Solving Key Challenges in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations (AECO) Industry with Jama Connect®: Part 1
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In this blog series, we’ll recap the “Six Key Challenges in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations (AECO) Industry and How to Solve Them with Jama Connect®“ whitepaper.
Solving Key Challenges in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations (AECO) Industry with Jama Connect®: Part 1
Six Key Challenges in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations (AECO) Industry and How to Solve Them with Jama Connect®
Introduction
The AECO (Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations) industry faces various challenges and opportunities as it adapts to changing market trends and technological advancements.
AECO is the largest industry in the world, according to McKinsey, and makes up 13% of global GDP. The industry has seen a steady increase in demand for sustainable and energy-efficient designs, as well as for innovative building materials and construction techniques. Additionally, digital technologies such as Building Information Modeling (BIM), cloud-based collaboration, and requirements management tools have become more prevalent, enabling better communication and project management across different stakeholders.
However, the industry is also grappling with issues such as a shortage of skilled labor, rising material costs, and increasing regulatory requirements. As such, the AECO industry is undergoing a transformation as it seeks to meet the evolving needs of clients and society while navigating a rapidly changing business landscape.
One of the challenges in adapting to changes in AECO is that a typical project involves many stakeholders, including architects, engineers, contractors, owners, and regulators, often with different business models and goals. These stakeholders must work together to design, build, and maintain the built environment, but structural and contractual agreements often make it difficult to communicate with each other to deliver projects on time and budget.
In this whitepaper, we will explore some of these challenges and how a requirements management solution like Jama Connect® can help solve them.
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Six Key Challenges
CHALLENGE #1 – Lack of Collaboration and Poor Communication
Collaboration and communication are essential in the AECO industry but can be difficult to achieve. With dozens, if not hundreds of individual firms involved in any given project, each stakeholder brings their own expertise, agenda, and perspective, which can lead to misunderstandings and communication breakdowns. This can result in rework, delays, and increased costs throughout the development process.
A requirements management solution like Jama Connect can help facilitate collaboration by providing a central repository for all project requirements. For example, the owner could post their original requirements into a Jama Connect environment allowing all stakeholders, project managers, and contracted firms access to the same information to jointly verify that their work is aligned to achieve project goals. Using Jama Connect to manage this process goes beyond just document sharing, by creating a record of verification that the requirements are met, or if there are changes, that those modifications are also tracked and validated back to the source.
CHALLENGE #2 – Scope Creep
Scope creep is a common issue in the AECO industry, where projects can become more complex and costly than initially planned. Scope creep occurs when project requirements expand beyond the original scope, leading to additional work, time, and costs that were not anticipated in the project plan. Broadly, this is referred to as the ‘change order’ process and results in project delays in addition to cost increases. Sometimes the changes result from a lack of clear communication and project management, where changes or additions to the project scope are not properly documented or approved. Additionally, external factors such as changes in regulations, client requirements, or unexpected site conditions can also contribute to scope creep. Managing scope creep in the AECO industry requires a proactive approach, including regular communication and documentation of changes, proper project planning and risk management, and stakeholder engagement to ensure that project expectations are aligned with project scope.
Jama Connect can help prevent scope creep by providing a platform for managing project requirements. This includes defining the scope of the project and ensuring that all stakeholders are aligned on project objectives and their plans are validated against the owner’s project requirements documents. Any changes to the project scope can be easily tracked and managed — in real time — within Jama Connect.
RELATED: Extending Live Traceability™ to Project Lifecycle Management (PLM) with Jama Connect®
CHALLENGE #3: – Redoing Similar Work Across Multiple Projects
Requirements reuse is a practice in the AECO industry that involves leveraging existing design requirements to develop new projects. By reusing requirements, designers and engineers can save time and resources while improving project quality and consistency. This can be particularly useful for large-scale projects or projects with similar design requirements, where requirements can be adapted and refined to fit new project contexts. Reuse of requirements can also help to ensure compliance with regulations and standards, as existing requirements can be used as a baseline for new projects.
While reuse can save an incredible about of time and money for all stakeholders involved, there needs to be an upfront investment in both tools and processes. To facilitate reuse of requirements, effective requirements management processes and tools are needed to capture, store, and manage requirements. Additionally, collaboration across different stakeholders is important to ensure that requirements are applicable and relevant to new projects.
Jama Connect is a powerful platform that can help the AECO industry with reuse in a number of ways.
Here are some examples:
- Requirements reuse: In the AECO industry, many projects have similar requirements. By using Jama Connect, organizations can create reusable templates and structures to reuse requirements across projects, saving time and effort. This can be especially useful for organizations that work on multiple projects simultaneously or for those that have a large number of projects with similar requirements.
- Design reuse: Just like with requirements, many projects in the AECO industry require similar designs. Imagine a wind farm project for example, where each of the turbine structures are identical in design. By reusing designs, organizations can reduce design time, improve consistency, and minimize errors. Jama Connect allows organizations to easily store and retrieve design artifacts, making it easy to reuse them across projects.
- Knowledge reuse: Over time, organizations in the AECO industry accumulate a lot of knowledge about their projects, including best practices and lessons learned from experience. Jama Connect provides a central repository for this knowledge, making it easy to share and reuse across projects.
- Process reuse: Many organizations in the AECO industry have well-established processes for managing projects, for example processes like issue resolution and design-change tracking. By using Jama Connect, organizations can capture these processes and reuse them across projects, improving consistency and efficiency.
Stay tuned for part 2 of this two-part series. Click HERE to download the entire whitepaper,
“Six Key Challenges in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations (AECO) Industry and How to Solve Them with Jama Connect®“
Chief Product & Marketing Officer at Rapid Apps
Construction software tech veteran, Pete Billante, has led product management for AECO industry products at Autodesk, Vela Systems, and now currently at Rapid Apps. With over 25 years of software industry experience, Pete has a track record of developing and scaling successful enterprise software products. Most recently, he led product and marketing at Repsly, a retail supply chain application. Prior to that he worked at Autodesk where he held leadership roles in both marketing and product management for Autodesk BIM 360, now part of Autodesk Construction Cloud. Pete was VP of Product Management at Vela Systems, one of the industry’s first SaaS AECO construction management platforms, prior to its acquisition by Autodesk. Pete is a graduate of MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Vanderbilt University.
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