Building a Better, Data-Driven Construction Industry

Paul Gandy is President of the Chartered Institute of Building and an Acumine Board Advisor. For more than two decades he has led businesses delivering everything from some of the UK's most complex major programmes to portfolios of smaller but operationally critical works. Across that career, one theme has remained constant: despite an explosion of available digital tools, construction still struggles with the fundamentals of understanding, capturing, and using project data well.

Here he shares a comprehensive perspective on why the industry continues to lag, what needs to change, and how solutions like Acumine's Build Intelligence platform can help organisations finally move from managing data to managing from data.

What the industry still gets wrong about data

My first real exposure to genuinely data-driven reporting came during the early days of PFI in the late 1990s. Projects were large, complex, and financially exposed. In that environment, leaders had no choice but to develop a deeper understanding of progress, cost, productivity, and risk — and even using what we would now consider archaic technology, some teams were achieving valuable insights from 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. Far too many businesses still rely on rough assessments of site progress, with reporting to senior management based as much on opinion or gut feeling as on fact. Complex or unhelpful presentation of commercial, financial, safety, and quality data makes things worse.

"I've spent hours reading through project reports — thick, detailed documents — and sometimes reached the end still not understanding whether we were on track or in trouble."

From a governance perspective, a lesson I learned when responsible for both major projects and large portfolios is that a direct line of sight to evidence-based reporting is critical. What I want to see is direction of travel: are we trending in line with the original plan, recovering, or diverging over time? This applies as much to commercial and financial metrics — unapproved changes, cash position, preliminaries spend — as it does to programme and productivity. And we shouldn't overlook quality and safety data, which isn't just important in its own right — it can be a leading indicator of broader project problems.

High-level statistics may be simple and easy to digest, but they don't always tell the true story. Getting inside the data — understanding which trades are really driving performance and why — is where the real insight lies.

Understanding and defining your data reporting

This starts with two critical things.

First, you need to understand the data that sits behind your original plan — and I use that word deliberately, not just "programme". By plan I mean the financials and commercial aspects alongside the schedule: where is the money in the project, what labour levels are expected, what are the anticipated cash and profit generation statistics over the life of the project, what is the expected level of quality non-compliances open at any given time. Without this baseline embedded in your reporting, you're missing a golden opportunity.

Second, you need to establish how data will be collected. Financial data will sit in your ERP. Workforce data matters too — resource levels go to the heart of productivity, and the data needs to be sound. Most projects now operate digital ID systems such as turnstiles or biometric access, but consider: does the system let you differentiate between total hours on site and hours actually spent in the field versus the canteen? It matters.

At project level, meaningful progress reporting must be grounded in 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.

Armed with that data, we can report in a genuinely useful way. What matters most is trend visibility — clear charts and well-designed graphs that give leaders a direct line of sight into whether a project is tracking, recovering, or diverging. And manual data handling must be reduced to an absolute minimum. Converting data into useful management information is the job of the reporting system, not the overworked project team. Their role is to provide explanation and analysis of what the data reveals — and it's remarkable how little needs to be said when the reporting is well designed.

Moving beyond managing data to delivering joined-up insights

I'm working with Acumine because they come at this challenge through the lens of a contractor. That background means they genuinely understand both the difficulties and what actually adds value and reduces risk on a programme.

They understand that good information early enables early intervention — and early intervention is so often the key to mitigating risk or performance problems. You'll often hear senior leaders in construction say, "If we know about the issues, we can almost always resolve or at least mitigate them." Yet those same leaders still rely on reporting that allows information to be coloured by optimism bias, based on only part of the full picture, 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 data is available — whether directly from site systems or through business applications like Asta PowerProject, ERP, or health and safety platforms — it is analysed within Build Intelligence and available for decision-making. The ability to drill down through portfolios of projects enables trends across business units to be surfaced quickly, moving the business closer to real-time decision-making rather than retrospective firefighting.

"If leaders know about issues early enough, they can almost always resolve or mitigate them. But too often, information is incomplete, out of date, or filtered by optimism."

How we build a better industry

Technology alone cannot fix construction's data problem. Change requires leadership, cultural shift, and consistent adoption at every level. Project teams need to see the value as much as business leadership. At project level, the benefits of more readily understood information, clearer insight into trends, and real savings in report-writing time are of genuine value to the people on the front line of delivery.

Hand in hand with this goes a culture of openness and transparency. Build Intelligence enables early intervention by leadership when required — but that intervention should come as support, not criticism, when risk is highlighted. And business leadership at regional, sector, or board level must embrace the benefits too. There's no point in timely data being available if it isn't reviewed for three weeks.

"The ability to interrogate data on screen — drilling down or stepping back — helps you gain real insight and make better decisions, faster."

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. The old adage still applies: garbage in, garbage out.

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 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.