What Seems Like a Complicated Problem, Can be a Very Simple Solution
I recently had a meeting with a group of project managers and engineers at a mid-size oil & gas producer. For managing their construction projects, this team have an immediate need to improve efficiency, improve project cost reporting, and reduce the amount of manual movement of documents. Especially the high number of documents shared through emails. Throughout the meeting, the four guys were passionately articulating their many diverse challenges they have day-to-day and month-to-month. Each time one piped up to speak about his own version of the ideal solution they needed, another would chime in with a slightly different take on his version of utopia. They went back and forth just unleashing their troubles and desires for a better system. My role in meetings like this is often to listen and facilitate. And, ultimately, to distill their needs down to a straightforward plan that would improve how they operate, and simplify their lives. Although they brought up many examples and frustrations - the underlying cause of what was truly troubling them was not that complicated. In their case, the challenges they articulated in our meeting could be broken into three broad categories: Field tracking of: labor hours, materials received & used, and daily log information Project Cost Reporting related to the above tracking captured. Reporting that’s easily accessible by multiple users through a common ‘cloud’ interface Document Workflow management and multi-user collaboration & approvals around documents Their perception was that their struggles are quite involved and complicated, but in reality, a very simple solution would eliminate a large percentage of their current pain. This perception is common amongst groups like this, because their daily work-lives are over-complicated by the many manual steps they have
