Big Data Comes to AEC Project Management

Look for engineering and construction firms to embrace the power of big data.  Rarely does the AEC industry examine why certain project teams and work crews are more productive than others.  What are the key variables that separate superior performance from the rather ho-hum?

The Schumpeter Column in the July 19th edition of the Economist (Little things that mean a lot: Businesses should aim for lots of small wins from "big data", that add up to something big) has a paragraph the AEC project management gurus should consider:

"The approach can even be used to tell businesses how better to organize their employees.  QuantumBlack, a data-analysis firm, says a client, an engineering multinational, measured how the output of its teams of workers varied as a result of dozens of differences in their composition.  It found a small step-change in productivity when the teams had more than seven members, whereas efficiency fell steadily with each additional time-zone in which team members were based.  How well the members already knew each other turned out to be especially important, yet the managers doing the scheduling had thought of this.  Most individual improvements were in the range of 0.5% to 1%, says Simon Williams of QuantumBlack, but together they added up to a 22% rise in teams' overall productivity."