94% of C-suite women have played sports. Caitlin Clark, the star point guard for Iowa and the new record-holder for career scoring in Division I,is the athlete everyone’s talking about. “Her away games averaged some 13,000 fans, more than twice as high as the average for non-Iowa games at those colleges, ESPN data shows. A couple of times, her games drew twice as many fans as the next best attended game,” point out Courtney Cox and Francesca Paris in the New York Times. Beginning in 1972 with the passage of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, women in athletics has steadily grown and so has ..read more

“StoaOne AI”, developed with Microsoft, has scoured 8,000 documents for information to pass along to project teams and help them with their builds. A second tool, which will mine billions of data points from health and safety observations and past incidents to predict, prevent and mitigate risks, is also in development. “We’ve got to use technology to make people more productive,” says CEO Leo Quinn. Read the FULL STORY HERE ..read more

Recently, one of LCI-Qatar’s members, Tony Jacob, a Management Consultant for Excelledia Quality Consulting, successfully completed all 12 Construction Accelerator® online video courses including Last Planner System®, Takt planning, Target Value Delivery, A3 decision-making, Processing and Value Stream Mapping, and Continuous Improvement. Two years ago LeanConstructionInstitute-Qatar (LCI-Qatar) the premier construction membership association in the region, noted for its leading edge construction learning, and ConstructionAccelerator® collaborated to bring this comprehensive Lean learning s ..read more

What a Successful Peer-to-Peer Superintendents Group Learned By Dan Fauchier Fourth in the Series Previously I reported that for over two years now, my friends and colleagues, Adam Hoots and Buddy Brumley, have been organizing and facilitating “Old Dawg Real Field Talks”, a twice monthly virtual meeting of superintendents and a couple of trade foremen tackling topics of immediate interest in the field. Many of our readers were intrigued by the questions the Old Dawgs had posed, and wanted to know what their responses were. Well, here’s the voice of literally centuries of experience! What is t ..read more

By Dan Fauchier For over two years now, my friends and colleagues, Adam Hoots and Buddy Brumley, have been organizing and facilitating “Old Dawg Real Field Talks”, twice monthly virtual meeting of superintendents and a couple of trade foremen proposing topics of interest, voting on them, and then discussing the “winners” in depth. It’s similar to a Lean Coffee format, but the group is really a great example of peer-to-peer learning. Does it work? Judge for yourself from samples of two years of feedback in the participants’ Plus/Deltas: This group is amazing. It’s really great we’re going thro ..read more

By Dan Fauchier Second in a series. In our first installment we offered some statistics our own research has yielded: “Primarily, how do YOU, yourself, learn new, better ways of doing your work?” 57% of you said, “From others, my peers” 29% responded “Videos online” 7% each for “Podcasts” and “Company Training”. If you missed that discussion, you can find it HERE. But is our research unique and limited to the built environment (design and construction) world? No. Small teams – Widespread Benefits As far back as 2008, Barron and Hammond, writing for the George Lucas Educational Foundation, re ..read more

In January 2024 we polled a group of LinkedIn, design, and construction professionals, “Primarily, how do YOU, yourself, learn new, better ways of doing your work?” 57% of you said, “From others, my peers” 29% responded “Videos online” 7% each for “Podcasts” and “Company Training”. It may surprise you, especially if you are one in charge of company training, but it does not surprise the researchers who have studied this! McKinsey found, and Harvard Business Review reported, “less than half of organizations have instituted any kind of formal peer-to-peer learning. One in three respondents sai ..read more

In a previous post, we examined why a Navigant survey of One Million RFI’s found that the average RFI costs $1,371 just to process, and the average project has 17.2 RFI’s per Million dollars. If you missed that post, you can FIND IT HERE. We started with the question “How can I install what I didn’t design and don’t understand?” The answer, the Solution is relatively simple. Save a million dollars by understanding what to install because you helped design it. Use Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) as your contracting method, a Big Room as your venue, and Target Value Delivery (TVD) as your proc ..read more

“Hey I didn’t design this, what does this mean here? I can’t install what I don’t understand.” So we ask! Typical contracts, even design-build, do not have all the decision makers on a project at the table at the same time, from beginning to end. Even if the CM or GC are working closely with the design team (rare) the trades and suppliers have separate contracts. This contractual “siloing” leads to RFIs. That’s because it’s inevitable that the estimates, scope, BIM or blueprints will have missing information and will not address everything. So someone documents a question, requiring someone to ..read more

Modern trends in the construction industry, such as Lean Construction, Building Information Modeling (BIM), and Green Buildings, have increased the importance of prefabrication and modularization, boosting the demand for long steel products. According to a recent report by Allied Market Research titled “Long Steel Market by Process, Product Type, and Application: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2021–2030,” the global long steel market, valued at $476,213 million in 2020, is projected to reach $731,934 million by 2030, with a CAGR of 4.1% from 2021 to 2030. READ MORE HERE ..read more