Stantec

Mo Shana’a: We’re now going to have Jan, who’s going to be sharing with us how he’s used Morta for resource planning and tracking. In every single one of these talks, especially the use case ones, it’s usually the very first person who’s implemented a use case within the Morta community. And Jan is the first person who’s implemented anything related to resource planning and tracking on the platform.

So really looking forward to having him share his perspective with us. And he has actually been through a whole battle to make sure that we can go live today. So I really, really appreciate him being with us and making it work.

Jan: Thanks, Mo. So, good afternoon everyone. I’m Jan. I am senior associate in Buildings at Stantec. I’m based in Reading. I’ve been with Stantec for about 10 years and my background is in mechanical engineering. And then for the last couple of years I moved to the digital side of things across Buildings.

I typically would get involved with everything around ISO 19650. Last year I started looking more into other tools that we can use for day-to-day operations. And when we got into Morta about a year ago, we started looking at other uses, and one of them was resource management.

So I’m going to talk about what was the typical problem, what we had to deal with, what was our challenge, and how we decided to overcome that using Morta. And then I would like to spend most of the time looking at the live demo to show you how the system is set up and how it can help with resource management on construction projects.

So the problem we are facing with resource management, we can separate it into, say, four different categories. The first and the main one is to know who’s available when projects are changing every day. None of the projects are perfect. Clients have different demands and projects get put on hold, so it’s sometimes quite challenging to keep everyone busy or not too busy.

The long term challenges are planning what we’re going to be doing in the next four weeks, what we’re going to be doing in the next three to six months. One thing is project winning and that’s completely separate from that. This is more about getting the actual resources and people who will be delivering the projects, and that also fits into recruiting and informing our HR team about gaps. What gaps we need to fill in terms of skills.

The last category is making sure that we have the right people delivering the expertise on the projects.

So if you now look at those four categories, the typical approach was a number of different spreadsheets. It could be standard Excel spreadsheet, it could be a different database, but nothing was really talking together. And it would cause a lot of issues. Specifically when we work on major projects between different offices in different time zones, that becomes more and more challenging.

So our challenge was to move all the Excel tables and everything into one system, in this case Morta, and give access to everyone and very quickly get everyone up to speed, and then create some useful dashboards, which can then inform the wider team and ultimately everyone who’s using Morta.

So this is a very simple process. Our resourcing is focused about projects, so we’re not looking at keeping people busy, we’re basically making sure that the projects are delivered on time and focusing everything about project delivery.

So then we would be looking at a very simplified workflow where the initial resource request would come from the project managers. So project managers would every Friday look at the plan for the next week, or if they know for the next four to six weeks. So as far as they can see in terms of their projects and put data into Morta in terms of who, how many engineers they need, how much time they expect to spend on the project.

This would get put in one massive database on Morta. So that’s the part in the middle. And from here we would drive some statistics and dashboards, which I’m going to show you in Power BI, and also look at long-term resourcing.

So when it’s done on Friday, it comes from the project needs. And then on Monday we have different resourcing groups and those would look at the needs for projects, if any person is overutilised. And we would go through a moderation. So for instance, if somebody’s overbooked or not booked at all, what can we do about it? And also we would look at the skills matrix and if the people are right for the project, and this would get then pushed into Power BI and shown to the whole team.

Now we can look at the live demo, which is more interesting than slides.

So this is our setup. That’s what everyone can access. For people who know how Morta works, from here up we have pages for people to access, and the tables below are the backend of the whole system.

So the key planning is in the resource planning and that pulls to the main table. One is staff summary where we have all members of the staff from different teams, and then all projects, and then discipline, office and role are used just to categorise it.

As you’ll see in here we have, say in this case, about 150 people split into different offices, disciplines, different roles. And we also assign a status because we want to keep the data, we want to maintain the history of the data. We wouldn’t delete any person and we would just change if someone leaves or terminates or something like that to help us filter it when someone leaves.

Then we have a summary of projects. It gives you some basic statistics about a project code, project name, who’s the project manager and what are the statuses of the projects. And then which discipline is delivering the project.

Now this comes into resource planning and what you see in here, it’s row data in the default view that we have pulling into Power BI. And then we have a few predefined views, which then are pulled on the pages. And essentially how this is set up, one row will tell you the name of a person, a project, what they’re working on, and what you see on the right, it’s how many days a week we expect them to spend each week for the next couple of months.

So if you look at how this actually works on a daily basis, on the resourcing dashboard we have three different tables. One is present workload, so this is done through dynamic tables, and I would see my workload only, projects where I’m PM.

I would see my projects and all the staff working on those projects. I can look at those numbers. And then I have all my project details. So if you saw as a person’s workload, I can see that I’m working on three different projects. I might have some tasks and notes here. This is a free text box. I would see who’s the PM for this project and how many days I’m expecting to spend on the project.

Now I can change those data in here or we can lock it down so people who are not set up as PMs can’t change the hours and they can just see what they will be working on.

Obviously also see on the bottom a summary. So how many days? So ideally everyone would be on five. If it’s more or less, that’s what happens in the moderation.

Then on Project 12, this is a different number of staff. And again, how much time they’re expecting to spend for the next few weeks. And in the bottom there is project details where we would mostly change what stage of the project it is, if it’s stage one or five, we can change the statuses from bid, live, completed, on hold. If we mark it as complete, it would disappear from all the tables in here so it doesn’t get too messy.

Now this is kind of what an individual can see and where the PMs would do most of their work, specifically let’s say on Fridays to get their planning for the next couple of weeks.

Then on Mondays where we do the moderation meeting, we would look at the resource management. A few of the tables are essentially the same just grouped by a different column. So on project workload, we would be looking at individual projects. On staff workload, we’ll be looking at individual people.

It seems like a lot for, in this case, 150 people, but typically it would get disseminated to much smaller groups so we can look at Oxford office, there’ll be less people, and then we can choose a discipline. You would see the summaries in here, where you would know five, so zero is no work assigned.

In addition, we have some projects where those are most of the time in bid stage where we have an option to have unassigned work. That means if you know that some of those would happen, we might add here, we need a technician two days a week for the next couple of weeks. And we have the question mark until we change it to an actual person.

So we also have an overview of work which is coming but hasn’t been assigned to anyone yet. So when we get to a point that we see some people are not busy, we can see if they can help with something from this list.

Now, this is where most of the work would happen. And dashboards, one is for reporting and forecasting. Those are done in Power BI. On our live hub those are refreshed every hour or every half an hour. In here it’s refreshed once a day.

So this would show an average utilisation across the last 12 months, or we can change the dates to see when we want to look at the utilisation. But this kind of gives you the higher level numbers across the team. You can look at different disciplines, different offices, but you can look at it a bit more visual, colour coded, what people do.

Blue is over five, so blue means people have too much work. So we need to see what’s happening there. And also zero to five would be from red to green to give us some nice graphic about what’s happening and have the heat map.

And then we have a list for annual leave so everyone knows who’s going to be off and when, so we can make sure that some people or some teams don’t book holiday at the same time and give us better visibility.

And then for senior management and board meetings, we have certain KPIs and those are around the revenue. So we would know what projects we’re winning, how much fee we’re getting. That would be a completely separate system. This is more focused about how much fee we expect to generate. And if you remember on the staff summary, we assign rates for individuals so we know how much they would be charged per hour. So this could feed based on how projects are busy or how people are busy towards the expected forecast of the fee generation.

Again, spread by offices, different disciplines. So there’s plenty of options for that.

And then what’s really cool about that, when you put together the numbers, how much individual people cost or how much we would charge for those per hour, how many hours or how many days we expect them to complete a project, this can give you a very easy to understand fee burn-down schedule.

So you can look at Project 57 and we would know that to complete the project, it might cost us £30,500, on average just under £3,000 a month. So assuming we can forecast in real time and be very accurate, how much would it take to complete the project? We have some forecast rather than just guessing.

And then obviously from other systems we can see how much we actually quoted the project for. And those numbers are then the actual upgrade. This is, let’s say, forecast focused around who would be working on the project for how long.

And we made it to the end of the presentation.

Mo Shana’a: We did. That was amazing. It was as inspiring as I expected it to be. There have been a few comments in the chat, everyone has been mind blown.

I just want to quickly, before I ask the question, I want to tell people a quick story. So, when Jan started using the platform, he wanted to use the platform and then he had to go through it and get approval and all of that.

Got approval I think at 5:00 PM on a Friday evening, or something like that. And I was getting emails at around 10 or 11:00 PM on Friday and throughout that weekend about things like lookups and all kinds of things on a weekend sprint building TIDPs at that point.

But I always say, that’s to me the indication of someone who’s going to do amazing things with a platform. And I think everyone has been mind blown by what they just saw with the resource planner and tracker.

So, thank you so much for sharing that. Just one quick question because it’s been asked: the employee data and project data and so on and so forth, have you inputted, how did you get it into the system to begin with?

Jan: So there’s one question we’re going to have actually for you in the next couple of months, maybe. We currently run this for 450 people. When we invite people in Morta, we have to add the name and then associate the name as a tag when we invite them so they get the dynamic table for their individual resourcing.

But in the future we might be looking to expand it for hundreds of people, so we might need to find a little bit easier solution for how to bulk upload.

Mo Shana’a: Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that. I think, again, that’s another example of we don’t have to do it all in one go. I’m gonna directly link it to this question which is leading to: are we linking it to the HR systems and so on and so forth.

And I’m sure that’s what we’ll be talking about. But that didn’t need to happen as a first step because it added a lot of value regardless, and it’s another area that can be improved upon as you’re looking to scale the implementation. So thanks for sharing that.

Jan: I think the biggest lesson is to keep it as simple as possible and then people use it. And to put this in perspective, the tool was built over two weekends and then implemented for 450 people within two and a half weeks.

Mo Shana’a: Amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks a lot Jan. Thanks for sharing that with us.