Building a Better, Data‑Driven Construction Industry: Insights from Paul Gandy
For more than two decades, Paul Gandy, President of the The Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) and Acumine’s Board Advisor, has been responsible for leading businesses delivering a wide variety of construction projects – from some of the UK’s most complex major programmes to portfolios of smaller but operationally critical works. Across his extensive leadership career, one theme has remained constant: despite an explosion of available digital tools, the construction industry still struggles with the fundamentals of understanding, capturing, and using project data well.
Here he offers a comprehensive perspective on why the industry continues to lag, what needs to change, and how solutions like Acumine can help organisations finally make the shift from managing data to managing from data.
“I recall spending several hours reading through the monthly report on one major project and … concluding that I still didn’t know what the status of the progress really was and whether we were in trouble or not!”
What The Industry Still Gets Wrong With Data
My first exposure to genuinely data‑driven reporting came during the early days of PFI in the late 1990s. Projects were large, complex, and financially exposed. Programmes were demanding with significant penalties for underperformance. In that environment, leaders had no choice but to develop a deeper understanding of project progress, cost, productivity, and risk.
Even at that time, using what we would now consider to be archaic and certainly not “fit for purpose” tech and software, some teams were managing to achieve valuable insights using nothing more than spreadsheets, manual measurement, and disciplined reporting routines. What surprises me is not how advanced some of those early processes were, but how little the industry has progressed since.
There are of course exceptions where the baton has been picked up and taken forward. However far too many businesses still rely on rough assessments of progress on site, with second-hand (or even more remote) reporting to the senior management. These can be based as much on opinion or ‘gut feeling’ as fact, with complex or unhelpful presentation of key data, including that for commercial, financial, safety and quality.
I recall spending several hours reading through the monthly report on one major project and, after getting to the end, concluding that I still didn’t know what the status of the progress really was and whether we were in trouble or not!
From a governance point of view, a lesson I learnt when responsible for delivering both major projects and large portfolios of smaller projects is that it’s critical to have a direct line of site to evidence-based project reporting.
What I want to see is the “direction of travel” – are we trending in line with the original plan, are we recovering or diverging from the plan over time. This applies as much to commercial and financial issues such as unapproved changes, cash position, preliminaries spend etc as it does to programme and productivity.
And of course we shouldn’t forget that data on quality and safety is not just important in its own right, it can also be a leading indicator of other issues on a project.
I’ve also seen the benefit of being able to get inside the data –such as to understand which trades are really driving performance and why, really getting under the skin of productivity. High-level statistics might be attractive because they are simple and easy to digest but they don’t tell the whole story, in fact often don’t tell the true story.
Understanding And Defining Your Data Reporting
This all starts with two critical things.
Firstly, you need to understand the data that sits behind your original plan – and I use the word “plan” deliberately, not “programme”. By plan I mean the financials and commercial aspects as well as the programme, i.e. where is the money in the project, what labour levels are expected, what are the statistics anticipated around cash and profit generation over the life of the project, what is the expected level of quality non-compliances open at any given time, how much cost per month do we expect the workforce to generate, what is the prelims spend over time, and so on. Without this information, and without embedding it in the baseline for reporting you are really missing a golden opportunity.
Secondly, you need to establish how data will be collected. Of course, financial data will be embedded in your ERP and the hardest part will probably be getting that to directly talk to your reporting, or else how will you check procurement progress, or quality and safety performance, and etc. Just knowing who is on site is critical as well, resource levels go to the heart of productivity, and the data needs to be sound. These days most projects should be operating digital ID systems such as turnstiles or gates and biometric information, but consider, does the system enable you to differentiate between total hours on site, such as the hours spend out in the field versus hours in the canteen? It matters.
At the project level, meaningful progress reporting must be based on measurable quantities: counting windows, concrete bays, service risers, endpoints commissioned. This is what enables reliable productivity analysis, not drawing drop‑lines on a Gantt chart.
This basic data is the foundation of progress and productivity reporting. And it’s the job of the construction site management and engineering team as least as much as the job for a planner.
Armed with the data behind the plan, we can start to report in a useful way. What matters most is ‘trend visibility’ with visual graphs and well-designed charts. Leaders need a clear line of sight into whether a project is tracking as planned, recovering, or diverging from expectations. And they need to see this across production, commercial, financial, safety, and quality metrics.
Beyond procurement and coordination, the real engine of project delivery is supply chain performance. When supply chain partners have accurate, consistent data on production, both on and off site, that data is properly analysed and clearly presented, everyone benefits. Specialist subcontractors gain earlier visibility of risks, more predictable workflows, and stronger commercial control. At the same time, the main contractor gains the confidence that delivery is aligned to plan, enabling better forecasting, fewer surprises, and more collaborative problem-solving across the project.
Absolutely critical is to reduce any manual handling of data to a minimum. Conversion of data into useful management information is the job of the reporting system, not the overworked team. Their key role is to provide explanation and analysis of what the data is revealing, but it’s surprising how little needs to be said if the rest of the reporting is well designed.
Move Beyond Managing Data To Delivering Joined-Up Insights
I’m working with Acumine as they come at the challenge of enabling great reporting using reliable data through the lens of a contractor – that’s where their background is and it means that they genuinely understand both the challenges and what adds value and reduces risk.
They understand that getting good information early enables early intervention. And its early intervention that is so often the key to mitigation of risks or performance problems.
You will often hear the senior leaders in construction business say, “If we know about the issues we can almost always resolve them or at least mitigate a proportion of the downside”, yet, they still rely on ‘old school’ reporting that allows the information they receive to be coloured by optimism bias (conscious or unconscious ), to be based upon only part of the full story and often many weeks out of date.
Acumine’s strength lies not in creating more data, but in making sense of the data that already exists. As soon as the data is available (whether directly from site information or through other business systems such as the Asta Powerproject, ERP and health and safety application) it will be analysed in Acumine’s Build Intelligence system and available for viewing and decision making.
The ability to drill down through portfolios of projects is extremely useful. It enables trends across business units to be highlighted and speeds up the process of business and project performance review. This enables business to move closer to real- time decision-making rather than retrospective firefighting.
How We Build a Better Industry
Technology alone cannot fix the industry’s data problem. Change requires leadership, cultural shift, and consistent adoption. It’s critical that the project teams see the value as well as the business leadership. At project level the benefits of more readily understood information, the insight into trends, and the saving of report writing time (so important given the workload of todays project teams) are of great value to those in the front line of project delivery for the business.
Hand in hand with this goes the reinforcement of a culture of openness and transparency. Acumine Build Intelligence enables early intervention by the business leadership should it be required but this should be in the form of support rather not criticism if any risk is highlighted.
Equally, the business leadership whether regional, sector or at the board level, needs to embrace the benefits. There is no point in timely data being available if it isn’t looked at for 3 weeks! Personally I like the dashboard to form the agenda for the review. The ability to drill into data, to interrogate and challenge it on the screen and to engage with the project team to gain the insights it gives and to inform decision making is incredibly useful.
The convergence of improved construction data, better connectivity, and AI‑driven insight offers enormous potential. The challenge is ensuring businesses use these tools intelligently, grounded in human expertise and proven processes as the old data adage “Garbage In, Garbage Out” still applies.
I believe solutions like Acumine’s play a critical role, not only in helping organisations manage performance, but in shaping a more transparent and sustainable industry. The industry has made progress, but still has significant work to do. The future belongs to organisations willing to move beyond traditional reporting, embrace data‑driven insight, and empower their teams and leaders to see and solve problems sooner.