Making Better Decisions On Construction Projects
The overwhelming majority of construction projects around the world aren’t delivered on time, on budget or even to the expectation of the client. There is enormous room for improvement and savings in project delivery in just about every area
These projects are the result of thousands and thousands of decisions made along the process from initial business case to handover. If we could find ways to improve just a small fraction of the decision-making processes in those projects, that would lead to a monumental reduction in poorly informed decisions, errors, and waste on projects.
Where is it all going wrong? What aspects of the decision-making process can be improved?
Our ability to make decisions under pressure is one of our most important skills as humans. However, our decision-making process is often overlooked or not remembered at all once that decision has been made.
We can all be irrational at times and affected by our emotions whether we want to believe it or not. This can affect the quality of the choices we make in our lives and our work.
I’m extremely interested in this process, of uncovering what biases could exist in the process of making decisions, whether that’s in business or any other area of life.
As a project manager, I’m constantly weighing up multiple risks and scenarios and trying to bring them to a decision point so that I can move forward, or relay those options to a client and get a positive outcome for their project.
But these options aren’t always complete, they may be missing information, or they could be biased toward moving in one particular direction.
What can help with the decision-making process?
It’s a little controversial right now but Artificial Intelligence is becoming a popular topic of conversation with new tools like Chat GPT-4 highlighting how AI can create anything from essays to CVs and websites. The question I’m interested in is, can AI assist decision-making on construction projects?
If we could use this tool to understand the decision-making process for our own lives, show us how our decisions affect results and help us make better decisions in the future the impacts could be exponential.
What I’m optimistic about as we move forward with applications like Chat GPT and other AI tools is that we find better ways to analyse the available information, and make decisions that can improve the results of projects. It’s a potential way to tap into the best decision-makers and project results in the world and have those processes consistently work for us.
This could include things like reviewing a contract for risks, scanning design documents for missing information or potential budget blowouts, weighing potential tenderers against each other for a specific project and based on a specific set of criteria, assessing variations, or knowing when workers should take a break on-site.
These are processes that require a deep understanding of all of the inputs that can impact a decision but prioritising and finding the most useful information could significantly impact the final decision and result.
It’s about helping us find the signal through the noise. Analysing data, finding a pattern and then making a decision.
If we are going to improve our results on construction projects, I’m optimistic that these tools are the logical next step to help. We want to use these tools to assist us to find the patterns and do it in a repeatable way, without being influenced by biases. If this occurs the improvements are potentially limitless.
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