C3 Systems
Hello and welcome to the C3 web site.
A construction company’s long term success depends almost entirely on
the quality of the decisions made by its front line project management people.
The quality of these decisions depends on two things:
The qualities of judgement and intelligence of the project managers in question, and
The quality of the information on which they base their decision making.
In an ideal world companies would aim to balance these two inputs:
reasonable quality people equipped with reasonable quality information,
to produce good decisions. However, construction is not an ideal world.
By and large, the quality of information available to support project level
decision making is appallingly poor - it probably always has been.
Note 1
Project managers in construction as a matter of routine have to apply
enormous amounts of judgement and intelligence in order to compensate for the
inadequacies in the available information. Often they don’t succeed.
Most firms have probably gone about as far as they can to ensure that
their people are selected, trained and motivated as well as possible to
cope with this situation.
In our experience, however, very few companies look closely at the
second half of the people / information balance. They work hard on the people
aspects, but tend to treat project information as a given, an external factor,
over which they have little or no effective control.
C3 Systems was set up specifically to help organisations and individuals to
deal with this. From what we've seen over recent years, most companies’ Information
Management processes can in fact be improved quite dramatically, at little cost,
by the implementation of a few, relatively simple, changes of approach.
A little management time, some careful thought are required but no great investment,
either in technology or other areas is needed to effect these initial improvements.
We can help in a number of ways, broadly as follows:
- We can carry out initial Information health checks, at project,
or overall company level
- We can also perform more intensive Information Management audits, including
detailed reviews of existing Information Management processes and procedures, and
assistance in their development
- For firms interested in really dramatically improving their Information Management
techniques, we can also provide knowledgeable support in the implementation of Building
Information Modelling (BIM) systems – as we see it, the future of Information Management
in construction.
For more details see our Services page.
It’s important to be clear that, in this discussion, we are not talking about
Information Technology, or computer systems. We are dealing with the actual Information
itself. The vast, vast majority of the information used by a construction project
manager is not structured or systematic material that could be captured in conventional
computing systems. It’s stuff like drawings, surveys, specifications, schedules, RFIs,
cost plans, bid tabulations, progress reports, contracts – the whole mass of papers,
e-mails, phone call notes, meeting minutes and such like.
Document management systems may well record the fact that these things exist. But
it’s the content that counts; specifically the quality – the usability – of that content.
Working with information of this sort: knowing its origins and accuracy; understanding
its possible meanings and implications; bridging gaps and inconsistencies, all requires
extraordinary levels of skill and judgement on the part of the project manager.
Document control systems, even those called knowledge management systems, don’t get
anywhere near solving this problem. Because to repeat: the information in question is so
unstructured, so unsystematic, that it simply cannot be captured intelligently in computer
systems. People continue to provide the essential interpretation and understanding.
In a sense our aim in C3 Systems is to help companies to de-skill the requirements of
the project management discipline. We want to make it easier for more ordinary people
to be able to manage projects more effectively and reliably. We aim to do this by greatly
enhancing the quality of information at their disposal, thereby reducing dramatically
the need for judgement and interpretative skill in this crucial area.
Our web site contains four main types of material:
General background information about the company and our approach to information
management on projects
- Information about the services that we can provide
- Information about our software products. We sell two software packages:
- TDM™- Probably the best pure technical document control system available
- Insight™ - C3 Production Management System - component level project management.
- Discussion Papers, in which we set out our thinking about Information Technology
and the management of projects.
The latest version of the Papers section of the site is largely given over to
discussion of a radically new approach to project information management. It’s called
Building Information Modelling (BIM), and we believe it will have a very profound impact
on the way projects are managed.
The single really important thing that BIM does is to change most of the information
used in projects from the sort of shapeless, cryptic forms we’re currently used to,
into highly structured, systematic data, fully amenable to management in computer
systems. This will greatly reduce the need for individual intuition and judgement in project
decision making and will have a huge impact on construction.
However, you may feel that BIM is for the future. If so, we would still urge you
to consider the ideas outlined here and elsewhere in the web site. Your firm can
easily become much better at managing project Information. Your people can thus become
much better decision makers. And ultimately your projects can become more predictable
and more profitable. We can help you do this, painlessly and economically.
Take the first step; click on our Contacts button.
Note 1.This has certainly been the case at least
since the nineteen sixties, as the famous "Higgin and Jessop" report
makes clear. Higgin And Jessop is a great read, with many historical insights that
are as true today as they ever were. G Higgin,
N Jessop, Communications in the Building Industry (London:
Tavistock Publications, 1965).