Guide

The world is quickly evolving, and if your public agency is not moving ahead with technological trends, it can slow or hinder your capital program. According to McKinsey, large capital construction projects are, on average, 20 months behind schedule and 80% over budget. Today, just about everything is digital, and the pandemic has rapidly accelerated this fact of life.

The more connected your public agency is, the more control you will have over your projects. In fact, according to IDC, within a few years, 75% of all IT spending will be on technologies that will digitize the workforce. But, we won’t lie. It can be a big undertaking to move your agency fully online and deploy an enterprise-level system to replace your point solutions. We have compiled 10 actions your public agency should take to digitize its capital program.

Speed up approvals through digital signature capabilities and leave an automated audit trail of decisions using an electronic signature tool such as DocuSign. A Forrester study recently said that a typical organization would save 49,000 worker hours over a three-year period using electronic signatures.

Projects of high value and complexity require an exceptionally efficient approval management process. It is time-consuming to create and approve contracts, manage change orders, and track contractor performance before the formal contract closure. You need a digital tool that helps you effortlessly move contracts from creation through closeout without missing a step. Implementing electronic signatures will give stakeholders visibility, improve communication, and leave a digital paper trail, so you always know where approval is at any time, keeping your construction projects on schedule.

Share the vital information the public needs to know, allow them to review your capital programs, and share feedback in one online location. Moving your public engagement online will make it easy to set up a capital program with all the necessary data for the public to consume. Users can easily search and comment on proposed projects relevant to their location using a map-based public portal. With the click of a button, the public can access information on a map that allowsthem to assess proposed projects in their neighborhood in a meaningful way.

When it’s time to compile, analyze, and review the data, having a digital tool simplifies the process and speeds up the review.

It takes a lot of effort and time for an IT department to maintain your homegrown systems. With so much tech being used across departments, it can drain resources in the IT department, which may already be spread thin. Your design and construction teams will operate more efficiently and become more productive once there is a consistent way of working. Top-performing owners and construction companies in a KPMG study reported that 69% of organizations have integrated project management reporting systems, and 76% of those are focused on technology to attract and retain talent.

When using disjointed systems, onboarding new staff, especially mid-project, can be a huge undertaking and an inefficient use of time. Once your organization is fully digital, onboarding new staff can be much simpler, as everyone understands what’s expected.

Consultants and contractors add an extra layer of complexity to most projects, and poor jobsite coordination and inadequate communication can lead to budget and schedule overruns. A digital system will keep everyone on the same page with an up-to-date view of the latest plans, documents, and changes, including internal teams and external stakeholders such as contractors, consultants, and inspectors. Digital systems provide role-based permissions so that each user only has access to the data they need.

Giving your consultants and contractors access to your digital systems will allow you to track all the intricacies of your project and ensure no information is missing. This will help reduce or eliminate project delays and contractor claims (and will leave you with a data trail if it’s needed). Streamlining this communication is an important factor that the Utah Department of Transportation attributes to estimated savings of $19.5 million per year!

Perhaps one of the greatest perks of digitizing your agency is the ability to access project information anytime, anywhere, reducing poor coordination and productivity at the jobsite. Paper forms for appraisals and surveys are a thing of the past with mobile apps for fieldwork. In addition to being “greener”, this will speed up the process, as the forms are processed in real time onsite. Your digital system then stores all the data together, making future access to the information simple.

There will also be fewer human data-entry errors without the need to re-enter information from paper surveys into the system: fewer errors mean greater time and cost savings.

Going digital will help you seamlessly integrate your current tools and systems, streamlining your entire capital improvement program from start to finish. When working with multiple stakeholders across different departments or vendors, you can save your organization a wealth of time by effortlessly integrating components like your financial systems, data warehouse, ESRI/GIS mapping, and DocuSign into one capital planning and management solution.

The best digital tools allow you to bring together everything you need to plan, track, automate, and manage program funds, budgets, and schedules in one place. Using a single unified system will improve efficiency (time, money, and resources) across your many departments. For example, the City of Las Vegas brought together the city council, finance, planners, and project managers into a single enterprise-wide system to accelerate the production of their annual CIP report by 3-4 months each year.

Gartner reports that the adoption of cloud technologies is accelerating and becoming the norm, with government spending on cloud technologies growing at around 17% per year.

You know your capital program best, so why stress about digitizing your organization when there are experts to help you? The adoption and success of new software systems often depend more on implementation than on the software itself. It’s essential you find a professional services team with a deep knowledge of both the product and the industry. Hire experts who will work with your team to configure every process, screen, form, and report to meet your agency’s unique needs so you can focus on the day-to-day operations of your agency.

Imagine if everyone in your agency used the same program and had the same up-to-date data? Utopia. Spreadsheets, emails, and homegrown systems are a thing of the past. These disjointed systems are hard to manage, prone to errors, and take up way too much time. According to the Construction Industry Institute, implementing enterprise-wide best practices will result in an average cost saving of 4.3% and reduce overall project schedules by 7.5% by bringing planning, design, procurement, and field operations together to achieve overall program objectives.

A single, agencywide solution can manage everything from capital planning to project management to maintenance. Automating your systems and processes will save your agency time, money, and resources.

Digitizing your public agency will boost collaboration, improve productivity, and reduce rework and risk. Aurigo Masterworks is built on the Masterworks Cloud Platform, an enterprise-proven platform that gives you the scalability, performance, security, and reliability your teams need, and your IT organization will appreciate. Aurigo products are easy to use and accessible from any browser or mobile device. Schedule your Aurigo Masterworks demo today and take the first step towards digitizing your agency.