When Construction Robots Say You’re Behind Schedule, And Seven Other Talks on Changes to How We Monitor Project Progress

As Franco Giaquinto, Founder and CEO of Latin American construction software company IPSUM, illustrated on this past week's Demo Call, few project controls conventions are under more assault right now than the Project Schedule. State of the art used to mean development of a massive GANTT Chart that would hang in a job trailer. Depending on the size of the job, teams of field engineers or site superintendents would wander job sites and color in completed schedule activities to show they had been completed. Projects with more staff might have even seen the actual project schedule updated on a weekly basis to try to show progress compared to the original schedule. Beyond the updated schedules, we had various permutations of project photographs to help teams understand where work was and wasn't completed. In most cases, projects that have controls are mostly still working from gantt charts and progress photos, but now, this is all starting to change.

Hensel Phelps', Andrew Cameron joined us at our Project Delivery Conference in July , to give us a peak at just how much the field of monitoring project progress is evolving. He presented how his company is using Boston Dynamics' SPOT and construction software, Holobuilder to track progress on their multiyear San Francisco Airport project. The overview was just one of a series of reminders about the ways in which project controls are rapidly changing.

This week, on this month's Smart Job Sites Analyst Call, we will be going deeper into discussion about some of the ways change is happening.

Chris and Brooks will help us understand the way new approaches to relational schedules, building modeling, and reality capture technology are being melded (along with robotics) to drive real change in the way companies understand job progress and plan their activities on-site.

If you'd like to study up for the call,, our Smart Job Sites 50 List is a good place to survey some of the solutions making their way onto project sites around the world.

Click here to see the 2020 Smart Job Site List

While we worked hard to catalogue many of the interesting and leading solutions on our Job Sites list, as is increasingly the case, we just weren't able to capture them all. We will be drilling down on the topic in a coming research report, but, in the meantime, if you'd like to study up for upcoming call, we've catalogued a few calls from the past year with entrepreneurs and experts in this area of using reality capture technology tied to models, schedules, and other project workflows to track project progress versus to help people get up to speed. It is important to note that we have tried to separate the analysis of the sensor technology that captures the data being analyzed from this look at the software that performs the analysis. We look separately at the different types of drones, scanners, photographic, robotic, crane and other technology that comes into play in how the data is gathered.