News + Insights

COVID-19 has an ongoing impact on the day to day operations of construction companies. Construction companies need to re-think the “how” to do business and require a complete focus on core activities.

New norms of conducting business in an environment where social distancing is necessary are leading to less efficient methods of working. This is causing a level of disruption and associated loss in productivity and efficiency at every level. It ranges from how many men can work in a trench, to the logistics of having three men in a 12-man hoist for vertical construction.

This complexity makes it very difficult to foresee the future, when the cumulative knowledge is based on traditional ways of working. Unfortunately, these ways do not reflect the current environment. Read more +

Big idea pioneer David Porter envisions a world where our $10 trillion project construction industry is no longer burdened by cost and time overruns. David said it’s the typical story we see in the media; massive infrastructure projects running millions or billions of dollars over budget and years late.

“These projects inevitably become the focus of political and media scrutiny, and so they should. If airlines had the track record of major projects, there wouldn’t be an airline industry,” David said. Read more +

Artificial Intelligence – Prediction in a Construction Environment

We have come to recognise that infrastructure projects run over time and budget. This point has been well documented by the University of Oxford based expert on mega-projects Professor Bent Flyvbjerg who maintains a global database of the performance of thousands of large projects (see Figure 1). Read more +

Endeavour Programme and BMD Urban: Lessons learnt from AI in practice on major projects

By Dr George Quezada, CSIRO Data61 on secondment to Arup Australasia

The world is amidst an artificial intelligence (AI) arms race with tech giants and national governments vying to create the best tech and skills ecosystem. According to CSIRO’s Data61 recent report, Australia’s AI Roadmap[1], AI could be worth over $22 trillion to the global economy by 2030. That’s new value created by humans working collaboratively with a new breed of software tools. Software that can harness and use enormous amounts of data to realise untapped value and achieve benefits and important goals, such as early detection of cancer, agricultural robots, vehicle crash avoidance, targeted infrastructure maintenance and more.

But what does it take to implement AI technology and create a successful business use case? I’ve explored this question with Australian-based AI start-up Endeavour Programme which is working with Brisbane-based civil construction company BMD Urban. BMD Urban is presently implementing Octant AI, an AI-enabled project management tool to help the business and project managers detect problematic projects, 30-60 percent ahead of time compared to current processes. The collaboration between Endeavour Programme and BMD Urban provides a useful case study to illustrate how adopting advanced AI technology enhances capabilities to tackle practical business problems and can provide valuable business insights and identify commercial opportunities and benefits. Read more +

With the World Economic Forum currently underway in Switzerland, I reflect on 6 June 2018. On this day, I was honoured to attend a select round-table discussion hosted jointly by the World Economic Forum Infrastructure and Urban Development Industries community, Stanford’s Global Projects Center and the Major Programme Management group at Oxford’s Saïd Business School.

This round table brought together a distinguished group of 30 industry professionals, senior executives, academics and other thought-leaders to discuss the challenges affecting the global construction industry. These discussions were part of a series of strategic dialogues designed to promote a cross-disciplinary agenda of industry reform, bringing together professionals of all disciplines who are committed to transforming the way major capital projects are planned and delivered for the future. Read more +

Over the last 12 months Endeavour Programme has been working closely with BMD Group Business Systems Manager Patrick Pearl to pilot the use of Octant. Data from almost 460 projects collected over seven years was used to demonstrate the business advantages of machine learning and artificial intelligence in predicting outcomes sooner than business norms and with greater accuracy.

Having completed several rounds of testing, our collaboration now moves into the implementation phase. We are working with a number of BMD senior managers and we expect to augment current business procedures with additional insights. Artificial intelligence predictions will alert these managers to projects with emerging cost over-runs and under-runs. Read more +

“What I am is something unbearable for the world of clichés; I’m a realist.” Gore Vidal.

When it comes to managing major projects, we strive for “effective and efficient”. It’s a cliché. Thinking about it, effective is a hurdle to get to efficient. Without effective there is no efficient. Research shows that more often than not, major projects don’t clear this hurdle. Read more +