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In his own words, Troy Thompson loves to program.
The director of operations at Big-D Construction has appreciated construction planning since his time in college, when he took construction project management programming courses.
Thompson has worked with several programs with today’s operating systems and tools, and now Salt Lake City-based Big-D uses a Planera solution to keep its jobs on time, train new employees and condense schedules.
Big-D teams understand the use of Planera at least 40 percent faster than their previous software, Thompson said, and see 20 percent more quality in “baseline” project schedules because of the software’s built-in grading system.
Here, Thompson talks about his work with Pleasanton, Calif.-based Planera, how he keeps his teams connected, and what technology has to offer Big-D.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
CONSTRUCTION DIVER: How did you meet Planera and develop a relationship with the company?
TROY THOMPSON: We wanted to be able to teach more people to code as we went from three offices to 19. Frankly, as we’re growing now—we’re at $3.5 billion now, and we’re growing to $5 billion by 2030—I need to build a lot more programmers into our company.
We wanted a tool that was very easy to learn and use, even for people who don’t yet have programming knowledge. In Oracle P6, that’s a little harder to do, unless you have corporate programmers, who can use it all day and do well in that space.
Planera, on the other hand, is extremely intuitive and easy to teach people, even if they don’t know how to program. If you start with the fundamentals and basics of CPM programming, they get the hang of it quickly.
We had an open session with Planera where they showed us the tool and what it can do. Because of my programming background, I instantly recognized how easy it was to use.
I love the fact that they show you how to do this in canvas view, or what I call logic view. So you’re starting with a blank canvas and you’re adding activities, relationships, activity durations on that blank canvas and connecting them. You’re adjusting the relationships, you’re adjusting the timing, and it’s very, very easy to teach and it’s very easy to do.
What problems did you want to solve with Planera?
We’ve identified that we probably overspend general conditions by, I’ll just say, millions of dollars. This is largely due to the quality of our schedules – I’ll be honest, we have decent schedules, but a lot of times when a project has a lot of owner changes, our project managers don’t necessarily want to put in a change request because of one small thing that happened.
Troy Thompson
Permission granted by Big-D Construction
Instead, they always think they can get that time back. It’s a great attitude to have. But it’s also what I call death by 1,000 paper cuts.
Because that little thing turns into two, and then three or four. The problem is that all of a sudden you have a 12% range change and there’s no way to get that much time back.
So what we’re trying to teach our people is, as hard as it is, have the conversation with the owner up front.
How did Big-D pitch it to his employees?
What I decided to do was to roll it out to a couple of offices and see how the users picked it up and felt about it. I did this with two groups in Arizona, my heavy industrial group and my southwest commercial group, both located in Tempe, Arizona. From there, I started adding other business units.
One by one, we continued to add these groups. This has been the evolution since we saw it.
How is the training going for the software?
We continue to have open work sessions where we bring two or three of the Planera people online.
We’ll take two to five of our prospects into a 90-minute work session where we’ll show them how powerful Planera is in bringing together what I call a “workroom.”
In other words, subcontractors can participate. You can count on the participation of excellent people in the programming. You can get management or leadership involved, and everyone can be working live in this collaborative work session, whether it’s creating the schedule or adding a snippet network for some big change that’s happened in a project.
Through this evolution, it continues. And we definitely see, in our not-so-distant future, maybe next year, probably turning it into an enterprise solution to some degree.
It becomes a road map to success.
