The Great Things I Learned From Engineering News-Record This Week

From the November 17/24 issue:

• People no longer look at housing as a good investment.  This will change how we think about development.
• Highway work is expected to be relatively flat.
• Multi-family starts in 2014 - $61.9 billion.
• Public works continues to be a drag on overall construction growth.
• By adding IT to anything in the infrastructure matrix - branding it "Smart" becomes almost mandatory.
• Concern regarding that the level of disasters is changing faster than how designers are reacting to them.
• Information mobility can increase information complexity.
• Failure almost never starts in the field.
• Project management is the science of planning combined with the art of reacting to surprise.
• Huge project problem - - poor project data shaping.  Bad execution stems from bad planning - - shortchanging a project's scope, purpose and policy development that underpin design decision often dooms projects before work begins.
• Building is only the last third of the project cycle.  Most of the time on a project is spent doing nothing physical.
• Excel is "grossly overutilized" for project management and schedules - it doesn't have the intelligence built into it that other construction project software would have.
• Industrial IT spending in the US is in the 6% to 8% range of their revenues.  Construction is still stuck in the 1% to 2% range.  Construction still doesn't spend very much on technology.