In this panel‑style YouTube discussion, William Doyle MRICS and colleagues argue that traditional commercial management on construction sites is largely reactive, relying on paper‑based records that are only consulted after a dispute arises. They propose digitising site records and treating the data as an "event" rather than a static document. By capturing every conversation, observation and measurement in a digital platform, the data can be aggregated and analysed to provide productivity insights, forecast future performance (aligned with NEC philosophy), and inform contract‑related decisions such as delegated authority limits. The speakers highlight how integrating these digital records with BIM models, asset‑management and commercial tools creates multi‑stakeholder reports (cost controllers, QS, inspectors, handover teams) and enables proactive actions like weather‑adjusted productivity planning and early identification of compensation‑event trends. Quotes from the late Dr Martin Barnes underscore the shift from administration to influencing what hasn’t yet happened. Overall, the conversation maps a transition from reactive, audit‑only record keeping to a continuous, data‑driven decision‑support ecosystem for commercial and project management.
Chapters
So before we even get that far, probably 3 things spring to mind, whether you're a client or a contractor. I think firstly, it takes the role of records, so the digitization of them takes the role of records beyond just the point evidential. So taking a record and justifying it as an accounting record, I think it goes way, way beyond that because in aggregate, this is a powerful productivity analysis tool. It's a enables us to perhaps more easily achieve some of the philosophy of NEC around forecasting and prospective assessments. So I think there's a really big bit there and lessons learned and estimators, how estimators and scheduling.
Your first point there reminds me of what we used to talk about at CMO, which was that we were managing events, not documents.
Not documents.
So traditionally the management of the contract was about exchanging documents and you're managing documents and we're like, well, what you're actually doing is trying to manage these events and documents are an output or a reporting function. Yeah, but it's about the event. And I think we need to probably move the industry slowly forward to see that this data that we're getting back from site is not about a single site diary. It's about getting data in these chunks that relate to parts of the contract and then using them in workflow and reporting for where their benefits are and not just having this audit page that goes in a leveraged file and then collects dust until we have our big bum fight.
It's such limited use and it's all that effort in recording it isn't being leveraged on a day-to-day basis. It's, it's, it's there in case we might want to look at that in isolation. And it's a real, it's a real lost opportunity. You remind me actually of something that the great late Dr. Martin Barnes said at a conference, which is project management is about influencing what hasn't yet happened. Everything else is just administration. So, you know, are we administering the records for the sake of doing records in case we have a problem? How miserable is that? You know, how about we capture them all in a really good way and then actually feed that back into our project management processes for the better?
Going back to the very start of the conversation about why it's always been done, I think for a lot of those reasons it's been done for either health and safety, for quality assurance, for engineering assurance. It's been very important to have an audit, a robust audit trail.
Yeah.
That shows we built this thing safely, we built it to the required quality and specification, and you've got that. But that has a limited value, doesn't it?
But heat map that to a, to a BIM model or an asset management tool or a commercial tool, and you can really leverage some lessons learned. And, you know, 1 1 is not 2. And so I think that would be one of my other so top 3 things. So we've got the elevation of it beyond just the evidential record into something that's prospectively useful. We've got the integration with other data from other sources that is becoming, you know, absolutely day-to-day what people do now. So integrating that data with things like contract management tools, asset management tools. And then secondly, I think just from convenience, and we said that might speak to acting and stated in the contract, just having that at your fingertips, but also being able to orientate it. So one dataset orientated many ways. So here's the report that's useful to the cost controller, here's the report that's useful to, you know, the QS, here's the report that's useful to the inspector. So who's looking after the shift patterns? So I think, I think here's one for handover. You know, I think there's so many different ways and we can leverage that digitally, can't we?
Massively. I think at the moment those individual paper records on triplicate pads are individual bits of a jigsaw, aren't they? And when you use a digital tool, you can put them all together and that same bit of data can be used in 5, 6, 7 ways for different parties within your project management organisation. So we can use that data proactively for all those different functions rather than reactively, as Nick alluded to, when the inevitable bunfight happens at the end of a project, which is what it was traditionally used for. So it's about moving away from that.
I heard recently a really good little saying, something along the lines of, by digitising it, you're you're preparing to answer questions you haven't thought of yet, you know.
And well, that's exactly what I was just thinking of, because when we started looking at reports in, in Simar from the data that we were capturing, there was a particularly large client who owned a huge asset in the aviation industry.
They had—
they didn't have any insight into the shape of how many compensation events and the value of them in different chunks. So, so, you know, how many conversations do I get across my whole portfolio that are between this amount and this amount? So where was the level of effort required to manage the contract for their teams? Because obviously they had a finite resource to manage the contract. And through the insights they could gain from a platform where you're capturing every single conversation event and the, and the quantum of it, you can say, well, actually, I need the team to go into this area because we've got, you know, we could let the project managers look after this because the total impact of all these small conversation events, the actual aggregated impact is, yeah, is a small amount of my risk contingency budget, whereas I've got these 4 huge events here that crop up and no one had those insights, did they?
You made me think of something else as well, like in terms of delegated authority to take a certain action under the contract. Quite often clients will put a financial limit to that. Arguably that financial limit could increase perhaps if the quality of the ingredients going into that—
We did that. We did do that specific exercise from that data. But I think imagine the data, imagine the questions that we don't yet know to ask of the data that we're starting to capture from Site Records.
The insights is when you start to bring different datasets together and take them off that triplicate pad that I keep referring to, and you can start to now understand how weather at certain times of the year affect productivity and plan and use that data more proactively. We can achieve so many more metres per day in the summer as opposed to winter. Seems obvious, but when you start to overlay that together, you can use that to influence productivity programmes and assessment of change as well. So I think, yeah, the big thing I've just taken from this section of this conversation is is we're now making things proactive, not reactive.
We're not—
we're taking out that leveraged file and we're actually doing something with that data every single day, whether that be at home, whether that be on site, wherever we need to be, we can access that information.
