Ledcor Project Management Database Gets the Project Back on Track.

Ledcor is a world class construction company that is involved in huge projects ranging from office buildings to roads to pipelines.  Another one of their unique projects started three years ago, when Ledcor was commissioned by the Alberta Government to help build 420 two-way radio towers to create a common frequency for Emergency Response Teams to help them communicate when a disaster strikes.

When Bob, the lead project manager, joined the team six months into the project he knew one of his first tasks was to fix the project management system.  At that point, the building of the towers was being tracked by a spreadsheet.  It was a massive spreadsheet that was 256 columns by 500 rows, and, to say the least, it was not helping move the project forward, but instead only causing pain to it’s users.  As Bob had worked around the world at other world-class companies, he had been exposed to the power of online databases, and he thought QuickBase was the best solution to get this project back under control.   

Challenges:

• Loss of Time – The massive spreadsheet was causing a major loss of time.  It was not uncommon for employees to spend hours looking for a piece of information – truly the proverbial needle in a haystack.
• Information Not Being Entered – Since the spreadsheet was so unfriendly to the users, it is no surprise that the project coordinators would avoid it at all costs, and try to get by on their own personal workarounds.
• Senior Management Reporting – One of Bob’s most hated aspects of the spreadsheet was the pivot tables that would take 2 hours to update every week, and they still couldn’t report on the necessary deliverables.
• Querying the Data – Due to the spreadsheet having missing information and simply being hard to report from, Ledcor was having a difficult time assessing what where the actual bottlenecks stopping the towers from being built on time.

“Me and another girl spent all morning searching for one piece of information in the project management spreadsheet – it has wasted so much time”

Solutions:

• Customized Dashboards – Each role in the project was able to have their own dashboards, customized to their roles and workflow within the building of the towers.
• Real Time Reporting – All of the reports that were needed to be produced for Senior Management were made and saved.  And since they are in real time, they would never have to be run again.  Now, all the time required is a click of the mouse.
• Project Management Workflow - Every time a new project is started all the tasks involved (over 100) are automatically laid out with a single click.  Every task has forecast dates and duration days – now it’s easy to query which tasks are the bottlenecks holding up the project. 
• Quick Build -  Less than 2 months.  The solution was designed, implemented and staff trained in two months, as anyone who has done software development knows that for a project of this scope that is light speed.

 “we needed a quick impletation because the old spreadsheet was causing so much pain”

 Results:

• Time Saved – For Bob alone the time savings are at least 100 hours per year in Senior Management Reporting (not to mention the time savings for the team as a whole).  With all his reports saved and in real time, he will never need to look at Pivot Tables again!
• Bottlenecks Identified – The building of the 420 sites were starting to fall behind.  Ledcor has now been able to identify the tasks that are the problem areas and can take the necessary steps to change the situation.
• Collaboration and Communication Amongst Team – All of the personal workarounds have stopped and everyone is now working off one centralized system.  Since more than once person can be in the system at a time, the project coordinators can share information and collaborate on the project in real time.