The dos and don’ts of running a technology pilot

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Construction has a reputation as a Luddite industry. Additional costs and risk aversion can make builders hesitant to try new technologies.

But success stories can be found, if one knows where to look.

Take, for example, Gilbane Building Co., Providence, Rhode Island, which used Trunk Tools of New York City to monitoring of 21,000 documents on a large stadium project in Wisconsin. The software saved Gilbane’s project team 20 to 40 minutes in travel and searching for answers to each question, and more than $100,000 in avoided rework.

The company thought the results were so successful that it continued sign an enterprise agreement with Trunk Tools to implement the technology nationally.

Edmonton, Alberta-based PCL, meanwhile, tested the load navigator from Broomfield, Colorado-based Vita Industrial, which helped the builder. work during high wind days while carrying giant shaped pieces through the air. The team saw a 30% increase in efficiency, and one project manager said it could save thousands to tens of thousands of dollars.

And Rochester, New York-based LeChase Construction Services adopted Oakland, California-based Join’s preconstruction technology planning tools to help streamline your work and meeting a key funding deadline for a $13.5 million school expansion in New York. The result? The team maintained steady momentum throughout the pre-construction process, and the school is scheduled for completion in the spring of 2025.

Key to all three success stories are the deliberate steps these contractors took to test these technologies before committing wholesale. It’s not simple: testing new technologies and services in a job or workplace can be a stressful and complicated task. In addition to the pressure to make the investment work, there may be a drive to make a profit or see immediate results.

Below, construction technology experts provide their list of dos and don’ts to help builders understand how best to pilot their next technology.

DO: Pilot for the right reasons

When piloting a new piece of technology, make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. A strong correlation between the needs of the business and the goals of the pilot committee is important, said Alex Belkofer, senior director of VDC at St. Louis-based McCarthy Building Cos. Louis.

“I’ve seen a lot of people go through doing a pilot with a small group of people, and they get a bottom line, but if it doesn’t meet the needs of the business, sometimes those pilots fizzle out,” Belkofer said.

McCarthy has stakeholders coming together to make these pilots happen: its innovation team, the emerging technology team and the VDC team, Belkofer said. This group, which he calls a community of practice, includes the workplace teams, such as field operations and preconstruction, that are implementing the pilot.

DON’T: skimp on investment

Companies that talk about innovation, but don’t walk the talk, can cause their teams to fail. It’s up to builders to make sure innovation teams can get what they need to make their pilots work, said Tim Gaylord, corporate director of innovation at Redwood City, Calif.-based DPR Construction.

While Gaylord acknowledged that margins in construction are tight, he noted how vital it is for innovation teams to be able to work on this type of technology.

“If you don’t have dedicated budgets that can help people try new things, and people help document and configure them, it’s very difficult to innovate when you’re on a project,” Gaylord said.

DO: Know exactly what your technology does

Builders need to know exactly what they expect to get out of it, said Jit Kee Chin, chief technology officer at Boston-based Suffolk Construction.

Chin used the example of Copilot technology from Microsoftthe tech giant’s AI assistant that integrates with Microsoft 365. He said it works best when it’s given a specific set of parameters to the questions users ask. If someone types in a random question and gets a right answer, Chin says, then that user isn’t using the technology to its full potential.

“Understanding that and then having a way to know what it takes to be successful, use it, and then overcome that adoption barrier is really important,” Chin said.

DON’T: He’s afraid of failure.

Experiments are experiments. Don’t be afraid to fail fast, Gaylord said.

“I think you can learn a lot from a tool that doesn’t work, but you have to have a structured way to capture that and share that, which is hard. Let your people try new things,” Gaylord said.

Chin noted that construction is a high-risk industry. But that can’t stop innovators.

“Take a risk. The industry needs to change,” Chin said.

DO: Learn from your peers

The world of construction is big – connecting with technologically advanced peers is a great way to better understand these processes.

Belkofer recommended going to conferences, talking to stakeholders and user groups, and sharing notes with other innovators to get a feel for the pulse of the industry and what it’s doing with technology.

“Get it. There’s a network of people out there who are probably doing and pursuing many of the same things as you,” Belkofer said.

However, learning from peers does not necessarily mean other companies, it could even be internal.

And again, don’t look at failures as, well, failures. There’s a lot a builder can take from a technology that doesn’t turn out as expected, Gaylord said. For example, knowing why it failed allows an innovation team to pass on the lessons so the next person doesn’t make those mistakes.

“It’s like investing in the stock market, right? Not all of them are going to be winners, but if you can learn from them and share those lessons learned so people don’t duplicate those efforts and waste their time, that’s huge,” Gaylord said.