TL;DR: We often add new digital bells and whistles to make improvements. This can cause bulked out, wasteful, processes. Another option is subtraction - taking away or replacing to remove waste or error. Digital transformation must be driven by business objectives. Digital processes must then be built into existing functions - not a separate digital team. We can get better at digitalisation by using lean principals.
There is a temptation in digital engineering to continually create new processes to make improvements. Digital teams may believe that they are improving an existing process by digitising it. Unfortunately, it’s likely that improvement by addition leads to duplication and waste in the current digital construction space.
Shadow process
Take a look at the digital design process. By graphically modelling and then coordinating those models, we get only benefit on the face of it. Better coordination, more efficient working, less waste. However, it is likely that at the real-life end of this process we will find that the production team will still hold on to at least some of the pre-digital process. This will blunt the effectiveness of the digitisation.
Team Discontent
A second order effect of this will be discontent. That the digital team will look at the bastardisation of the ‘improvement’ and become frustrated - “why can’t they see we're trying to help?”. The production team will look at the digital team and ask why they keep adding to their workload - “we used to do X and it was fine, now we have to do X and Y”.
Add +/- Subtract
There are two paths to getting better at what we do. We can either try to be more intelligent or we can try to make less mistakes. As the great Chalie Munger said:
“It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”
We can either add more bells and whistles or we can remove waste and error (hopefully both 😉). The image below taken from James Clear’s post “To Make Big Gains, Avoid Tiny Losses” illustrates this really well:
Getting Leaner
Digital transformation should be viewed as a lean process. Not digital for its own sake but a process of reviewing processes to establish any waste and look for opportunities to make the process more effective. Digital transformation is a lens of Lean.
Some everyday examples of addition vs subtraction:
Education
Addition: become more intelligent.
Subtraction: avoid stupid mistakes.
Exercise
Addition: make your workouts more intense.
Subtraction: miss fewer workouts.
Sport
Addition: score more
Subtraction: concede less
Over time processes can become naturally bloated with organic tweaking and reaction to problems, lessons, and issues. From time-to-time processes need to be reviewed to ensure that processes are as simple as possible, but no simpler (Einstein? 🧐).
How easy to add to a process and think “job done”? Think about how much more difficult to look at a process and remove or replace steps to make the end product better, decrease the cycle time, or make the producers life easier.
(Non) Digital Transformation
One of my colleagues relayed to me an interesting point made at a presentation they attended - “digital transformation should not be led by a digital team”. The point being that we as digital practitioners have biases which end up with digital solutions.
Digital transformation should be the product of a strategy to meet the outcomes led by the core business model. Once the outcomes are established then we can have digital specialists - working alongside other functions - set the strategy, plans, standards, and platforms to meet those objectives.
Built In, Not Bolt On
‘Digital’ is often a team within a project, division, or company. In my experience this team gets left holding the digital processes. The result of this is that the traditional functions are likely still doing what they always have - we don’t get the new processes embedded - which leads to non-conformance and waste.
By building digital processes into existing functions there is less risk of duplication. If you can embed the digital procedures within the existing functions - commercial, planning, design, engineering… - then there is far less rationale to duplicate.
Simple vs Complex
Our goal should be to make life of end users as simple as possible. This is where the digital team find their place.
David A. Norman in his book “Living with Complexity” suggests that complexity is like energy, it can’t be created or destroyed - only moved elsewhere (from “Why Life Can’t Be Simpler”).
The optimum move is to have the front-end of a digital process super simple for the end-user by backing that up with the nerds in the digital and IT teams doing the complex tasks to make the process work in the background.
Final Thoughts
From my point of view construction lives in a world of shadow processes and systems. This ends up in waste which leads us to some of the poor outcomes, and where it doesn’t lead to a negative outcome it almost certainly reduces margin.
While digital transformation can be a game-changer for construction care needs to be taken to ensure that there is alignment from business model to objectives/outcomes, to strategy to standards, and ultimately to platforms, processes, and systems.
By adopting the ‘lean’ approach we can ensure that the correct thinking is done and the digital transformation is aligned with the needs of the business and with the people who will need to adopt them.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, how can I improve my thinking? Reach out in the comments, on Twitter or on LinkedIn.
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