5 things Engineering and Construction projects can learn from agile Systems and Technology Projects

Both Systems & Technology and Engineering Construction as disciplines are heavily reliant on project execution in order to deliver value to their customers. Both industries continue to improve their project management practices. This blog looks at some of the things that Engineering & Construction projects could learn from Systems & Technology. 

 This is intended to be a fun look at the differences of the two different disciplines and is presented only as a concept that may trigger some ideas as to how to improve your own project execution processes.

Reusability of Assets

Systems & Technology professionals reuse. They modularise and reuse between projects across the industry. A new software development project reuses code at nearly every level of then design. Its very common to use modules that can be leveraged across many projects. Engineering on the other hand nearly always design bespoke assets for a purpose. The industry could look to newer and innovative ways of modularising design to maximise reuse. Done intelligently, engineering & construction could reinvent supply chains akin to those in manufacturing. 

Investment in productivity.

Systems & Technology projects focus on making their own teams more productive (sometimes to a fault). Work practices, and technologies are integrated into the way the teams work. Team have well defined workflows, and each step is enabled with integrated productivity tools. Engineering & Construction projects rarely do a good job of defining their work processes, or investing in technology, despite a plethora of technology being available.

Ongoing performance improvement

Systems & Technology projects (namely agile ones) have improvement built into the process. These projects do a great job of measuring productivity and making it visible and driving improvement from this data. Due to agile nature of these projects they are able to incorporate the information back into the process and as a result continual improvement is a result. Much of this inherent improvement is predicated on having data available to measure and improve.

Portfolio Management

Because organisations have comparatively many more Systems and Technology projects it is common for the portfolio management practices to be better developed for these types of projects. Systems & Technology projects are managed for health at a portfolio level, comparatively better than engineering & construction projects. Systems & Technology projects often have better defined demand management practices as well as good cadence across the enterprise. 

 Test Driven Design

Over the last decade Systems & Technology projects have started to integrate with quality within the process. Test Driven Development involves writing test scripts before the code is developed.  By investing in testing in this way the organisation is able to automate testing and validate the function of the code. Often, in engineering and construction projects commissioning is left until the end of the process and consequently, commissioning a plant is both arduous, time consuming and risky.

 I hope this list provides some insight into agile practices which may inspire the improvement of the way engineering and construction projects think about their own processes.