hello everyone my name is comron akar CEO of project control Academy and the lead for project professionals Network and the Epic program as you know this year we started a series it's called Tech talk series when we invite technology leaders and Tool providers to come and talk about the technology and tools that they have the solutions that they have in my last year's kind of research and talking to technology providers I noticed there are a lot of great things going on and I was excited to brin
g these voices and these presentations to you this year and I'm great grateful for that and today we also have another great presentation by Michael Wong from out build uh let me just give you a little bit introduction about Michael and then he gets started Michael is a seasoned professional in the construction industry with a rich and diverse career spinning various roles currently he's serving as the head of customer success at outbuild uh based in California Bay Area Mike has over 14 years of
experience in the industry his expertise in compasses project management design and construction and Senior leadership roles highlighting by significant contributions to high-profile projects like Star Wars Galaxy's Edge at Disneyland I didn't know that so um great great experience there and also the new Stanford Hospital project in Paulo Alto California with a foundation in collaborative planning Michael is an evangelist of people first planning and empowerment of those who physically build th
e spaces we live work and play in every day that's why we have Michael here to talk about the subject topic that should be uh should be something of value and interest and that's Bridging the Gap between schedule and look ahead as you know in today's Dynamic con Construction in enironment the disconnect between what's planned and what's actually happening on site can derail even the most accurately scheduled projects and we are here with Michael to talk about the solution that they have and the
strategies that you can Implement in order to fill this Gap so Michael thank you very much for joining this session uh everyone please mute yourself if you don't want to talk and as I mentioned if you want to ask a question or have a discussion during this session just raise your hand and we will uh we will have you uh open to to speak so thank you very much Michael glory is yours thank you for the lovely introduction how's everybody doing looks like we got people from all over the world which i
s awesome I love uh talking to a diverse group of people again I think I mentioned before maybe some people jumped on I don't like lecturing I like having conversations I like telling stories too so this presentation will really be more of a story uh about everybody deals with no matter where you are in the world when it comes to starting and planning and executing a project so um I'm going to jump right into it um I already have a great introduction so I don't want to talk any more about myself
and then I will go ahead and share so let's make sure that sh that pops up right all right so we're going to talk about Bridging the Gap between schedule and look atad now people call it different things but schedule in this instance what I'm going to explain is really your master plan it's your contractual obligation your prime prime contract agreement that you've made with your stakeholders major Milestones phases things like that and we consider look ahead right is that more short interval i
nside of the four to six we planning window that is consistently been what's actually happening in the field but is not reflected in that larger stakeholder conversation that you have right so we want to make sure that we get those connected and outbuild has many tools that allow you to do that but again I like to tell stories so this is really about starting a new project I'm sure everybody on this call has maybe not even started one project but dozens of projects kind of all start the same way
right lots of conversations with maybe small amounts of people at the beginning you're talking about your preliminary Prime schedule you put it in RFP for your request for proposal talked about major Milestones timelines all that kind of jazz in a contract your contract gets signed you do your bid analyses right you're working with uh your upfront teams your pre-construction teams you're finding those team members and those subcontractors that are going to take this idea and turn it into someth
ing physical and then you get them signed up you're excited to mobilize the site honeymoons right honeymoon state is what we call it sunshine and rainbows people are excited new project different team um you put a huge amount of effort into resource loading this one we want this one to be different we want this one to to have morale all the way through everyone's going to be really happy to collaborate everyone's GNA be super excited to come to the job site right um then what happens we all know
what happens stuff kind of shifts there's an idea you're bringing schedule information into the the team and because of the contract you signed or because of the level of detail You' brought at the beginning uh you're doing something that this guy who we all know has said on multiple occasions why do we do this right when you bring in a rockstar set of subs and I've been I mean all these hard hats behind me right I've been part of different teams and different positions I've been one of those r
ockstar Subs I've been the owner that brought in I've been always surprised that my leadership or the stakeholders are people that that really Drive construction at the the top top of the Ivory Tower right they still drive that we are telling everybody who's hired in this project what to do we're bringing a schedule in we're taking their expertise and we're lowering their potential in terms of what they're able to actually produce for us because of what we're actually driving as tools for them t
o use right we don't want to do that we're handing I mean depending on the size of the project that you're on right you're handing millions of dollars to a group of professionals that have been doing this longer than you you might have more General experience across a project or across a different type of building but that specific trade that you're handing that million-dollar contract to is the expert that's what they hiring them to do so you shouldn't be telling them what to do right you shoul
d be having them tell you what to do and I know that all these people that I worked with here mostly the superintendents the second day here wait hold on you're going to have contractors come on their job and tell us how to build the building not necessarily you still have lot Milestones you're still G to have scope and and things that you can drive to fruition but you're you're expecting that those teams that have that expertise bring that expertise to the table and I'll show you how that works
right we've all seen one of these I like just having this scroll as I'm as I'm talking here right this is a pretty typical six level detail schedule single trade based goes down to single day logic um it's a CPM nightmare basically right it's logical in a sense it's it's connected mathematically it follows the CPM principles you can follow critical path all the way through it but is it practical are these tools that we're using to produce and try to predict the future and expect Perfection are
they actually practical I've been on so many projects I've never seen this actually be practical as a useful tool yes your litigation team your lawyers the people that you know cover you from claims which unfortunately is a very real part of construction they love this because it holds people accountable to the day to the date to the whatever you're driving towards but it completely kneecaps everything you're trying to set up on a job from the beginning you're hiring the best of the best and the
n you're not really giving them a chance to be the best you're giving them something that five people came up with two years ago and expecting them to make this work even though five years ago this project or two years ago right this project was totally different there's a whole different set of constraints whole different variables that we never sort of could have forecasted right WEA Global pandemics I can name a dozen and they could all always change right why are we expecting teams to adhere
to something that they weren't a part of one and um not how they do business they know how to build right we should be flipping this around as the the necessary nonv value of a project we should be flipping this around so that we're providing a tool that lets them live to their full potential to live up to everything that they can bring to a project right stop doing this we need to stop doing this it's a very large poke at everybody and disrupt the industry and that's why we exist as a company
that's why I love my job so much is that I I don't like doing this to teams that don't deserve it I don't like doing this to teams that are spectacular Builders yet they are adhered and expected of with things like this right we Embrace change we know it's coming right it's it's the most consistent taxes change it's it's it's coming we're not going to avoid it a tool like this doesn't allow you to change it doesn't allow you to adapt doesn't allow you to be as as fast and adaptable and as agile
as the field teams know to be the people that are building the building know how to be this thing can't keep up with it that's why they're always disjointed that's why I'm speaking about Bridging the Gap between the two because they have been consistently disconnected so fortifying training really embracing and preparing a team for change because we know it's coming right I worked with a team this is not long ago actually so they're literally out on the Hawai Islands so they're already faced wit
h constraints that you know maybe some of the people on this call have never seen before terms of procurement terms of actually getting proper lead times and knowing where stuff is coming especially post postco procurement times have just blown out the window like you don't know if something's shown up or not so they had about a thousand Line schedule followed about the same structure as the one I was showing before and I got them to this in about four hours this looks crazy right this is a 50 l
ine item schedule it took a thousand line items and we built a 50 line item schedule off of it this is possible 100% possible it's just depending on your drive to change your drive to actually forecast and really embrace the idea that I need to make a tool that is for the field to do their best work not for my lawyers to cover my butt at the beginning of a job when it hasn't even gone South yet it's like bringing a prenuptual agreement to your first date with your significant other let's try to
make this this successful before it's a failure instead of making it a failure from the beginning right this is possible our tool allows you to do this we have different levels of planning which I'm going to walk through and show everybody that allows you to have a higher level of phase and Milestone driven planning and expectation set where you can get into those details that is adaptable and agile enough and keeps up with the field team basically what they're doing with Excel nowadays and then
you don't have to worry about if the two are connected they talk to each other all the time one technology stack that goes all the way down to weekly planning you're looking for scopes of work here right you're looking for obvious Milestones or phases this is you know built off of a poor plan right so there's a this is like a four four story building good size good uh good amount of scope and we followed the structural teams plan for how they were going to pour the basements and the the parking
garage and all this this scope of work and we started compartment alizing those pieces to follow those those crew flows that ta plan kind of in a sense and then we built through the exteriors we built through the Interiors we built through anything else that we knew was going to drive critical path and we connected those logically that's where the the logic is driven that's where you can still follow that CPM method still hold people accountable still see how dates are slipping or adjusting but
it's at a much higher level because you're not expecting Perfection from the start of the job you want to have the right level of detail at the right time if you're getting closer to the work that's when you use the look Ahad tool and you really refine how that work work that that work is really going to be laid out so a couple things I've already said right you want to make sure that you have that conversation with your ownership and if you're lucky enough that you are ownership or you you hav
e an owner that's maybe more on board with this because they understand it too it's a lot better than seeing that 3,000 4,000 line item Behemoth that they're used to getting print outs of where they can't they can't really see what's happening you want to have that conversation at front hey we're going to try something different consistently on all my projects my field team suffer because I have to use this ridiculous Prime contract schedule that doesn't help anybody and is already it's causing
us to have a claim at the end of the job so really it's a tool to to save you from claim but it's causing you claim it's it's totally backwards doesn't make any sense to a lot of teams that have been trying to correct this this nut for a long time right um we're talking about workflow of the project we want to understand where we're starting which way we're going what obviously need to get built first for other things uh location based could be location based it could be trade based too dependin
g on what makes the most sense with your project and your scope uh your site constraints if you have a Access Road only on one side of your project you're most likely going to start with that exterior until the rest of the project opens up whatever that constraint may be maybe you have to get a crane area out of there first so you got to build everything else and then the cranes last right that those are logical steps in terms of building a master schedule like this and then TR handoffs again th
is tool this level of planning is set up and focused so that those rockstar Subs that you signed up and are handing millions of dollars to have everything they need every tool they need to succeed on the project use drawings right every you know everyone's got print outs of drawings in their planning rooms you should have as many as you can possibly fit on the walls use your models we are blessed with the fact that we don't have to look at stuff in 2D we don't look at stuff that's handdrawn anym
ore there's augmented goggles you can put on your face and actually stand in the space right try to try to find a way that you can get those rockstar players to be able to feel comfortable flying a model or somebody that can fly a model for them so that it's an it's an overall spatial conversation it's not just looking at drawings and possibly missing how we can make this schedule or master schedule even better and involve them bring them into it every people every person I've ever trained right
and every every time that I've been a part of an ownership or GC position we have a huge struggle with Rel reliable commitment and it starts again with they weren't part of that schedule build yet they're expected to adhere to it flip that around make them do their job right you guys are the experts I have a date that I need to hit because of our overall projects project length I want high quality I want te good teamwork I want under schedule or under budget and I want ahead of schedule that's
what we should all strive for as a team how's the best way to do that right how do we get to that point as a team this is our look ahead tool this is the answer that we're trying to solve to that solution right or we're trying to create for that solution it is not logically tied you have two levels here and I didn't show the first level but it looks just like that print out right you have this top level which is that 50 line item schedule I was talking about this is that second level down this i
s where the rubber hits the road this is where your teams because we're cloud-based and we are not Project based in terms of our pricing model or sorry not user based in in terms of our pricing model you could have 100 people in this helping you plan this at once you should have a 100 people in this helping you plan this at once whoever's got the most relevant information should be a part of this plan they should be making tasks for themselves they should be holding themselves accountable for th
eir their piece of each one of these puzzles right each one of these major sections here you can see you can choose a certain week interval to look out and then you can actually pick those parts of the schedule and out build will focus and refine everything that you want to focus on those pieces and gives you the platform to start building out those plants without the complication of logic TI without the headache of having a dozen people into one Microsoft Project file right or one P6 file it's
all in the cloud and it all can handle people getting in there and adding their pieces of the puzzle we have full user permission control you're not link ising any power you're not worried about how if I have a sub that comes in and puts in a bunch of tasks how is that going to affect my master schedule is it just going to change things really really nearly no not at all there's a process called modification request really the look ahead module is is the is the place where people can put the pla
n in and then those plan administrators the people that know more about critical path or more about the grand scale of the project they can approve or deny those changes and that again that is all logged into this single technology stack of a platform and there'll be lots of questions on this so I'm looking forward to at the end of this when I can stop talking you guys can start talking too so um point and click right point and click on what actually you want to plan you go in you build this pla
n super easy drag and drop move stuff up and down again no sort of logic constraint the logic lives at the master schedule and you can break that down as much as you need to but this is built to be free and adaptable for all the teams that need to use it little side by-side comparison we like to show this is actually on a YouTube channel this is somebody building this exact same thing in Excel and then somebody you building in an outbuild and you already see right off the betat we're way ahead y
ou're gonna come in with a difficulty of you know I I hear the the contention all the time hey my teams will never get in and actually start building this right it's it's intimidating it's a software tool they're already using Excel and they're using it in a very slow archaic way because again Excel is the best thing and the worst thing that's ever happened to modern society you can do so much with Excel but it's so limited in the in the other sense of the word right it's fragmented it anything
that changes on that doesn't flow into anything else that you're using outu is much faster it's connected in one single technology stack and it's built specifically for doing this Excel is not built for this we were able to do this in four minutes right put in a good plan this video continues for a long time and we're still working through how to do all the formatting and making your weeks and all this other stuff with Excel just in that sense at all and saying you're one of your most expensive
and highly skilled competent employees on the job site your superintendent your people that are driving work they don't have to do this for four hours a week they can do it in 20 minutes or even five minutes if it's if it's a consistent build that you can just copy and paste f ah heads over we have tools that allow you to do that too all focused on making those rockstar team players as rock star as they possibly can be right it goes to the field too that's my favorite part is that their barrier
of Entry is not a laptop they're on the run I that that hard hat and this hard hat I was subcontractor and I was actually a project manager that was basically absorbing as much as I could from my general superintendants and I was literally running after them it was normal pace for them to walk but I was running after them because I had to keep up with everything that they're giving me in a notebook and then I take that notebook back and try to process everything they deal with every day these ar
e the types of tools we want to provide so that they can make those changes on the Fly they can track constraints on the Fly they can absolutely back check and feed that information back into the system so that they can make insightful changes on a higher scale again you track progress on this you go and you check in with a trade specifically on this those changes you had internet connection straight to the cloud everybody sees it can be approved or denied it's one technology stack lots of tools
that allow you to do this this was yesterday in Denver I live in San Jose California but this was yesterday in Denver there's teams doing this actively doing this and they love it they love the fact that they're actually able to hold their subcontractor teams accountable for what they're signed up to do they took their master schedule they condensed it they drove to the Milestones that they want to make sure gets executed on a project and then they held their teams accountable to get getting th
em there and what this subcontractor does is they actually stand back and be like what do you need to get your job done this is my main job as a general contractor not to tell you what to do you're supposed to tell me what needs to get done and what's in your way and I am going to take care of that that is my job I'm not value ad here right I am necessary nonv value you are the value ad how do we make you more value and the teams are buying into it we have lots of different tools that allow you
to see data in terms of plan percent complete who's actually meeting their goals who's actually planning their goals correctly and it's a it's a slow turn right because a lot of people are this is new holy holy moly the subcontractor team is being listened to uh we usually just talk about this behind your backs out in the field about how screwed up this plan is now we can actually talk about this plan with you and it's in a tool that's yes Technology based but it's pretty easy I can understand i
t pretty quickly I have the customer success team at outfi to help train me on it all right let's try this thing and these teams are seeing success these are all plans from from different projects right where they're going in and they're taking that level of detail that was consistently given to one person on a laptop somewhere else totally disconnected from the field and they're making their plans they're creating their own commitments they're being a part of this planning effort and if that ha
ppens if you get buying at that level then reliable commitment skyrockets because it's not someone else's plan that they're just being told to do is their plan like hey we've been talking about this for four weeks you told me you needed three days with this we had a RFI that I resolve for you you can't call me tomorrow or Monday morning and be like hey we can't do this this is your plan we've been talking about this for three weeks what happened obviously something could come up but it's more of
a mutual conversation about that work right it's not I told you you're going to do this on Monday three weeks ago I know you didn't give any buy into this but why isn't it done right that's the wrong way to think about it again you're doing their job for them and you're really just burning out your your highly competent and and highest paid employees and they're just going to leave the job because all the subcontractors aren't doing their job I hate telling people what to do and nothing gets do
ne it's very backwards in the way that it's set up right so lots of different teams doing this um one of the biggest things though to that I like to really really talk about the most and one of the biggest things I think we bring to the construction industry is constraint tracking I like quotes I don't know if you guys have caught this yet this guy likes throwing punches like getting hit with punches right we get all this planning right oh great we got a planning tool perfect awesome what happen
s when something changes what happens when that thing that you didn't see coming comes in and totally screws up your plan you don't have to just sit and take the punch don't don't just wait for that to happen forecast it again in our tool in the very beginning part of our plan here you can already start tracking roadblocks and I actually show this in a different a different slide as well too but Mr Tyson here giving you the heads up like hey there's punches coming we know there's changes happeni
ng why are we waiting for them to happen again leverage that team that you're paying lots of money to because they're experts in their field leverage them to do that planning for you to be that Advanced Recon team of hey we GNA need a drawing we're inspection the city still hasn't approved this the architect still hasn't approved this uh the 17 gang boxes are in the way you could be looking weeks and weeks in advance too because again we are separate but connected they have access to anything th
at's coming in the next six eight weeks even Beyond and they can start talking about what's in their way and that's what you push as Behavior right we've all seen these These are terrible they're great but they're terrible because they're not connected to anything it's on a wall in a TR trailer somewhere it's great that this information is getting captured but it's not being captured in the right place it's not being put where you need it right it needs to be connected to the plan and the way we
do that right this is the roadblock module in out build and same kind of process right you're planning out you pick your master plan detail you plan out all your different steps of that task you make your to-do list and then once you get to the point of you know resequencing and getting your stuff done you can really start hammering into what the actual road blocks are going to be for those tasks you can see like this Tas this is the today line now now we're looking at something that's three or
four weeks out and we can hit that construction cone right here and it it brings up a whole different module it's on the iPad same button that you can see on the iPad and you can actually start vetting out information that you know it's the punch that's coming you know this punch is coming so avoid it right or try to try to resolve it and then the other thing we do as well is because again one technology stack we have have access to all this data that's being input by those teams that know how
to do the work they know what's coming or they have a very good idea of what's coming better than we do it puts it in a nice clean constraint log that you can track your open punches or your removed punches uh you can hold people accountable for it you can absolutely have a trending column is actually something we added from user requests that shows how many days do I have left until this is actually going to affect my plan for for what my teams have said or which which specific passs are going
to affect this you can have multiple as well and then even if any of the teams on online here one of the first uh teams that really started integrating with a lot is procore any new RFI that's written in procore after you connect your out build schedule to procore starts bringing in new rfis so it's already giving you a heads up hey someone might be swinging at this punch here this punch might be coming make sure you're on on top of if this RFI is going to affect any of your plan and it's just p
oint and click which tasks of the plan are going to be affected and what's great since it is bilateral and connected to procore that RFI or that constraint is removed in procore it's removed moved into the removed plan here on your constraint log so again all sorts of tools that allow you to really Dodge and weave those punches instead of just taking them and having the the plan really be affected by it we love getting out to the field too we love it that's where we have all come from I mean I h
ave 14 years of construction experience a lot of the people part of our company we'd rather we don't have an office we're a fully remote company we'd rather be out in the fields working with teams I work down in the trenches with all of these people that um are dealing with these problems every day and learning more about it again we're not a Oracle we're not a Microsoft we are a band of construction professionals that just got tired of seeing this stuff happen and we decided to make a change an
d try to disrupt how this has been done we love training this is part of packages too if you sign up for course us we love coming out doing training learning from you throwing ideas at you it's more of a partnership than an actual contract that you signning with us this is the team in Hawaii I was working with too subcontractor team print out look ahe heads talking about their plan all in one place um this is actually in Santiago Chile so we're all over um a lot of teams in in Latin America team
s in Canada we got teams in Australia um all over the world now and it's growing quickly so uh it's not just a singular idea this is not just a problem that is faced to a specific place this is universal problem that really needs to be addressed in construction and the numbers are showing so our active projects have been consistently growing I've been in this company for two years we didn't have very many us this is just us based too by the way or or centered on US based so we didn't have very m
any us-based projects that we were really focused on um we were just getting started trying to understand we have this great idea has worked well in Latin America is it going to directly translate to what's happening in the US or anywhere else in the world it does these charts are all up and to the right that's what you want to see when you're trying to start a new idea or disrupt an industry so about halfway through I want to show these last couple slides too this is a more of a deep dive into
to this hard hat here the cool the cool looking one from Disney um that was my probably one of my most eye-opening experiences terms of collaborative planning from the very beginning very top of the food chain at at Disney um they wanted to make sure that this was a very collaborative project but unfortunately the tools they were using at the time out didn't exist there were tools like been 360 plan some things that really kind of constrained how we were talking and how we were collaborating wit
h each other so this will be a direct comparison of of what I've seen what I really learned the most in my three years at Disney um planning this work and really understanding how we could have improved if we had more of Technology based or or quicker adaptable tools than the very low Fidelity I'll show you that we had so this was a general process here right you had three different phases and then there was an executive reporting and a bunch of stuff that was fed out for making larger decisions
but you had your big rooms you had your field boards and you had your project hubs each one of these align very closely to all the different stages of out build as well right you got your master planning you're figuring out what's coming into your cycle and you're figuring out how to refine that and how do you actually execute it and then you're learning from it throughout the process so stickies in wall it's all we had we would put everything in Excel that would get processed down and had to b
e post-produced by a dozen different people to get it put in the right place and formatted correctly and emailed to everybody it was a nightmare just to get you know three four hours worth of work that we had done in face planning out to everybody memorialized and captured somehow out build on the right hand side does that a little differently right it's all cloud-based it's intuitive you can drag and drop you can drag and drop dependencies you can copy scope we do have an upload feature I like
mentioning that at the end of my presentation we have an upload feature but like I said from the beginning there don't upload the 1500 line on schedule and expect it to work in out build because it's not going to we we're not set up that way you're going to negate basically all the other levels and and all the other value ad that you have in out build start with schedule basically at its barebones what are your major Milestones what are your major phases you can always refine from there and add
back as much as you need to but break down the process until it doesn't work anymore and then just start adding back from there this was our look ahead planning we had three rooms every day 5 am planning meetings checking in Daily check-ins it was a nightmare You' open the trailer door or you open the door just to the right of this this room and all those stickies would blow off the wall sometimes and it was a mess to try to put everything back and these boards had to get shifted we had differen
t swim Lanes we had I think it was like 1400 people on the site right and every now and again you have a shift of entire Crews that have to come in in different rooms it was a Monumental effort to get physical stickies written explained put on a wall and executed on and that was incredibly beneficial for the project because we were able to be super adapted it is low Fidelity people are intimidated by a Sharpie and a it shouldn't be some people were but uh less people were intimidated by a Sharpi
e in a wall than maybe a computer software or being afraid of I'm not really a scheduler you know how to build so we need your build knowledge I don't need your scheduling knowledge I'm glad you don't have scheduling knowledge because that's just going to slow you down I want to know how you want to build this and this is how you uh you know communicate that out to everybody then this plan on the right is the outu look Ahad that we've kind of Ted talked about already that connects all that stuff
into um the one technology stack that's connected to the master plan and then I even talked about this but we have that third level down that's that's actually weekly work planning so you've done all your work you've refined the plan you've connected it to your master plan activities now you want to hold people accountable to that really good working planning effort that you've had for the last three to four weeks this is the week you're in this is the week that is about to start and you commit
to it we were doing this with paper and Excel actually out on the field tracking constraints and whatnot but you can see you can commit to specific scopes of work you track progress here and then at the end of the job or actually end of the week you close and you can actually start seeing realtime data that we used to do with stickies and Sharpies little stickers and Sharpies and Maps but we track this with PPC charts we track this with PR charts which is your ability to remove constraints that
have been forecasted we give you pie charts that show you your variants like where what is the consistent issue is it is it labor is it the owner change orders is it weather which one is driving your your up or down PPC right you can track track multiple stages um this is really just a first generation we have so many so many aspirations on how we can make this better executive dashboards that show full company profiles that show every project uh having these more refined to show specific subco
ntractor data and how that can be used to help that your Rockstar players make them even more Rockstar um a long shot I mean this was only five years ago that was on this project and these tools like this are evolving people are using powerbi to feed stuff into it I'm sure lots of people on this call probably have used powerbi or Tableau we had this on Disney but the base level data entry was difficult to make sure one that it was good data and then just to capture it by the time you captured it
we were already in the next phase and that data didn't really help us anymore it's got to to be really quick it's got to be really clean it's got to be really concise and having one technology stack where you're having lots of teams collaborate and put this data in from the Grassroots from their brains straight into the computer that is how you're going to find the best data and make the most insightful decisions I love this quote I actually just heard this actually in the last couple days the
beatings will continue until team morale improves that's not a good way to run a project and unfortunately a lot of people that run projects now that's all I've been taught I mean lead by fear fear gets results why do I want to walk away from Fear when um yelling at people get things done but only gets done as as far as you can yell it's only as far as things get done right so this is a subtle difference between these two pictures but um we're going to open up to questions here in a bit as well
but I was wondering if anybody could catch what the difference is to this and I'll give you guys a hint it's got something to do with the chairs and the tables something to do with with kind of the energy in these two different rooms right that energy on the left hand side is what we're trying to capture we're trying to capture this is this is a superintendent this was my job as support none of these guys were General Contractors none of these guys had anything to do with support team these were
the workers these were the actual field teams in foren that were driving that work and look what they're doing they're collaborating they're working this is what excites me when I see because we're able to build a trusting open environment anybody can come in with good ideas and put them on the board and say hey let's try this let's try over here hey we we dealt with this there a real pain in the butt in this other building I think if we try this this will be better that's how you do it right t
here the team on the right they're still very effective but it's still a lot of onus on the general contractor it's still a lot of effort for the general contractor to go around and capture everybody's stuff put it on the board and then just people kind of Nod yep I did tell you that uhhuh don't do that you're doing their job stop doing their job make them do their job aim for the left not for the right of this breakdown right that's my presentation in terms of my general aspect of of out build
hopefully you learn a little bit more about us I know I left a lot of stuff um open for discussion happy to answer questions now as well um but I do employ if anybody's more interested um send me an email we can get you connected to any of our our team members give you demos um hopefully you work through the whole process here I get out there and train you wherever you are in the world and we can we can further this conversation and build our our community that all believes in what we're doing s
o thank you very much for your time uh I leave it open for questions now great thank you very much uh Mike maybe you unshare the screen or stop sharing yep uh we open these two questions there are some questions already uh in the chat box uh let me just go there okay so John you have a question maybe you can ask that if you are here that would be maybe better because John is is one of those Master scheduling absolutely so different I mean big projects so he has a question and that's his kind of
passion area so John I I'd like to to you to ask yourself yeah I have a can you hear me now yeah yeah yeah um uh I'm uh working at U big uh pharmaceutical uh production uh buildings um and that is both utility buildings and production buildings uh for no nordish um and um one of my problem is that I'm working in the MEP area so I have all the technical uh disciplines uh H rack uh cooling water electrical all the security and everything uh and one of my problems is that when we are working with o
ur civil contractors uh they are using exactly the same method that you are describing but I see when we come to the MEP area um where we are having so many different piping and uh wiring that has to be uh yeah put up at at a a certain um or or order otherwise we simply can't put put them in it is huge uh rast fry ESS steel tubes 3 400 MM and so on uh and here is uh the issue that if we are coming out out of syn uh then it has a huge effect on on the the schedule and uh my experience is that whe
n it is construction people running those uh uh I meetings that you are showing um I have an experience that they are not uh using the schedule so that they can see the how things are in interacting so um uh I I totally agree that uh we need those building meeting to to to see what is U has to to be done on the short term but I need some more focus on the scheduling part of it and it is totally lacking in many of our projects yeah I mean answer thank you for your question by the way John and the
n not a unique problem very much a big problem I've I've U I've done enough Hospital work too that you know every every Corridor you open up in a hospital in a major Hospital anywhere there's so much stuff in every square inch that you're you're putting in a ton of effort to try to we call it lasagna planning in a sense that there's so many different layers that have to go in at the right time that that even uh accelerates a need for a tool where all those people are consistently talking to each
other and any of those changes are seen processed rapidly rapidly replanned as fast as possible because the more days that you're waiting right the more days that the plan is affected so it really it really again starts with how refined do you need to make an area maybe if it's if it's a processing MEP area that's got tons and tons of of coordination really highlight those heavily heavily heavily uh trafficked areas the ones that have a really really tight coordination and make that an appropri
ate size that you're not your schedules your sub schedules of that aren't too complicated right aren't too crazy to try to have those field teams really feed information into and again that I'm uh starting on fixating on the process for each system and then saying which location are we having are they located uh and then we put the order inflation order on on that level um so it is a complex schedule but we are down to to systems and locations MH and also for the whole commissioning part uh we'r
e also having that in in the schedule very very detailed but uh the most important is that it is the project managers that has said uh what they want in the the schedule I totally agree that it is those experts that should do the but we need to be much more uh yeah disciplined in the me area yeah no I completely agree it's um I mean I was in drywall for a long time too Framing and and I always say those are the ones that everything passes through but your MEP trades are are really your densest I
think absolutely because shafts and your ceilings and all these areas that have these me systems that have to work together they have certain requirements they have to be certain distances all this stuff it is a it is a especially difficult area to refund and it's great to hear you're doing location based and you guys are breaking down those areas that you need the most focused to but I I you know what I've I've seen consistently is certain project managers could be better versed at scheduling
tools than others it should be something that is very low barrier of Entry bars and dragging and dropping and adjusting and doing it on an iPad or doing it on a computer so that um those people those experts can bring that data quickly to you right and I'm sure what scheduling software are you guys using we're using P6 right and uh even some of our uh project managers they are doing their own scheduling right yeah exactly so if they're not comfortable in P6 again the P6 and Microsoft projects th
ey have I mean I think Microsoft Project has 250 buttons or something just on the front screen and at the top ribbon and when I was in Microsoft Project I used maybe four of them consistently so again it's it's that problem you deal with right with uh P6 is incredibly powerful you can do so many things with P6 but what parts of P6 really get you the most value right what is that 20% that gets you the 80% of the work done um we've taken all those and we are we we consistently take feedback and re
build and re and readjust how we're doing things so that those tools that you're seeing as most value add gets put into our system and part of how we're planning as well too so it's really about I mean you got some Rockstar competent people that know how to do these things except the tools are being handed are they're difficult to manage so thank you for your question John appreciate it thanks John for the question and thanks Michael for the answer uh I think the next question is more related to
that you be mentioned about Prim Vera and Microsoft Project so Caron is asking one what is the name of the product so we know it's out buil that's that's the name of this platform now the question is uh how is it connect how does it connect to other platforms like Prima I think this could be a standalone right it doesn't require Prima or Microsoft Project or things like that to get data in right absolutely yeah so I I mentioned there is an upload tool so we do caution that first schedule that I
showed that was just endlessly scrolling is a is a P6 schedule that we've loaded it can read P6 schedule files it can read Microsoft Project files and get you to a point where you can see your data in our system and process it in our system but again you got to remember that we are a different way of planning we're a different level broken down system and if you load a schedule there's not an easy way to take a 2009 item schedule and make it work as an out build schedule so definitely you can b
ring in your tools you can summarize actually worked with a lot of P6 teams that are very used to using P6 in Microsoft Project and we brought in the summary tasks we brought in the chunks and Milestones that they've seen in their templates or they already have made in a prime schedule brought that into the system and then started using the look ahead with all their data that they had V6 and there's not there's not a straight direct way to plug it in because there's a lot of still conversation a
bout those driving factors that I talked about of crew flow what's ready for work where's where do we have access understanding that instead of a really mathematically based in a lot of sense sometimes those P6 schedules are really based off of CPM principle and and math of like what could be possibly done as you're getting closer to a project because those P schedules they take forever to build too they got to validate weeks and weeks to validate as you get closer to actually doing that work th
at's when you really kind of activate a phase and say okay I'm three months out or two months out let's activate this phase in a sense let's put it into our look Ahad and build and let's start really refining those details I I always tell people don't see a 50 Line itm schedule and assume that all that detail is gone we just threw it out absolutely not we're taking your P6 data that you've already used and we are engaging it at the right time at the right level of planning so that your tools can
your teams can actually use those tools they use that effort that you put in and and um spend all that time betting and what you know is a validated duration for these tasks don't get rid of that data that data is gold for sure but use it at the right time Don't Force It at the beginning as a as a as a attempt to be perfect from the beginning because we know those plans are going to change and there's lots of really easy tools to to actually copy and paste and move that data all through your ou
t build schedule again keeping up with how things are actually getting built yeah I think here I think the idea is to for Shifting the mindset and providing alternative ways of doing things um that could be easy for many people to use so sometimes we are just a stock with Prim Vera and we sometimes we think okay is there any way out is there anything simpler is there something that we can and I think today's presentation is more about yes there is possibility and also we have to kind of have som
e sort of shift in our mindset about these things um so now Michael one question is you showed like the first thing you showed there was a lot of line items and then you showed the other one that out build show like 50 60 line items so how do you go after this like is it a team effort before the project starts to reduce that 2 56 line items um how does I didn't I didn't get that when when you took us through the example yeah how does that work comparing the like very large schedule with lots of
line items versus the out build yeah so so getting to and this is that was a very aggressive um and I'm pushing this team to be aggressive because they have great potential to be able to drive a 50 60 line item schedule not every team is going to be able to do that I understand that again that first question was what is your expectation that's set from your owner your your key stakeholders they want to see certain Milestone dates hopefully not everybody can can avoid going into three four levels
of detail but hopefully there is some dialogue you can have with that team that's expecting that monthly schedule update about I have all this data we validated this schedule and got a pretty good idea what all these durations are going to be with the data we had at hand I am going to step back out capture that data as phases now and mileston that I'm still holding ourselves accountable to I'm still committing to this dry date I'm still committing to this coo date whatever whatever those major
Milestones are but I'm backing out that data and I'm saving it for when I know that we're going to be working more on that area that phase because I don't want to you know clog the works or really just drown my team with too much information we still have that information it's ready to go whenever we need to put it in there but when we put it in we're actually if it's something that's happening a year later I get a Year's worth of data I get a Year's worth of learning that I can actually take wh
at we assumed was going to be the the plan and really make it the plan and input it and to answer your question too it's it's not an easy it's not an easy this is how you do it it's it's very much people focused every job's got different constraints every job's got different owner requirements every job's got different crew flows or sizes or tacted tacted areas and units of work right it's a lot of understanding what we could possibly start with and I always push people to say break the system d
own until it doesn't work take as much out as you possibly can until someone says okay that's too much we got to put something back in right and that's kind of your your barometer always say general rule of thumb if it's single trade or inside of maybe two or three weeks always try to push that into look Ahad any of that data put it in the look at so go to like a corridor phase that has all this me in it don't go to single trade me and talk about a five-day activity on your master schedule that
is what look ahead's made for right make it Corridor a and floor three of Building B that is your chunk and leave it at that chunk right connect to a milestone have your logic flow through it but everything else that's inside of three or four weeks of duration or even two weeks of duration and is a single trade activity it doesn't have any handoff in it put that in look at okay because that's where the the agile and adaptable part comes in oh that that's great so that's now I got how how the app
roaches that's really great there is a question from Ernesto are you able to save different versions of this schedule is it manual or automatic or do you have a history feature to view the changes yep absolutely abolutely so we have what we call baselines so you can have a master schedule so that 50 Line schedule that I showed you can set a baseline at any time we have unlimited number of basis lines you can set it's basically just a timestamp of what that schedule looked like and then it's just
a dialogue with a list that you can turn those different basis lines on and off and it will always reference to your current schedule and actually show you change in days of behead ahead or behind and that is so master plan right now since it is cloudbased is an active save you do have to make sure any changes you make you hit the save button the system does warn you if you're moving to a different module or tab hey make sure you save this before you you jump to a different thing but that that'
s an active save and then a baseline is an active active button push as well to be like okay maybe it's the once a month update maybe it's the once a week meeting you have you just want to capture those timelines the more the area really you could save every day if you really wanted to doesn't doesn't limit you to how many and then uh you always have those points in time to go back to very good thank you and one more question here I see I don't know a comment or question shik Ahmed ahmedin out b
uild are actually redefining the look ahead planning and aligning with Baseline schedule can the actuals be recorded in out bu software and transfer by to scheduling software yeah so we do have uh again like I said the Baseline is your planned whatever you're baselining right and then your real schedule when you're progressing it the second you put progress into out build it'll lock those dates and it'll basically actualize what happened in the field for you and then you can see the difference b
etween whatever Baseline you want to reference to what that actualized data is and it will always save that that logged information and then again that the talking I didn't show you guys modification requests but talking between changes that are happening look ahead and you know things that you want to make sure get captured in the master plan modification requests are all logged as well and we're constantly improving that tool on how to report out on that data so you can can see charts and you
can definitely see how you know these specific changes have affect your schedule that's all tools we we also provide very good thank you very much Michael anyone has any other questions Michael how can people reach out I think you provided your email someone wants to have a demo they should reach out to you or the team and Al is there any possibility for people to try it out yes so out.com literally it's just a doom out.com um there are a bunch of different buttons on there that you can see some
of the stuff we're providing there's a demo button we do provide a 30-day demo with a conversation with our our account Executives um I get I'm through the other end of it after you sign contract you get to talk talk with me and work with me in the training and implementation part of it and our CS team but uh yes absolutely we we love having people try it bring as many of your colleagues and peers in as well to try it because you know it's not an easy thing to just adjust to it takes uh it take
s some effort to really to to try to rethink how can we do this a different way a better way an Innovative way can't just keep doing what's what's been done in the past right because you're gonna get the same result so very good very good presentation Michael you can see also the comments about presentation style that you had the storytelling one last thing I wanted to ask is Disney still using the same method so so they this was ilpd so Disney definitely um they love they love experimenting rig
ht they love just trying new stuff and they definitely have and whing Turner actually was the main general contractor that has changed a lot of the culture of planning and weding Turner is is what we learned on that job and really putting onus on I'm hiring a really smart subcontractor team how do I make them as as proficient and as competent as possible I don't want to be tell them what to do for the life of the job right they need to be telling me what to do what I need to get out of the way f
or them so that they can do their job right and that that's really changed a lot of planning efforts both in Disney and whing Turner so yeah uh it's been uh it's been cool to see that kind of grow from an experience I was a part of great thanks a lot everyone for attending this session thanks also Michael you mentioned that kudos to Academy for this program great that glad that you you guys like it it's it's been great turnout as as well with about 50 60 people I saw at the most so very good the
re and we are recording this session but the recording won't be available to PPN uh Community it would be available just to the Epic uh epic program members so if you want to know how we can get access to the recording let us know thanks again Michael for this session everyone see you next month with another Tik Tok session that we will have thanks a lot and have a great day everyone thank you everybody bye
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