standard by any technology solution provider they work with. We've done in building information modeling where owner companies decided they said it's part of my country you have to deliver the BIM model for example or you have to use the BIM model to do this. Well that same philosophy of requiring under the pre-qualifications criteria requiring a software vendor to provide interoperable solutions needs to happen for advanced work packaging to actually also deliver the results that is intended to deliver.

100% agree yeah. Again this is another piece of the puzzle which is the technology piece that needs to be also in line with this whole integration philosophy. This is kind of like where we see the next generation of project delivery and the next generation of project management office that is a technology powered project management office. That future is built with people who are not only providing the technology but do also provide the project services with the technology. So you need to define what the project needs, what the practice is, what everybody needs and then decide what technologies mirrors.

That's one of the key elements. So it's all about alignment early on between the key stakeholders putting things down on paper on whatever means you have that are clarified in the beginning. Of course it's the owner at some point at the end of the day especially when you think about what they want to do with that information. From my perspective I'm always thinking forward thinking how can we use this data. We're looking to track against what we're planning right.

I mean that's definitely a schedule function you want to know how well you've done. You know the question is in which category is that falling now? I'd like to hear your perspective. Who is the person paying for initially? Well we've talked about the next generation project management office which is characterized by this practice of integration.

Well the second characteristics of that next generation project management office is standardization and that means that the project management team that is looking into the company's project management practices and project delivery practices they need to aim for collecting data that enables them to take a look back and standardize the best practices and improve on the less efficient practice. You can only do that in the case where you have a strategy to what is the data you want to collect from day one. Think about it this way we have had the chance to work with an aerospace organization that has been quite advanced in terms of looking at what data is needed at what time in its project delivery.

And one of the key practices we've implemented could really be useful to many companies is this notion of a data alignment and a data management meeting and deliverable early on in the project. When you kick off a project you have this series of meetings to talk about scope, talk about strategy, talk about objectives, you know business objective, project objectives, find plus minus 30 percent estimates or whatever your estimate and procedure is. Well in addition to that you would create a formal practice a series of meetings and deliverables and work process to align your data strategy.

You define what data engineering and non-engineering data those two sources of data what do you need at what point in time and what kind of data do you need to close the projects with. If you take a look at the EPC industry data handover at the end between the owner and the EPC is one of the key areas that are costing way more money than what has been budgeted for. So it is a source of waste of money because at the end of the project everyone is struggling on handing over the right data and the right format to that owner company and that operations and maintenance team that's going to use that data to operate the facility for the next 20-30 years.

You need to do that integration of data and that alignment of data again in the beginning. Because the owner is the one operating the plan or operating the building, operating the facility, I do believe that it is important early investment to happen from the owner's side on clarifying that data strategy that information strategy early on. And the thing is think about it this way for the owner teams that are listening to us right now you're paying for it one way or the other. You either do it in the beginning upfront minimize the changes the change requests change orders the extensions the claims all the hustles that's going to happen at the end of the project the hard way at the end so be proactive about it.

I definitely second that setting up a project properly in the beginning at least laying out something that should be feasible even if you're updating it all the way through and saying okay well the first few months of the project this isn't working we need to update our approach at least having something for you to measure against initially you know do an assessment within certain increments throughout the project that by far is working better than not having a very clearly laid out plan from the beginning 100 agree with you on that.

And that data I'm dealing with that right now with handing over as builds and project information at the end of one of my projects right now it is an investment from the owner's perspective at the back end if people are not carrying out the level of focus and efficiency and good tracking methodologies throughout the entire project they're pretty much scrambling at the back end if that's not taking place. So setting up that good plan way in the beginning laying out the expectations clearly and tracking them throughout ensuring that they're meeting the expectations that by far can make a huge difference.

It goes back again to this idea of who pays for this I mean it's a simple question but the business model and I think many of your other invitees that talked about projects they mentioned that the business model in construction has been one of the challenges to delivering on this advanced work packaging or this integrated project delivery capability and the business model which relates to the contracting side as well is preventing that. Now digital transformation happening in the industry as an opportunity to retool our business model people and for is looking at clarifying or assign this job of integration to the digital provider whoever is responsible for the digital delivery.

So let's say you're working with an EPC company that has gone fully digital then they would be the one responsible for that. If you're the owner company who has adopted a number of digital practices and you're building this holistic integrated digital delivery system then that team that's doing that needs to own this integration practice and of course the same way we look at projects like EPCM where you have this option of assigning engineering procurement construction management to a third party well we can definitely assign the practice of integration so sort of a EPCI where that integration is assigned to a third party and that third party is technology power.

Now this is a way of looking at the business model and making it more aligned with this idea of integrated project delivery and of course the third party that is driving and doing that integration depending on the contracting strategy they can be paid either through the owner in the beginning perhaps they can even be part of the incentive structure of the contract to incentivize them to drive performance save cost in the office and the field. There are ways around that I mean if we can be a little bit more creative a little bit more adventurous about this there are ways we can drive this and make the contract and the payments the actual practice.

A second element to that is what you mentioned is the performance measurement you know the schedules and the cost the whole idea behind the advanced world packaging is not to measure against your cost numbers your cost codes you need to measure against the actual physical plan. The advanced world packaging system is focused entirely on the scope and the physical progressing and then your cost codes your schedule codes they fall on top of that. I like that approach and I like tracking against planned work in lean methodologies we'll talk about planned percents complete and so you're tracking against planned work based upon the expectation of when you're going to carry it out and it's really percentage based.

So I feel like we dug into a lot of what AWP advanced work packaging is and a lot of the ideas about integration setting up the PAP or the project execution plan early on making sure to get the facilities management or owner operators the maintenance team and the management team up to speed way early on in the process life cycle and then tracking against your work plan like we said just now and then lastly your data. Let's touch on how to use this data moving forward and some of the advantages.

Let me first define what data is it's a generic term and it can mean different things to different people. The industry has made really great progress in terms of defining design and engineering data. The mere invention of the build and information model the integration of the design you know the clash detection practice all that has helped a lot we have made quite the progress there. If we take a look at the bottom line in terms of productivity we're all familiar with this productivity chart that compares construction with rest of the industries and you can see curve for productivity going up for all other industries and then for construction remains almost the same or sometimes it's even declining.

So overall as an industry we have not done disruption in the project delivery performance from a field perspective and the reason is this is my you know based on the research we've done but kind of like a perspective haven't seen projects from all sizes and haven't worked on this advanced work packing practice. The reason is that we have paid so much attention to engineering data but we have not given much attention to the non-engineering data. Non-engineering data or non-engineering information in general because you know information is way broader and more comprehensive than data is basically everything that happens around that facility that digital facility.

You're building your facility you're going to build the digital twin of that which is your 3D model of that. Well around that you have all sorts of information that is not captured digitally and that is not controlled for and that's basically the context your environmental context your organizational context your collaboration context your contracting context your deliverable context cost and schedule everything else that's a huge amount of information a huge sources of uncertainties that do happen that do impact the project that we have not paid attention for a blunt example a typical contract these documents the way we look at them in projects and even when you store them in document management systems that are used by the construction industry for us they're just a title and a date the best case scenario we know who created that document and who the person who last updated that

document that's it. If you look at your building information model if you have way more information there about the data if you take a look at all the rest of the deliverables that are non-engineering the best thing you can get is you know those three pieces of information the title when it was created last updated and who created it that's it we do not pay attention we're not investigating we're not building the content and the knowledge inside that we're not mapping that collaboration we're not building the digital twin of the project system and that's what we're advocating for the practice of integration is about the non-engineering because we're doing integration already in design you know clash detection meetings where we're aligning those models for piping hvac and so on that's clash detection we're doing it that's integration of the design but what we need to do more is integration of everything else we need to

do the clash detection for people and non-engineering information as we do for engineering and design data we're missing the clash detection before we clash as different entities working on projects so let's talk a little bit about tcon and how you're proposing to do this with concord project technologies through a live project execution plan i mean we touched briefly on the requirement that we're looking to recommend and suggest to owner and epsc firms to use technology to facilitate this process but talk a little bit about how you are doing that with tcon you know we've talked about this next generation project management office and that's project support office or project support team that's driven by the practice of integration by being construction driven and by looking at data and aiming for standardizing as much as possible project delivery well we at concord project technologies we want to be that next generation project management office on demand

the idea originated when i was working with this company that the number of investors came together they're investing in a plant and the team that's building the plant is going to operate the plant and continue with that and so it's one large project company in those cases does not make sense from a business perspective for them to invest in building project management office capabilities because they have one project that's it i was talking to the project director i'm saying can you provide this service or can you provide us with a number of templates or a number of group of practices that are ready to use and that we can adopt and deliver our project with successfully and move forward because building those practices in-house does not make sense for us to invest that much into it i came to realize afterwards that business question of investing in building project

management capabilities is also challenging to companies with large projects as well where is this going to come from is this a project cost or is this an overhead cost at the time i get our investors to fund a year-long study with what we call an innovation council the concord innovation council which was formed by project experts technology experts both in cloud computing security engineering information and so on so we came together and we studied the picture about every single piece of software in the market we talked to many owner companies apc companies and the conclusion we came out with at the end of this year-long research was that if we want to have a change if a platform to exist that can bring about changes and results for projects it has to be technology power and it has to be a project services powered as well so it has

to marry both the idea is that the platform and the team aim to shorten the time of construction by acting on the office side and back end side of the project that's the overall picture of course the platform and the way we look at it is driven by the advanced work practice in practice alignment of data integration of the practices and the definition of handover of data beforehand in the back end so we do all those practices that are typically challenging to a project manager or a project director building your estimates you're building your case you're putting together an execution strategy and you're asking the question who should do my integration and who should do my interface management we are powered by this platform that can ensure automatic handover of data information and integration of peoples and systems that's really helpful to understand at a high level because i know it gets even more detailed than that what you're able to do from a

technology platform in addition to the integration of the work packaging and all the non-design information to take advantage of in the beginning of the end of the project the uniqueness of this is the business proposition around this legacy software companies you remember in the beginning i talked about mergers happening in the epsi market the same trend is also happening in the software vendors the legacy software vendors where you have companies acquiring other companies merging together to be able to provide more solutions now the main risk with that is the risk of locking owner companies and epsi companies into one standard or the other if owner companies do not play a role in defining an industry-wide standard for a minimum interoperability think about this way you're working with this company today in five years you will have hard time working with any other company and increasing your competitiveness because your data is not

interoperable with the rest of the market in this digital transformation era if there is one advice i would give to project intensive companies both epsi and owner companies and especially for medium size epsi companies that cannot afford to build in-house digital capabilities themselves be very conscious about the decisions you make in using one technology or the other ask yourself the questions are they interoperable are they api friendly can you integrate other solutions into them because you need to remain open and scalable not fall into a trap where you're using a technology that's gonna be closed on itself and not talk to the industry and not move forward with the rapid change of the digital market the interview i did with kimon anuma how to make sure that your data is being able to get carried across different platforms as it relates to your project but i think this layers on the process perspective so i think that's hugely valuable well opha i want

to ask you what are the best ways to get in contact with you and learn more about what you're doing if you want to learn more about advanced work packaging there is a an open source information it's called workpackaging.org which is the official website of the awp institute it's a non-profit independent research organization that was initially founded based on my thesis work on advanced work packaging which was the very first academic work written on the subject it's open information you can sign up and learn more about awp when it comes to the practice of integration and the way technology plays into this let's say if you're a project director or project manager who's looking to get the support done in terms of the practice of integration in your project both in definition and execution please visit tconglobal.com which is the official website of conquer project technologies and get in touch with us or you can you know get in touch with me

directly through linkedin i'm quite active in linkedin absolutely thank you so much for sharing that and thank you so much for being a guest on the constructor podcast well britany thank you for creating this platform for us to share some of the various opinions and the various experiences on projects we need this kind of communication and you're one of the pioneers in this i do encourage you very much and i do congratulate you on this great effort wish you the best and thank you again and thanks to everybody who listened to this thank you so much opha thanks for listening to this interview with opha hamdi find out more about opha and what tcon is up to at constructor.com slash ep 70 if you've learned something valuable in this episode share it with your friends and colleagues you can also let me know if you've enjoyed our discussion by

connecting with me on twitter at britney underscore ct or find me on linkedin or you can just email me to at britney at constructor.com that's b-r-i-t-t-a-n-i-e at construct double r.com next week we will be speaking with brian platz the co-ceo at flurry db flurry db is a scalable blockchain database that combines enterprise capability with blockchain proof and security we will talk about when working with a flurry blockchain database it makes it easier to define your own blockchain the type of data it will store information its transactions and its products think about any information that's stored in a database now you can store it with the flurry blockchain database even your BIM model we will also discuss how flurry db could help to streamline litigations thus reducing the timeline for the discovery period so you can more clearly understand what happened and when with that i look forward to sharing this interview with you guys next week

if you haven't already subscribed to the podcast you can do so at your preferred podcast player please leave a review to show your support and let me know you are enjoying the podcast i look forward to talking with you guys next week