Five Ways to Tackle Productivity Challenges

In our last post, “Technology Disruption: Turn Challenges into Opportunities,” we established that staffing shortages, low productivity and low profitability are challenges for the construction industry that embody both threats and opportunities at the same time.

How do you take advantage of the available opportunities to address productivity challenges and reposition your organization to thrive in this technology-infused world?

You Need a New Approach

Technology is key to diminishing the threats while at the same time unlocking new opportunities and creating competitive differentiation going forward. This technology-infused future demands organizations to think and act differently. This new approach—with technology at the center—is a combination of re-engineered operational processes, data, and new organizational structure.

Here are five essential ingredients to position your firm for success:

Step 1: Start with Leadership

Moving in the right direction doesn’t start with technology selections. It starts with leadership. CEO vision and executive team alignment are essential to successful execution. It also takes a unified cross-functional team to engage in discussion on how the business must change in order to create competitive differentiation through the deployment of disruptive technologies.

Step 2: Change Your Process

Organizations must begin to exercise more intentional management over business process change. This is especially important in the construction and engineering industry due to the dynamic nature of the work and the myriad of technology options to consider. Stop and think about the approach you use to implement change in your organization today.

Step 3: Create a Chain Reaction

There is an opportunistic chain reaction to be created that starts with productivity improvements in operations. This will in turn reduce your time and investment attempting to manage talent shortages in Human Resources that in turn will impact your ability to attract and retain younger workers. It’s a big win-win-win!

Step 4: Control Your Technology Landscape

One of the most challenging situations faced by organizations today, especially those who are managed in functional silos, is to connect all of the disparate applications that continue to proliferate throughout the organization. This should be a team effort to not only identify the applications in use, but to determine the roles the various applications play and analyze the value of each application.

Step 5: Leverage Your Most Valuable Asset--Data

Time may be money, but data is the new gold. We are now in an age where data is the most valuable asset to a business. Data-driven businesses find ways to source information that would take hours to create in one-off scenarios. Technology can now create, analyze, share, and monitor data for us in seconds—not hours.

Staffing Shortages, Low Productivity, and Low Profitability—Part Two

To learn more about how Agile Frameworks can help you leverage technology disruption and turn staffing shortages, low productivity and low profitability challenges into opportunities, look at our guide, “Staffing Shortages, Low Productivity, and Low Profitability—Part Two.” To download the guide, click the button below.