Breaking Down Barriers: Democratising Planning and Portfolio Data for Collaborative Project Success

The construction industry might have been undergoing a digital revolution in recent years, but unlocking the full potential of data remains a challenge. In this Acumine webinar, industry leaders from McLaren Construction, Lendlease, and Elecosoft — authors of Asta PowerProject — explore how businesses can move beyond the planning team and put meaningful project data into the hands of the people who need it most.

Opening address: the challenge of sharing planning data

Alistair O'Reilly of Acumine opens with a challenge that will resonate with any senior leader who has sat through a programme review: planning data is too often locked inside specialist tools, understood only by planners, and rarely presented in a way that drives confident decision-making beyond the planning team. The question is not whether businesses have data. It's whether the right people can access it, trust it, and act on it.

Case study: McLaren Construction's journey from Excel to Power BI

Brendan Johnston of McLaren Construction charts their journey from manual, Excel-based processes to a data-driven reporting environment built on Power BI. The shift was not simply a technology upgrade — it required a fundamental rethinking of how programme data is captured, structured, and shared across a portfolio. The result is real-time performance insight available to project teams, business unit leaders, and senior management alike, with decision-making grounded in evidence rather than interpretation.

Panel discussion: elevating planning to a strategic capability

The panel — featuring Matt Warren of Lendlease, Mark Chapman of Elecosoft, Daniel Maddocks of Acumine, and senior planners from leading UK contractors — ranges across the questions the industry is genuinely grappling with.

How has the industry's relationship with planning data matured? The panel reflects honestly on a long history of planning being treated as a specialist discipline rather than a strategic one — and on the cultural work required to change that. Progress has been real but uneven, and the gap between the most and least data-mature organisations in the industry is widening.

What does modern programme reporting actually look like? The conversation moves from historic monthly PDF reports to the expectation of near-real-time visibility. Pivotal moments include the wider adoption of PowerProject, the emergence of Power BI as a reporting layer, and the integration of planning data with commercial and financial systems to produce genuinely joined-up insight.

What are the lead indicators that matter most? The panel identifies the metrics that give early warning of programme stress — productivity rates against planned output, resource levels versus forecast, procurement progress, and quality non-compliance trends. High-level summaries are useful for governance; lead indicators are what enable intervention before problems become crises.

How do you drive cultural adoption of new tools and processes? Resistance to change is universal, but the panel points to a consistent pattern in successful adoption: start with the people who will benefit most at project level, demonstrate value quickly, and build upward. Mandating new tools from the top without project-level buy-in rarely works.

Where is technology taking the industry in the next five to ten years? The panel is measured but optimistic. AI and predictive analytics hold genuine promise for early warning, resource optimisation, and risk modelling — but only for organisations that have first built the data foundations to support them. The technology will continue to develop rapidly; organisational readiness is the binding constraint.

The role of technology vendors

Mark Chapman of Elecosoft offers a vendor perspective on how Asta PowerProject has evolved alongside changing industry needs — and how the relationship between scheduling tools and reporting platforms like Power BI has shifted from a nice-to-have integration to an operational expectation. The future of management reporting, the panel agrees, will be shaped by AI-driven early warning systems that capture real-time progress data, surface deviations automatically, and enable positive intervention before programmes slip.