What we covered

We covered everything from admin controls to interpreting dashboards (yes, the ones you’ve probably been ignoring) and how to use your data to win more work. Think of this webinar as a crash course in making numbers work for you—minus the crash.

Watch it on-demand

Transcript

Jessica: Hi, I'm Jessica, one of the co-founders of Part3 in case you haven't met me. I have a background working for a general contractor for six years, and then I made the switch to working for architects for another five years. Then I started the journey with Part3.

Thanks for taking the time to join the webinar today. We're going to go over your project insights, what data you can collect from Part3, and how you can use that data. We’re going to first talk about where the industry is at in terms of data and how they apply it to the business. We’ll go through different areas in Part3 where we surface data and insights for your projects, your groups, and then overall from that admin perspective of how you can do a deep dive into the data across your firm and across projects. Then we’ll end by discussing what to do with all of this data. Now that you know what you have, how can you apply it in your firm to make decisions and drive strategy?

As we go through this webinar, I just want to keep something in the back of your mind. When I worked at an architectural firm on many projects, I was told, "Oh, we're running out of hours." This isn't uncommon in the industry, so I asked, "How did we come up with our fee for this project? How do we possibly have no hours left when we still have another year of construction?" We knew the construction end date; that wasn't a surprise for anyone. I didn’t get an answer, and that was a shock because not only did I know we had a long time left on this project, but no one really knew how we established that fee. Was there a calculation? Were we pulling it from historical data? What was it based on?

Needless to say, my hours got billed under another project, and I don't really know what happened with that other project as well. We'll come back to this at the end, but keep in mind that 46% of architectural contracts are fixed-fee or lump sum. So, what does data have to do with this?

There’s a lot of software being used in the industry. Firms are implementing different software and expanding their tools, but there are still many firms that rely on spreadsheets. This isn’t real-time data. It takes a person dedicating time to inputting correct data, and we’re relying on them to do it. And it's still not real-time.

We still talk to a lot of customers and firms, and many of them rely heavily on Excel and Word documents, whether for data collection, business information, or just day-to-day project management. 60% of firms are using data to drive decision-making and inform the strategy of their firm. But that begs the question, what are the other 40% doing?

An industry report recently found that project status visibility and access to historical project data are huge challenges for firms in terms of project management, gathering that information, and deciding what to do with it.

The question is, do you have the right software to help you collect this data, analyze it, and then use it to make decisions?

Now, let's chat about how your firm actually collects data. 60% of the firms we spoke to use qualitative data. This means they might have project managers in a room sharing updates about their projects. They might manually update a status document or say, “Everyone come prepared to the meeting and give us all the information you have on your projects.” In those meetings, which can last up to two hours, you often hear from the loudest voices in the room, while the quiet ones stay quiet. Essentially, you mostly hear about how projects are going badly and the problems they’re facing—you don’t really get good stats or real data from these conversations.

25% of firms have nothing. They just rely on conversations in the office or anecdotal comments from team members. These firms often abandon their reporting methods because the meetings or status document updates took too long, people weren’t doing them, and they were ineffective.

15% of firms we spoke to collect quantitative data. This gives them a better understanding of gaps in their firm, which they can use for recruiting, software tooling, coaching, and resource planning. It also means fewer meetings, which results in time and resource savings, and of course, savings in billable hours. If you think about one meeting with 20 people in it—whether internal or external—that's at least $6,000 in billable hours for a two-hour meeting. Most of those people are thinking, “This isn’t productive. I have other things to do.”

Those firms that collect quantitative data are better positioned to outcompete their peers when bidding for new work.

Now let’s talk about the data we surface for you in Part3. We have our project dashboards, and this was one of the first things we built in Part3. We realized we were building all this documentation and pulling in different data points, so we wanted to surface it for people to see what’s really going on in their projects at a high level. This project dashboard gives you updates on response times for submittals and RFIs, how many documents are being issued, the reasons for issuing those documents, and, of course, if your scope includes financial information, you’re reviewing quotations and issuing change orders. We surface all of that for you as well.

We’ve heard from people that they often have this dashboard open during OAC meetings. With real-time data, you know exactly what submittals were returned, what RFIs are in your court, and what documents were issued. You can speak with confidence because you have that data in real-time during the meeting.

Here’s an example from one of our projects. It’s a sample project, but it’ll give you a good understanding. For instance, I can see a lot of changes were issued due to coordination. I also see a lot of change values associated with mechanical work. Maybe I’ll ask myself, "Is my mechanical consultant performing well? Were the drawings coordinated properly? Did they overlook something big?" This gives me a quick insight into why so many mechanical items and coordination documents are being issued.

I can also see there’s a lot of owner-requested changes and a high volume of contract overages due to those requests. Should we submit an additional service order? This can help with difficult conversations with the owner. We heard from one of our customers that the owner called one day asking, “Where’s all this money coming from? Why are we issuing all these changes?” They were able to pull up the dashboard and show, “It’s because you requested these changes.” The owner then understood, but without that data, you might panic and wonder why there’s a huge contract overage.

In this example, I can also see that our submittal response times are high. Did we receive more submittals than expected? Is the GC bombarding us with submittals all at once, instead of spreading them out as they should? Or is my consultant team not responding quickly enough? I can see they’re taking 9 or 10 days, which leaves me little time for my final review, pushing out my overall response times.

This is a good opportunity to think about enabling Part3's reminder schedules. You want to make sure everyone stays on track and tasks are completed. For example, chasing consultants for responses can feel like herding cats. They have other projects going on, which is fair, but when you have deadlines and expectations to meet on your project, it’s tough to manage.

Remember calling up, you know, my structural consultant and saying, "Hey, I really need this shop drawing. I sent it to you two weeks ago." And they might say, "Oh, can you resend that to me?" And I'm thinking, "No, I don't want to resend that to you. I sent it, and you need to do your part of the job now." So it is really that low-level management of getting responses, things getting lost in emails when you get hundreds of emails a day. You can look at this information and say, "Where do I need to lean in? What can I do to help the team?"

And then all of this information that we're surfacing at the project dashboard led us to our group analytics. This is something that we heard from a lot of our customers—that the more projects they got in Part3, the harder it was to rely on that dashboard information. If you have 10 projects in Part3, going into each project dashboard, taking that time to do a deep dive and see where things are at when you need that quick glance overview, is a bit too time-consuming for them. So we let users create their own groups, whether you want to categorize that—maybe just commercial projects in one group, and you want to pull some data on that because you're submitting a new bid for a commercial project. Maybe you want to group by contract size because that will help you learn, you know, for future projects that you want to bid based on that contract size. Either way, we're surfacing this data to show you the project performance and the team performance, which jobs are performing well, which ones might be in trouble, what your group averages are, and how this data can help you make decisions.

So we'll dive into that when we do the actual demo. And then one new feature that we introduced is our admin overview. While the group insights are really great for giving you that opportunity to see things at a higher level, when you notice that a project is in trouble, now I want to see why that project is in trouble and how it is in trouble. This lets you do a deep dive into that project. For example, here I've sorted by past due tasks. I can see I have a lot of past due tasks, and if I drill down further, I would see that those are all submittals. So maybe I am swamped; maybe I can pull someone else from another project that's performing well and isn't super busy right now, put an additional resource with them, and help get some of those submittals off my plate. This will help with a lot of those conversations that you need to have.

So now we're going to jump into a demo, and I will start sharing that right now. This is what you see when you come into Part3. This is the landing page that everybody has. We have all of your projects by company, by your organization, and then your projects. These are the default groups that you get, but you can create your own groups. So this new "Project Group" button here allows you to decide if you want this to be a private group or a public group. Maybe you want to see how one studio is performing, so you're going to keep this private. Maybe you want to see how one PM is performing, and you want to keep that private. You can group by projects or by categories.

Categories—if you're a Part3 customer, you know that when you create a project, you can give it a tag, and this tag helps with your grouping. Maybe I just want to make a group of all of my commercial projects that are renovations. This is the focus that I want to have because I'm going to build a commercial renovation project and want to put in a bid. Or maybe we have a studio that just focuses on commercial. So I'm going to save that project group.

Oops. Now I've pulled in all of those projects, and I can view these analytics on the right-hand side here. I can see all of those projects that have that tag, and I get this kind of overview across the top. I can see my change instructions, submittals, all of that information, and an overview of these response times as an average across all of these groups. Again, if you're handling financials on this project, we'll show you how much money has been issued in change orders on these projects and what's currently outstanding in accepted quotations. This gives you an understanding of how much more is coming down the pipeline.

Then we get into this area down here, which is the response times. The colors are meant to tell you what's good, what's bad, and what's your average. I can see here our average response time across all of my commercial renovation projects is 8 days. That's not too bad for submittals, but I can see that this project is taking 16 days, when my contractual obligation is 10 days. So something is going on there, and I need to figure out what's happening. I can also see that this project has a lot more submittals than we anticipated, more than the average in that group. What is going on there?

So you can use this information to see what is happening. You can get your averages, see which projects have those numbers, and by clicking on them, have that quick link into your project. For example, here I can see 65 King Street is way overdue. Maybe this project also needs some help. If I click here, I'm brought right to that project dashboard we talked about. Keep in mind that this is all test information and might have some nonsense in it. But I can see that this is my submittal response time. I've returned 19, but I have quite a few in progress. I can jump in here and see which ones are in progress. I can also see my response times. These are very exaggerated numbers, but I can see that my electrical consultant is really slowing things down. Other consultants are doing fine, but for some reason, I'm having a hard time chasing electrical. That can be a really good example where you have the data to lean in and have those tough conversations.

Sometimes it's hard to have a tough conversation and just say, "Oh, I got some feedback that you're taking a bit long." But now you can actually say, "You're taking way too long to review submittals. This is your average on this project. These are the submittals that are still in your court. Why haven't you reviewed them? What's the holdup? Is our project not a priority?" Of course, you have those conversations. You can also see the different documents that are issued. How long is it taking the team to get documents out the door when they're issuing changes or instructions? And then there's an overall contract overage and where those overages are coming from.

You can also look at your values down here. I can see I still have a lot of changes that are coming from coordination. A lot of those are associated with mechanical and structural. So what's going on there? Looking at the values again, mechanical and structural have really high change values. The reasons are there as well. Were these drawings coordinated? What's going on? Why are we issuing all these changes? There's a lot of owner-requested changes. Do I need to talk to the owner about this? Change value by reason is also very high. Forty percent of the amount in this increase is because of owners. Again, this helps you have those tough conversations, but it also helps you see performance in a great way.

It's not always about the negative. You can use this to reward your team and see how things are going. We've heard from some people that they want to use this information from their project insights and their dashboard to reward people: "You're doing a great job. Thank you so much for all of your hard work. You're hitting your deadlines. You're great at managing this project." It's not always about the negative.

If I come back here to my homepage, we also have this "Admin Overview" area that I was talking about. If I click here, this is for admins at the org level. Not everyone sees this. This is just to help those higher-level people, maybe a principal or a director, that just want to have that quick glance at how things are going. As I mentioned before, you might have these meetings where you're only learning about the projects when something's gone wrong. But maybe you could have had a chance to jump in a little bit earlier before you waited too long to give them more resources or have a conversation with the GC: "Why are there so many RFIs? What are you guys doing?"

As an example, on my project in the past, you are a CA team, and you might have two CAs, and your GC has 30 people. They're just like all sending RFIs at you. I'm not going to respond to those in time; it's just not realistic.

So, you guys need to prioritize things. I'm just one person, so this is what you can kind of surface in those areas. As I mentioned before, you can view by project, view by team member, or view by document type. Maybe I want to look at all of my outstanding submittals—what is going on? It’s going to tell me all the submittals that I have on all of the projects. Or, I could view it by project. I can sort by overdue submittals. There are tons of submittals in Part3, so that's probably taken a while. But if I look at one of my other projects, I can see how well things are performing. Again, this is similar to the example I showed before, but you can kind of just see very quickly who is not performing and who needs some help.

You can view by team member, project, or document, and this helps you understand from that group insights level down to the project level, drilling down to who in that project might need help.

Now, I'm going to talk about what you can do with your data. Part3 is surfacing all of this quantitative data—from our project dashboards to our group insights to the admin overview. So, what can you actually do with that? We've heard from a lot of our customers that they’re using these stats in their bid packages to win more work. The data doesn’t lie. If you can show an owner how well your firm is performing, that’s very powerful. It speaks volumes to that owner because you can speak with confidence and accuracy about how your firm is actually doing. You might outbid another competitor because you have these stats, whereas they might just be speaking at a high level without quantitative data.

A lot of people have contracts based on relationships, but if you can get some data in there as well, that’s super powerful for you. It’s also really helpful for internal conversations—you have all the data across your projects, so you can have those conversations with your internal team members or your external team members. Maybe you have a consultant that you work with. We know that firms work with repeat consultants all the time. You’ve established a relationship, and you’re going to carry that electrical consultant on a lot of your projects. You like working with them, but maybe you need to have those conversations. Maybe they're performing really well, or maybe they're not performing, and you need to figure out, like, why aren’t we your priority?

But you can also have these conversations for positive reasons. Like I said, you can pull that data to reward people, have great conversations, and see how well you’re performing. Maybe you can take on more projects. You can figure out what you want to do with that and how it applies to your resource planning.

You can use the data to help shape the way you form your project teams, allocate resources, and then help teams before it's too late. That’s one of the big things we try to help surface for our customers. We want to give you confidence to know what is actually happening across your projects and across your firm. Because if we can’t surface that information for you, then there’s a gap in what we’re providing, and for you as well, because you're relying on us as one of your software tools. We want to help drive your decision-making and benefit your firm, not just your projects. More importantly, you want to keep your profits.

This is super important because if you can give an accurate bid, you’re more likely to retain your profits. You won’t need to have those difficult conversations about running out of hours or going in for a low bid. You need to do that sometimes to maintain a relationship or get a project, but it's obviously bad from a financial perspective and the growth of your firm. As we said, 46% of these project contracts are fixed fee or lump sum. You need to go in with accuracy to know that you're going to make money on this project.

From my own experience, it’s so painful to see change quotes come in and the GC is getting that 10% extra on every single one. You’re thinking, "Where’s my money? Why can’t I bill the hours on my project, but they get more money every single time?" So, make sure you're keeping those profits and use all this information to make decisions for your firm and establish that strategy for winning more work and setting up your projects.

So I'm going to stop now. We're going to take some questions. Jess is going to read for me. I know it's confusing—we have two Jess's. Jess is going to read for me, and we're going to go through and see which answers we can give you.

Jess R: Okay, we're going to ask that you put your questions in the chat. So far, we don't have anything, but you can pop one in there if you'd like. 

Jessica: If not, you can always reach out to us later. We have a lot of resources on our website, and we're going to post this webinar afterward. But you can always reach out to us at Support Part3. If you're a customer, you know that we'll get back to you right away. If you're not a customer, you can still reach out to us, and we're happy to chat.

Jess R: We do have a question from a raised hand, so I'm just going to open your mic. Go for it, Maggie.

Maggie: Can you hear me?

Jess R: Yes, we can. There we go!

Maggie: Great. When I went to the chat, it said that it's disabled. I tried to put my question, so that might be part of the problem. I do have a question, though.

Jess R: Yeah, go ahead.

Maggie: So when I look at my project and I look at the dashboard, and I see the change count and how it's divided by different disciplines, is there a way for Part3 to capture when multiple disciplines have been included in, say, a PCCO situation? Because right now, it's all individual.

Jessica: If it’s a multidisciplinary company?

Maggie: No, if the PC affects multiple disciplines. So, say, architectural, mechanical, electrical. Right now, it shows just an electrical change.

Jessica: Right, it separates them out. Yeah, I think, like I was saying, this is one of the first areas that we built, so we do have new things that we want to add to it. But I think that's a really good idea because we do group them. I can see, for that example, there might be a ripple effect—like a light changed, and so everything else changed with it because of that. So I think separating that out is a really good idea.

Maggie: Yeah, we just see that a lot with PCCOs, that it's not just one discipline that is affected. So it sort of skews the stats when it’s divided by discipline this way, I feel. But yeah, it's food for thought. Thank you.

Jessica: Yeah, no, we always want the feedback, so awesome. 

Maggie: Thanks!

Jessica: No problem.

Jess R: I think I opened the chat now to everybody, so let me know if you have any more questions. 

Jessica: I think I see some in the Q&A. So I think the first one is: Do we have a way to connect with data from timesheet programs like Ajera or Deltek? 

We are exploring an integration with Deltek right now. Our main integration is Procore, but no other integrations are really off the table for us. We're also exploring integrations with UNET and other platforms. Right now, though, no, we don't have that. We know that we have data, like how much time people spend on Part3, and could that help implement timesheets and tracking how long you spend on projects? I know myself that it's actually hard to think, at the end of the week, "What did I spend my time on, exactly?" But yeah, we don’t have that integration just yet.

I think another question, Emma?

Jess R: Yeah, this is a feature suggestion we got: On Procore-integrated projects, it adds to the cycle time if the GC hasn't closed the submittal, even if we've responded to it. This might skew some stats.

Jessica: Yes, definitely. That is one thing we’re working on. We’re chatting with Procore about how they calculate some of their time, so that's something we're working with their software team to resolve, so that we have those review and response times more accurate. There's also a gap, I think. In addition to that, if it's not closed, but if there's a "ball in court" that doesn't impact you as a company, it's also counting those hours. So we're working with Procore to resolve that.

Jess R: Awesome. And then with projects that are integrated with Procore, or the GC using another software for change orders, is there a way that we can track data with the RFIs in regard to cost impact and disciplines, just on the Part3 RFI side?

Jessica: Currently, from an RFI, you can create a quote, and so that’s linking the quote for you and the financial aspect of that RFI. We don’t have the ability to automatically pull that info, so if the GC is using Procore for change orders, we can’t automatically sync that data for you. But you could create quotations from the RFI, so that dollar value is always connected with that RFI if you’re not going through a full change order flow. I don't know if that answers the question. Sorry, I hope it does!

Jess R: Awesome. Okay, it looks like there’s no other... Oh, another one: I’ve also found that Procore settings can override my due date settings for submittals and RFIs. I.e., the GC sets the due date for three days, but we're allowed ten per spec.

Jessica: Yeah, that’s one thing we’re trying to figure out. One thing that we want to introduce to help with this is a priority status. That’s something we need to chat with Procore about as well. They don’t have a priority status for RFIs, and so if we want to keep the due date that you have as per your contract, but the GC submits something they think is urgent, it's hard to tell if it’s actually urgent because everything from their perspective is urgent. So, if they're giving you these short timelines to review something, is it reasonable? Is it actually a high priority, or are they just not giving you enough time? That’s something we’re trying to work out—how can we let them have some input on what’s a priority for them, while you maintain your review times as per your contract? From a design perspective, that’s definitely something we’re working on.

In terms of our Procore connection, we are creating some step-based reviews within the step. To explain that further, if the GC assigns you, right now you can add collaborators for a submittal, but maybe instead of just adding it as one generic group of collaborators, you want mechanical to go first, then electrical, then you. So, you’ll be able to create your own steps and set your own due dates for those steps. This will help you manage your consultants in terms of giving you enough time to actually do your response. That might be something that helps with that, because the GC won’t own those due dates—you will own those due dates.

Jess R: We have some live suggestions here. We asked the GC to note "urgent" on RFI titles, but yes, everything tends to be urgent for the GC.

Jessica: I know, it’s tough because I come from both worlds. I was a GC and I was an architect, but I tried not to be that person when I was a GC. I tried very hard!

Jess R: Awesome. Okay, we’ll leave it open for a couple more minutes here. 

Jessica: I really appreciate you guys taking the time to join the webinar. We always want feedback from Part3, and if you're a customer, hopefully, you see that we do take that feedback and want to implement it. All of these areas, like the dashboard, the insights, the admin features—these are just some of the things that we're doing, but we know there’s so much more we want to grow with. So, what you see is not ever going to be the final product. There's tons that we'll keep adding in there.

Jess R: Awesome, I think we’re good.

Jessica: Okay, cool. Thanks, guys! Have a good one!

Jess R: Thanks, have a great day!