Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT)
MSFT)

Satya Nadella, CEO

Construction projects are by nature tedious, time-consuming, and prone to delays. Given that they involve many moving parts, equipment and materials, and teams, we see millions of project managers struggle to keep their sites run smoothly, efficiently, on time, and under budget. According to McKinsey’s report, nearly 98 percent of megaprojects had cost overruns of more than 30 percent, while 77 percent of projects are behind schedule. Poor decision-making, inadequate communication, limited talent management, and lack of short- and long-term planning act as some of the key drivers of such outcomes. Needless to say, if discipline requires a well-thought-out schedule, it is construction project management!

Skills aside, having a robust suite of project management tools can make a world of difference. Not only do they embed software like Gantt charts and resource management, but they offer to facilitate end-to-end process. In other words, these tools can help project managers oversee the planning, design, and construction of a project from ideation to fruition. They help control budgets, ensure quality, and effectively manage time and resources.

However, even the best of bricks cannot promise you a great house. In terms of technology, they must be easy to deploy, user-friendly, robust, and cost-effective— which is precisely what Microsoft Project (MS Project) brings to the table.

At its core, Microsoft enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. “We want every company out there to be a tech company in its own right. And our mission is to empower you to do that,” says Satya Nadella, CEO.

In the long list of tools MS Project offers for construction management; the Office 365 Planner is one to talk about. As a leading scheduling tool for construction projects, it helps project managers holistically manage projects by enabling them to develop plans, allocate money to the operations, monitor the budget, and review the workload. Not only this, it helps to create budgets based on job and resource allocation ratios.

MS Project also offers integrated project management dashboards and monitoring features. Managers and their teams can use features such as planning, scheduling, grid view, board view, timeline view, communication & collaboration, co-authoring, reporting, roadmap, and resource management to work seamlessly without any disruptions—all within a single platform. With MS Project, they can prepare insightful reports and make data-driven decisions based on project proposals, project timelines, and employee schedules. As the amount of time assigned to assignments and work is measured, the expenditure is decided by software in proportion to the number of work hours—from the task-level to the project-level.

MS Project also helps establish a critical route timeline and critical chain. Schedules can be resource-graded, and essential chains are visualized in a Gantt diagram. As construction tasks require multiple software programs used both inside and outside the organization by team members, MS Project integrates horizontally and vertically with other technologies to allow hassle-free sharing between programmers, such as Excel and Outlook Word, and more. Such robust offerings help companies collaborate seamlessly, reduce miscommunication, error, rework, and deliver construction projects on time, within the stipulated budget.
Lead By Example

In one instance, Rhomberg is a fourth-generation multinational construction company owned by a family specializing in design, resources, and railway technologies, collaborated with MondayCoffee, a Microsoft Gold Partner, to see these benefits come to life. They struggled with critical initiative, encouraging them to take the fast track wherever possible and enable stakeholders to experience the benefits quickly.

To this end, MondayCoffee paired Office 365, Dynamics CRM, and Azure. They used Microsoft PowerApps, Power BI, Flow, SharePoint lists, Dynamics CRM, and Outlook to improve collaboration, reduce time wastage, and increase accountability—streamlining the entire construction management process.

As Rhomberg is split into many industry segments, grouped under a shared policy to strengthen their cooperation, they migrated to the cloud, installed a tenant for Microsoft Office 365, and replaced legacy IT applications with Microsoft’s standard tools. With these, Rhomberg could automate small tasks and improve cross-team communication. In addition to time saves, the company has achieved greater transparency and higher consistency in business-related workflows. Such is the prowess of MS Projects!

Microsoft undeniably offers one of the best-in-class solutions for construction management. It helps project managers work confidently with a powerful project management tool that makes getting started and managing projects both simple and easy. Regardless of size or scale, MS projects offer users the flexibility to choose methods and tools that best suit their needs. It is inexpensive, very user-friendly, and provides a decent set of reports and graphs— off the shelf. Even a casual user of MS Office with no scheduling experience can pick MS Projects and get started. Given its popularity in the construction world and the fact that many contracts are now mandating its use, it is perhaps safe to say that MS Projects is here to stay.

In a nutshell, If you are looking for a feature-packed project management tool, then look no further. Jump on the Microsoft bandwagon and let the software do the rest—while you can focus on tasks that matter.