Building owners are demanding a more efficient project delivery process. They want higher quality, lower cost, and shorter schedules. How can better communication help to bring that about? Of all the applications of the Internet in the design professions, none has more wide-ranging significance than Web-based project management. It offers the potential to establish a seamless flow of project based information from player to player, over a project’s entire life cycle. Better access to information means learning from mistakes and not repeating them in the next project.

Coordination is the project manager’s toughest task—and lack of coordination, the biggest source of problems. A system that shortens and clarifies the connections between pieces of information is certain to reduce mistakes and delays. The problems of coordination are multiplied under fast-track construction. In the traditional design-bid-build project delivery cycle, there is at least a single moment prior to construction when the entire project is “complete” and theoretically fully coordinated. With fast-track, because design and construction are occurring simultaneously, architects must foresee how a construction change could affect an aspect of the project that has not yet been designed or how a design change could be precluded by something that has already been built. Fast-track construction clearly demands better communication between designer and builder than the traditional sequential process does.

A typical project presents two sets of coordination issues with which managers must contend: organizational, across disciplines, and temporal, across phases of a project, from programming to design, construction, and facilities management.

San Francisco-based McCall Design Group used open-source Zope to create a Design Portal for project management

One aspect of coordination that presents both organizational and temporal issues is change notification. Tracking the history of even minor changes to a design is critical to successful project management. For example, suppose an architect must design doors wide enough to accommodate equipment that will be moved into and out of a room. During the programming phase, detailed information about this equipment is given to the architect, who designs accordingly. Two years later, during construction, someone within the client organization orders new, wider, equipment that does not fit through the doors the architects specified. The new building now has to be remodeled, before it is even completed, because no system of change notification was in place. Keeping track of who changed what, and why, is something that current systems don’t do well. With so many players within different organizations working on a project, how can you ensure that when one makes a change, all the others who are affected are notified, and no
one else?

In addition to documenting changes, adequate coordination also requires documenting the intent behind project decisions. Keeping a record of intentions can facilitate the resolution of disputes and prevent misunderstandings. Moreover, a complete project file that maintains a history of why decisions were made, not just when and by whom, can be extremely useful in the design of future projects. Managers recognize that not all design decisions are made during the design phase of a project; many decisions are in fact made in the field during construction. Systems to capture such on-the-fly or out-of-sequence decision making are needed.

Role tracking is another aspect of coordination that can be supported by better communication. Any large-scale project involves hundreds of people, thousands of decisions, and huge volumes of information. As the project progresses, participants’ roles and responsibilities with respect to project information change. Clearly defining roles as they evolve over time in a multiplayer environment is one of the great challenges of project management.

So far, information technology seems only to have increased information overload for project managers. When copying is so easy that everyone on a project team receives every memo and letter, who canpossibly read it all? How can you filter out the important messages from the dross? Sometimes many more people than necessary are informed of every change in a project, as the notifier attempts to build a paper trail. The result is that almost everyone is overwhelmed with irrelevant messages, making it easy to miss the few that really count. Michael J. Bocchicchio, who is responsible for managing billions of dollars of construction projects for the University of California, complains that project chatter is more distracting than ever: “The net result is I don’t have time for this stuff and throw it all away. Communication is short-circuited.”

All of these issues—change notification, documentation of intent, role definition, and information filtering—can be managed more effectively with the Internet. Two broad approaches have been proposed for managing the integration of project data: Electronic Document Management (EDM) and the shared project model, also known as the object model integrated database.