Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
CEO of Gather on Site Diaries as a Process
73 Plays8 months ago
In this episode, Carlos & Jason are joined by Will Doyle, CEO of Gather.
The three discuss how & why site diaries are often neglected despite their pivotal role in project management.
And how moving from bin bags of paper records to a digital process unlocks integration with other sources for actuals.
Follow Carlos on Linkedin | Follow Jason on Linkedin | Check out Aphex
Recommended
Transcript
Cultural Differences in Food Terminology
00:00:00
Speaker
The test for how northern someone is, is what do you call a chip sandwich? A chip butty. Yeah. There we go. Right. What would you call it, Carlos? A chip sandwich. I thought it was a trick question then. Start a chip sandwich. There's like six different names for it in different places. Are you talking about chips in bread? Yeah. Yes. So when you go to the chippy and you're a chip butty, like what's the bread called? I've never ordered a chip butty before, but I would probably call it.
00:00:26
Speaker
chip roll today. In olden where I'm from, it's called a muffin. So you want a chip muffin?
00:00:36
Speaker
what yeah we have muffins for like eggs benedict that's not a muffin in south london we call us as having breakfast with the queen on the king he has any of the eggs benedict on the muffin i don't know if you can relate to that at all will but yeah oh no fire a chip balm or a chip muffin
Overview: Offsite Podcast with Jason and Carlos
00:01:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Offsite podcast with Jason and Carlos, where we talk all things construction and technology. Join us for discussions with industry leaders and insights into the latest trends in construction.
Guest Introduction: Will, CEO of Gather
00:01:15
Speaker
Welcome back to the pod. Today, we are talking about site diaries and we're joined by Will. Will is the CEO of Gather, previously Rail Diary.
00:01:25
Speaker
Gather, I guess, is one of the leading site diary apps in the UK. So we see it on a bunch of projects. Will's also a QS, so it means he's very knowledgeable, extra brownie points for being someone who actually understands the why behind these things. So yeah, great to have you on the show, Will. To kick off.
What are Site Diaries and Why are They Important?
00:01:46
Speaker
So for me, there's few workflows on a construction project that happen as frequently as the site diary. So you've got the majority of a delivery team filling in these forms every day. Is this something that we do at Habit? But I guess the question is, why are they so important?
00:02:03
Speaker
Yeah, good question, Carlos. And yeah, thank you for having me. It's good to join you both. So yeah, um, I am a QS. So this is probably from my perspective, but I've done this for a few years now. And for me, the site diaries, traditionally a paper document, isn't it? We all see it on a Oracle kind of duplicate or triple get padded, but it's, it's there every day. Cause that it's the who, what, why, and when that's how I kind of explain it to people within our business and people within the wider industry. It's a record of what happened.
00:02:31
Speaker
And something happens every day, doesn't it? So we need to understand what happened. Who was there? Why were they there? What were they doing? And for me, it's understanding what we say we're going to do. And this is what we actually didn't. More importantly, and probably linking back to you both from a planning perspective, why was it different? How can I learn? How can I improve? And that's why we need to do it every day. Because not just because someone said 100 or 1000 years ago, we should feel this like diary. It's about actually understanding learning and improving every day. That's for me is why it's there.
00:03:01
Speaker
And if we think, so there's, there's like the clear sort of, it's the record and I'm going back to my QS hat here. It's like a record of events with all the associated information with it. How do we actually, how is that information? So you mentioned there about, it's about improving performance and things like
From Paper to Digital: The Evolution of Site Diaries
00:03:17
Speaker
that. Typically, how is that actually used at the moment in terms of that information that's going back because
00:03:22
Speaker
I guess when I think about site diaries, a lot of them were paper-based forms. So what was the sort of status quo there in terms of using that data, or is it just old-school sort of, this is for claims and records? I think Jason's got his hand up. I can go first if you'd like. Very polite, Jason. Well, while I distracted you, I'll add to Carlos's question. How about that? I'll put the hand down. Okay, thank you. I think in general,
00:03:50
Speaker
If you were to ask the average person in construction on a project, a lot of people say we need to do a site direct super important because it becomes a record. At some point we're going to need a record, like just leaving the record of what happened.
00:04:06
Speaker
Is that the sole value of a site die? Or is it, you know, is it important for other reasons than just we wrote down what happened on site. And if we ever need to go back and demonstrate what happened on that day, we've got it written down somewhere. I guess, yeah, I think the question that, um, Carlos might be getting to release what I've hijacked is, yeah, what is the, what is the true value of this site die process that everyone spends so much time doing every day on projects around the world?
00:04:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think traditionally is, is, as you explained, like it's about just having a record in case something happens, in case something goes wrong. When I was a QS and working for Baba Beatty, 18 year old, worked away at London, it was all records, records, records. That literally what I got told every single day. And my first two, three, maybe in six months was just filing records, making sure we had a record for every single shift, every single project. And it was.
00:05:02
Speaker
It was that just in case, just in case we need it, just in case something goes wrong, just in case there's an issue. And you're often just sat in a lever arch file, which sits on the project's office or goes back to head office when the project finishes and it's just in case. And that's the very traditional approach and people would dust them off and use it to deal with claims. But I think that's changed. I think that it's had to change because we can't just carry on using the site there as a reactive thing.
00:05:29
Speaker
And certainly what I've seen in the last two, maybe three years is it's a proactive tool. And that's what we'll be going back to my opening comment about is about learning and improving, because what's the point in just doing something to sit there and never actually opening that record until something's gone wrong.
00:05:45
Speaker
That's kind of what I used to do. I used to get the record out and go, this isn't very good. It's filled in paper. I'd ring up some poor person on site and say, you're not giving me this information. It was three, six, nine months ago. And they wouldn't remember, but now it's having that information on a daily basis for things really important. And yeah, everyone does it. Let's make it easier. Let's make it a bit more useful.
00:06:06
Speaker
Yeah, a hundred percent. Um, if we think about then like the status quo, right? So on a construction project right now, we're going to see a spectrum from like handwritten diaries through maybe words sort of forms and maybe up to sort of piece of technology, like, like gather. Um, it's really underwhelming given the importance of a site diary, like it's this record that protects you against claims and future like risks.
00:06:34
Speaker
Why do you think the, like the biggest software houses have actually sort of not tackled this or put a lot of focus on
Why Do Major Software Vendors Overlook Site Diaries?
00:06:40
Speaker
this? I think we've kind of fallen to the trap that we can just put the site diary with just forms that we use on site. We just, we've kind of just banded it together. I was with a bigger software vendor yesterday and they kind of grouped it under HSQE or health and safety and quality. And I was like,
00:06:56
Speaker
I don't really think it sits there. Maybe that's because I'm a QX and that's my background. But for me, it's a commercial document. It's a commercial assurance tool for all the reasons. Just talks about colors and resection and understanding and improving. It drives productivity, isn't it? How do we get better every single day? So I think people haven't tackled that because they've just thought, okay, I'll just build a form.
00:07:16
Speaker
When I started railed areas, it was six, seven years ago, I walked into the office of all who's our CTO and said, take me to this Excel sheet that I built. It's amazing. It's best spreadsheet ever put on a tablet. And I learned in about a week that the best way to enter data is not actually the table.
00:07:33
Speaker
Like that's how you read a year and interpret it. But we're asking people who are there to deliver a job to use a table and then put some numbers in some words. And that's actually a great experience for them. It's and the reluctantly do it and you get poor quality records, missing records as a result. So.
00:07:50
Speaker
I think people have probably wrongly banded it into, we can do this in a general site form, we can just make it up. But actually when we think about it, we need to think about that person on site. I think if you think about that, for me, it's like a person on site in high-vis, in the pouring rain, somewhere in the middle of nowhere at 3am. How do I make their life easy? And that's probably what we've not challenged and addressed as an industry.
00:08:13
Speaker
So yeah, if we, uh, well, if we think about like, right, side guys are massively important. They can protect us from when something goes wrong or if we could theoretically use the data for all sorts of things that could drive business value. Yeah.
Enhancing User Experience for Better Data
00:08:30
Speaker
My experience from previous projects being on the ground, um, and you tell me whether this is what it looks like. You know, you're probably looking at a million site stories, uh, all the time.
00:08:41
Speaker
The current status quo for the average project feels like there's some crappy form somewhere that someone has to fill out. The person has to fill it out is sometimes right at the bottom of the food chain. No one wants to do it so they keep delegating it down until there's no one else to keep delegating it to.
00:09:01
Speaker
And you end up in this situation where there's terrible user experience. The person filling it out is so far removed from the actual value of what this thing is for, which it could be a commercial claim. It could be a safety thing. And someone has to do it and just does it and writes stuff that might not even be relevant to protect you against that thing. Side note, we used to have to do it back when I was a site engineer and have to do the site diaries to prove that no one ever read them.
00:09:29
Speaker
where this chap on night shift for about six months was taking photos of his boots and other random things around the office and attaching it as his site records in the site diary and that went on for like six months before someone opened one of the diaries and just looked at it and went, what are you doing? So it's a terrible experience. It gets pushed right to the bottom.
00:09:53
Speaker
But it's so important. It seems like a weird misalignment and a problem that means that unless the person that is doing it understands why it's important and gets some value out of it, they're always in this spot where they're being consistently done. The information won't be what we need. Is that what it looks like on the ground today for the average object?
00:10:15
Speaker
I think so. On the way in is what I was thinking, how many construction technology tools do we have where we rely on someone who's so far removed from the kind of the value? I can't think of many others, if any at all, but other than the kind of site diary process. And I think, sure, anecdote there as far as, it's this black hole of information, isn't it? That person on site would try their best to give you the right data, but it just, it's this black hole.
00:10:39
Speaker
You'll actually get a phone call from an angry curious like me or Carlos is when something's gone wrong and we're not looked at them for three or four months and now we need the records desperately so I can't think of many of the processes that on the construction site that where that happens because
00:10:54
Speaker
You look at your project plan every day, you look at your financials on a daily or weekly monthly, records, you only get out really traditionally when something goes wrong. And that's, that's not good as it can think about that person on site. There's no feedback. There's no say you've done a really good job keeps, keeps sending me more photos like this. This is excellent.
00:11:12
Speaker
They usually just get the the sharp end of when something's got wrong or why not included this why not include those photos and that's a horrible oral experience and That's the way you get crappy records as you described because there's no incentive So what I think we should do and what I'm trying to change is is that feedback every single day good or bad?
00:11:31
Speaker
We should tell someone, thank you. Record's really good. Like, thanks for that. Keep, he keep giving me more photos or can I have more photos of the excavation or whatever it needs to be. And that's how you'll get that feedback. That's how you'll improve the quality of those records. You can have the best tool, the best user experience, but if that person is not getting feedback from their peers, then they're just going to give up, aren't they? So that's what I see as the status quo at the moment. That's what we're trying to change.
00:11:58
Speaker
Yeah, side note, I didn't intend to go into this, but from a software design perspective, in so many of the consumer tools we use, there's these little moments that reward you at little increments along the way. You get a lovely little inbox zero moment when you finish, you read whatever it is.
00:12:19
Speaker
and i've never seen a single one of those in in any of the experience that i've ever had to use doing these uh these um yeah side dyes well actually just so many of the forms that we had to fill out in in construction so i think that there's lots of cool ideas that that brings up um yeah what's that aha moment that's that bit to delight you yeah do you mean there's there's none of that it's just yeah i'll send it off into this black hole and
00:12:48
Speaker
But, and then I'll, I'll see what comes back if anything. And like your, your friend who said these boots every day, Jimmy, he proves that no one was looking at it. So by the way, by the way, I kind of sanitized that story. The, um, it started as boots and then got worse and worse and worse. Uh, at one point it was like, uh, photos of like different subcontractors on site being like, that person's useless. And he would like write on there. Yeah. See.
00:13:15
Speaker
It got out of hand. It got out of hand. Yeah. At least they weren't first surfaced like in court or during a claim or like dispute process. That would have been a bit. Well, I think that's the only reason someone went and actually opened the things, which is the problem with, right? Exactly. For six months. And then someone goes, Oh, damn, there was an issue, you know, back in July or whatever it was, goes in there and goes, why are there photos of boots in here?
00:13:41
Speaker
Exactly. And like, you just lose all the value, don't you? Because it just becomes nonsense, poor quality. And it's so unfair on that personal side. And I think going back to your question, Carlos, why the big event does not tackle that problem is because we often sell them to, to be the decision makers, people who've got hold of budget and making tools for them. We're really, we're forgetting on the person we actually expect to deliver these projects. I think that's where we need to change.
00:14:06
Speaker
Yeah, I can imagine it's quite difficult because you guys typically like, you would probably, your way in would be through the commercial team here at the budget holder and the people sort of driving this record. But ultimately you're asking the entire delivery team to put a lot of time and effort into something that doesn't directly give them any value, but it does give the commercial team value. Now, so more than just a record, um,
00:14:31
Speaker
Obviously with paper-based diaries, you couldn't really do anything with it because it's just, it lives in a leverage file, as you say, and it gathers dust. What does a good site diary workflow look like now that we do have like apps in place and we're gathering this information?
Creating Efficient Workflows for Site Diaries
00:14:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's a really good question. And there's two things probably for me is probably the speed and the quality. Those are how we kind of look at it. So I think the speed, just to go back to that user experience, like when I was above B2, pay people extra hour data to finish your records. They did it by hand. We knew it was important. It still wasn't very good.
00:15:04
Speaker
For that person who's extremely busy, they're doing long shifts, they're outside, they've got lots to do. It's got to be quick. It's got to be easy for them to do. So regardless of workflow and how quickly they can do things is super important. And we've tackled that in a specific way by just pre-populating it. So it can, how much of the other record can we fill in before that person walks out on site?
00:15:24
Speaker
For us it's 64%, so all the planned works, all the resources are meant to be on site, what time we're meant to access the infrastructure, so all you're asking for that person to do is say what actually happened, who actually turned up, how many machines we did,
00:15:40
Speaker
how many quantities of X or Y we don't get me some photos of it. So it shifted that kind of perception. This is a document you need to fill into. This is a workflow as you describe it and say, right, this is what I'm planning to do. Tell me what actually happened.
00:15:56
Speaker
I think that's where you get the buy-in, you get the quality and the consistency because everyone can tell you how much they've done. I can tell you I've done 40 meters of this. I can tell you that these 10 people turn up on site. Having to work out a plan, you just get a plan 100%, 100%. And that's where we need to move away to. So for me, the workflow and the quality of a site diary includes where we're working. It's the who, what, why, and when if we go through that. So who is on site, labor, plant materials.
00:16:22
Speaker
captured in a consistent way so i can use that information so you can say right jason's done 30 shifts this week and i've always spelled jason's name the same way because jason's got a profile nothing goes with it i've got my plan and and i know what my output or my excavator's working time is how much standing time it is because i can use all that data save the material what was on site what was delivered
00:16:45
Speaker
And then going back to the progress side, probably where this comes in kind of hand in hand with Aphex is understanding what we plan to do and what we've actually delivered. So we plan to do 100 of X, we've done 50, well which 50, and give us all the detail around that.
00:17:01
Speaker
And the other thing I think we miss is an allocation. So an allocation of labour plant materials. Traditionally, separate duplicate pad again, but that's kind of the secret sauce that brings it all together. So I've got who was on site, I've got what they were doing, for how much they've achieved. But let's allocate their time to that because we can use that for short term substantiation when something goes wrong, claims, all the stuff we talked about.
00:17:24
Speaker
isn't that even more powerful when we learn about it? So next time I'm doing this activity, I know what resources are required. I know what my average output is per day. I know what the risks are likely to face because I can see all the things have been delayed. So allocating our resource against activities is a thing that's not traditionally a psych diary, but I think is the most important thing and it's how it brings it all together. Hopefully that's answered your question. That was a bit of a long answer.
00:17:47
Speaker
Yeah, so a good outcome starts with something like a really robust capturing experience. Yeah, that captures that. Where and what was the last one? Why?
00:18:02
Speaker
Why and when, yeah. And then, um, if you were to take that even further and go, you know, what does great look like from the business? What do you, what do you see as, uh, how businesses get the most value out of that workflow, whether it's something they're doing now or something they could be doing. I think for a lot of the.
Using Real-Time Data for Business Improvement
00:18:25
Speaker
kind of more progressive businesses and our customers that are really pushing the boundary. I know, Carlos, you've posted about this before. It's kind of real-time CVRs, understanding cost and value together, because we have that record straight from site. We know what is cost. We know the value is generated because we know the activity. So that's the next step of the workflow. How I can use that, say, right, we plan to have 20 people on site. This is what we've actually got. Why was it different? Have we achieved more? Have we achieved less? And it brings kind of commercial teams who are traditionally
00:18:55
Speaker
maybe work at home these days but away from the delivery team and delivery teams together because it brings that kind of not right but it does doesn't it doesn't because traditionally you go end of the month ago we've overspent we're not actually what we thought we would do uh why and then you point the
00:19:12
Speaker
the finger at the delivery team, what if you could have that discussion collaborously every day or every week based on the site records, not waiting for the end of the month to the period end reporting, you're actually looking at your program, what's actually happened on site and the cost with it. So I think that's where we're really pushing the boundaries and that's where we need to get to because when you get to the end of the month and the period, the opportunity to do something about it's gone.
00:19:35
Speaker
So let's do it every day and then bring those people together and not just have commercial teams sit in their ivory towers. And I was definitely guilty of that in the past and actually talk to people that are out there delivering it.
00:19:47
Speaker
And do you see the idea of even going further than that and any contractors using that data to build up their production rates for tendering the next job? You know, that sort of, yeah, absolutely. Like if you were to continue on the kind of claims theme, we've seen people use site diaries as kind of substantiate measured mile approach to substantiate in production outputs, um, which is quite detailed and we usually use kind of.
00:20:12
Speaker
Other projects, well, what if you could use your own data to kind of estimate what that should have been? Well, then, yeah, next time I do this project, I know the delays I need to price, so I can use my site diary to create a risk register. Next time I do this project, I know all the risks I'm likely to face, and then I've got production outputs, I've got resources that are required to do it. And you can start to see where you can optimize things. If a 10-person gang delivers X per hour, then they cost me that, whereas a 5-person gang delivers Y, what's the most efficient way of doing it?
00:20:43
Speaker
My background's in rail and we start to see that too when you optimize in possessions or occupations of taking over that infrastructure for a limited amount of time. What's the most efficient use, gang size, how much shall we be planning? Should I do one foundation or two? And all that sort of thing is where you learn. And you can only do that if that person on site gives you proper structured data. So you need to keep looping back to that. But yeah, that's where I see it going, Jason.
00:21:09
Speaker
And then one of the things, because this is a conversation that I've had a number of times with different contractors, literally as recently as today with a tier one in Asia. Okay. You've got this source of these records that could be generated from a really robust site-type workflow. One of the tricky things is that's not the only source of like records or actuals for a project. There's usually like delivery dockets. Sometimes it comes in on invoice.
00:21:39
Speaker
So there's all these other potential sources of these actuals that could either suck like if you're doing the site during you're taking that data, you could theoretically duplicate that data and incorrectly measure it. So how, how do you see, you know, either now or in the future properly bringing those sources together?
00:22:01
Speaker
Yes, good question. The example you use around delivery dockets is something that we've looked at over the last 12 months and been really popular. How can I take that delivery information with the materials that are actually used on that particular activity and even feed that back to kind of finance. So matching it with the purchase or the invoice that has come from the supplier and actually what was done.
00:22:21
Speaker
Yeah that's about construction technology really putting the kind of working together playing nicely isn't it and how can we make that information so it's easy for you can feed it back to your ERP system, whatever you're using for financing your ordering system, what you're using to kind of understand the carbon impacts of those materials, all that kind of good stuff.
Integrating Site Diary Data for a Holistic View
00:22:39
Speaker
I think that's about data being consistent, but then technology companies like ours play nicely together, like understanding that data transparency, be able to give them other systems the right format of data, the right quality of data, gives that contractor that you spoke to this morning, that whole picture, because someone might have missed something. I mean, it'll be captured elsewhere. We're not trying to duplicate things, we want to de-duplicate things, but it's good to have that kind of capture all as well.
00:23:05
Speaker
Earlier, you sort of mentioned about obviously performance. So like, for example, you could understand what you're burning every day on a construction site in terms of labor materials. Have your customers thought about like performance of, say, supply chain? So for example, you could know yesterday that ExSUBE didn't provide labor on six sites, which is then like actually quite a big red flag for a potential issue with supply chain or like
00:23:32
Speaker
certain type of material and things like that. Is that, is that where the customers are going at the moment or was that a bit too sort of broad? It's happened. I've seen, I've seen happen with, with client organizations where they've given similar scope to two different contractors and you see optionally contracts, which clients are usually a little bit kind of nervous about.
00:23:55
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Let's just crack on and spend as much money as possible. Well, it's not like that, is it really? It's about delivering value. So we've seen it on projects, and this was a cable installation project where the first contractor was delivering, let's say, 100,000 meters, and they were averaging £2.50 a meter. And then the other contractor was delivering at £4 a meter.
00:24:18
Speaker
Like you start to understand where people are efficient, where you're getting value for money and you increase the scope or you give them more work because they're so much more efficient. And you start to question the second contractor. And what we saw on that job is one of the contractors actually not given any more scope after their initial scope. Whereas I think the first contractor, I still work on the job. They've been given more and more scope because they're so efficient. So that's where I see clients trying to drive value for money.
00:24:46
Speaker
And just be transparent. You could do all that now on a traditional paper record if you really wanted to. It would just take you a long time to work out and do that. But having real-time value and production metrics makes you understand as a project, as a client, as a contractor or subcontractor, where you're efficient, where you're not so efficient. And I think that's something that's missing in construction at the moment, that visibility. So yeah, that's absolutely where it needs to go.
00:25:11
Speaker
Let's talk to someone from a client organization the other day and their plan in the future is to pay higher per meter the quicker you do it. So you're really incentivized to just smash through and you're paid more and obviously you're
00:25:23
Speaker
you'd then command a higher fee. So yeah, I do think there's that particular in the materials front, what are we actually installing? Because the old option here, which is basically we'll pay your cost and give you a fee. You're just not incentivized to do anything at any pace really. So yeah. Okay. That's interesting.
00:25:45
Speaker
There's no incentive, is there? It's crazy. But yeah, if you know, you're going to get more scope, do you mean more fee? Then you're going to, you're going to be as efficient as you can and be rewarded hopefully. So yeah, that's where, where I see it going. Something in the UK. Well, can I just take us back to a previous question to double click on it before, before moving forward?
00:26:05
Speaker
the idea of this like okay I've got these records coming in from delivery dockets from subcontractors and I've got folks doing a site diary with some allocation or recording of powers or recording of materials how do you see that working where does the site do I have to be cognizant of those records and pre-populate them or do the team just kind of know that we don't need to record concrete because concrete comes in via dockets
00:26:34
Speaker
how integrated and seamless you see that working at the moment, and then maybe how do you see it working in the future? At the moment, it's probably two very separate processes, teams like you've described, they don't probably talk to each other even. I mean, I'm the store person, I get them to deliver the materials. For me, I want all that information to be on the site diary. I want that report, I know what was delivered that day, because it's just part of that story, isn't it? Why did we not achieve
00:27:02
Speaker
no matter foundation thoughts i will the delivery of concrete arrive until two hours after we thought it would be here's the doctor that shows that that was the case from delivery driver so. It's just part of that story of what happened that day so for me we want to have the delivery docket some another similar information.
00:27:18
Speaker
as part of your site Daria, either captured Daria in it or at least appended to it as a link back to maybe the tool or software you're using to capture that information. But for us, we see a lot of clients in the UK capturing delivery dockets on their shift record or site Daria every single day because
00:27:36
Speaker
It is just part of that story because material is so
How to Ensure Consistent Site Diary Usage
00:27:40
Speaker
so important. I see so many project delays when things have turned up late with the wrong material, wrong mix, use the concrete example, whatever it needs to be. It's just part of that narrative for why we did or did not achieve what we thought we could do that day.
00:27:54
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, cool. At risk of boring people, I won't ask follow-on questions, but I have a long list. If I was then to go back to what someone listening to this might be interested in hearing. So, okay, we're on an infrastructure or some sort of construction project today, like a hundred, hundred billion dollars or tons.
00:28:14
Speaker
Our side diary is done in some spreadsheet or wherever. It's almost doesn't matter what the tool is. It gets inconsistently filled out. You know, we do it in spits and spurts. The records in there are not like they're just someone wrote an essay or put it under the sea of that car or wherever.
00:28:30
Speaker
What would you say if you were like on that project or you were working with that project, what are the like, what would be the steps? What would be the practical steps to get to like one of those good or great outcomes of, of, you know, make Saitari something that is actually valuable and consistently used?
00:28:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's a really good question and one of the first questions we ask project like that would be how many records are you actually expecting? Every day, every week and you'd be surprised at how many people don't know. I don't know how many records I should have every single day and we kind of start there like, are you expecting 10? Is it 100?
00:29:04
Speaker
And you should know that because you should know how many teams you're doing, who's reporting, and just making sure that's really clear. And then that's how we measure kind of that rollout, get into that kind of success point is how have we got 100% of the records? And once you do that, you can start to improve the quality further, get the feedback. But we see projects with so many holes in their kind of record-keeping process and not being clear what the responsibility is. But that's where we start because if you're watching this, how many records should you have on your project today? Do you know?
00:29:34
Speaker
And not many people do. And yeah, the tool and gather takes care of the quality element to a degree because we lock it down the workflow structures. But we need to understand what we're measuring against. Is it a hundred records, right? How do we get to a hundred records? And that can take.
00:29:52
Speaker
not that long a time. We worked with a tier one contractor on a hundred million pound job last summer. We did that in 30 days. They got from not having any records on gather. There was some paper, it was on Excel sheets. The particular project, and I won't go into it, is they literally had so many paper allocation sheets, the graduate QS and BIM bags under his desk of allocation sheets. I went to their office and this is a big project and I was like,
00:30:17
Speaker
are you not worried the cleaners might just take them out tonight and then put them in the bin like he just had bin bags it was it was crazy and going from bin bags to having 100% of your records in 30 days i thought was pretty crazy but it's quite easy to do when you just understand what i need to do and have the right tool but yeah moving away from bin bags and that is a true story i'll watch
00:30:38
Speaker
Yeah. So there's obviously that this clear problem of like complete records and records from the right people about like full courage of the works. And you mentioned, I think you said 64%, you can pre-populate the diary. How close to a hundred can you get?
00:31:01
Speaker
think about technology that can gather or capture information. Do you think you can get to 100 or close enough? I don't get to 100 because we still want that narrative. You could probably use other tools to get the more objective things in, quantities and things like that. But a lot of the gold in the site diaries when someone explains something, we ask them to categorize it and say, what pot does that fall into? Why was it laid put?
00:31:28
Speaker
The real gold still comes from someone say, right, it was the reason why we didn't do that work was a material issue. Well, tell me a little bit more. I need to know what the material issue was. And you might have the dockets that go with it. So we're not, we're never going to get 200% because we still rely on that person's experience there. They're there to deliver the work. They know how it should be delivered and tell them what's blocking them.
00:31:49
Speaker
And that's where I see, and you can use technology to help that. We all have it on our devices, but speech-to-text is just so popular on sites. Because when I go and see training sessions, when people roll out gatherings, we encourage people on sites to run into their phones, just moan at the app and tell us what's gone wrong and give us that anecdotal evidence. So yeah, I'd love to get to 100%, but I think we've missed it on that kind of good stuff that happens.
00:32:17
Speaker
Yeah and that's only when you explain and like free text is a nightmare. You want to lock that down as much as possible and bring in quantities, calculations, categorize things, drop down menus, all those kind of simple tools. But once you've done that, explaining it in kind of free form is what you need to do.
00:32:35
Speaker
Well, I just want to say something you said right at the start. We're talking about how so much software, including site diaries in construction is designed for the benefit of someone sat at the top that gets what in some sort of output and has very little consideration for the person rewarding the person who's got to put the information
The Need for User-Focused Construction Software
00:32:56
Speaker
in there.
00:32:56
Speaker
is something i bang on about consistently and there's this like saying there's this like saying when it comes to like social media how like the user of social media is the product and not the customer and i think there's so much of that in a lot of construction software where
00:33:14
Speaker
The person that actually uses the software every day to do whatever the workflow is, is the product for the person that's going to get the report. I think you can't fix any of this unless you break that model for sure and give value to the person that actually does the thing every day.
00:33:32
Speaker
Um, yeah, when I, when I started rail diary, I was all about giving the best dashboard report and adoption was like through the floor. It was, we were struggling. Emma, who was our product design at the time. She was like, well, we just need to focus on the mobile app. We've seen so many people just use tablets and we've six years ago, tablets, a bit phones were a bit smaller. So tablets were quite popular. Now we see it kind of the other way around, but.
00:33:56
Speaker
It was just let's just focus on that person on site like there the person like all these fancy reports all the other stuff is easy if we can get that right and that's where i think we need to focus on on that person and you make the experience easier you make it quick because they're busy people they don't want to do this because they're there to deliver you make the process of them getting feedback
00:34:19
Speaker
and a normal occurrence like i can't really when i was on site how many times did i actually go and say thank you to someone and and well done that was really good site darren maybe that's just me as a person but i don't see that happen on construction sites really i don't say see that it's always when something's gone wrong like why has that happened so i see that positive feedback loop being another way to kind of break that cycle you just talked about um and that's that's something that we're constantly working on and we haven't got right yet and i don't think anyone's got that quite right yet but
00:34:48
Speaker
I think we all need to kind of work on how do I tell someone they've done a good job or point them in the right direction when they've not done so that's what we need to get.
00:34:56
Speaker
Yeah, well, mate, thank you very much. The, I think the, this is a really important work for, I think there's so much of what people are trying to do at like a higher level, whether it be AI or analytics or getting thing across business starts at like the getting the right data captions. A diary is like tip of the sphere in my view. So, uh, yeah, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us, mate. Thank you for having me. It's been really good chatting to you both. Thanks, bro. Thank you.
00:35:25
Speaker
Cheers, everyone.