Conversations are Team Meetings

What the construction industry is counting on is technology to make our communications clearer.  Industry leaders use video conferencing to have conversations – important to capture body language cues and readily available, apps abound on many smartphones and social networks today.  Seems like the project managers I know send an email following a conversation to recap and document what they just said.

Project Documents are Changing

Our documents are  easily accessible from Sharepoint, Construction Imaging, project management team portals, or Box.net as all generations are wanting access from anywhere, anytime.  (If you haven’t made the transition to electronic documents you better be thinking about it before you get busy again.) Mark-ups and edits occur on documents frequently and the construction plans seem to pose the biggest challenges.  Versioning control is a decision everyday.  Your records management integrity depends on it.

Collaborative Construction Communications Technology

What do construction team meetings look like today? They’re collaborative, mobile and transparent.  At least the successful ones are.  If you expect to collaborate solely with email you will need more hours in your day.  It’s time to transform your methods and it needs to work for internal and external teams.  One such solution is gaining respect in the industry.  It’s called Bluebeam Studio and I’m luckily part of their partner program.  Watch this short video and see what you think.  Your socks are about to be blown off!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTo2q8NllLc

The value is in working simultaneously or on your own time.  If you can’t make it to the Studio session it can be left open for you to chime in later.  If you’re running a pre-construction meeting you can meet virtually and work together. The flexibility is all there.  Have you used Studio?  Would you like to experience it for yourself?  Leave a comment and I’ll invite you and your team to a Studio project and collaborate together today.

This crosses all workforce generations and makes a visual record that’s easy to learn, review, share and save to your project document repository.

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Having volunteered to lead this workshop, students learned the importance of a LinkedIn headline, joining Linkedin groups, networking, volunteering and gaining experience at every turn – all while documenting their activities using their smartphones – capturing pictures, video and notes to showcase what students are doing outside the classroom. Each student added new elements to their profiles and contemplated what other LinkedIn applications (Slideshare, Box.net, Google Docs, etc) and social media they might want to use to enhance their findability.

With 55% of members attending the Construction Users Roundtable Conference expecting a labor shortage of construction managers, here are a few hungry students you may be interested in:
Graduate Students:
Navid Behzad
Arpita Ghosh
Christine Tancinco
Seniors:
Chrystine Bohman
Chris Celani
Jon Geele
Kim Young
Amanda Nichols
Kent Rinker
Juniors:
Sean Yeager
Sawyer Zuber
Kim Rahberger
Sophomores:
Sterling Smith
Freshmen:
Ashley Bernardez

Already Employed:
Patricia Traegde Sundt Construction

You may notice that many of these students are female. ASU excels at recruiting women to the construction careers through their Advancing Women in Construction program, connecting women business owners (mentors) with students(mentees). If you know high school students considering construction project management or engineering, share this post with them and have them consider emailing:
Dawn Rogers
Program Manager Recruitment and Retention
Del E. Webb School of Construction Management
Arizona State University

If you are looking for a speaker or in need of an educational workshop to help leverage LinkedIn, please contact me, Carol Hagen. I am available in person or via webinar for your business, group or association.

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