Steve Jones   0:25
Thanks, Andy. Looking forward to this. 

Andy Verone   0:28
Steve, as always, as you know, we have a global audience. Spend a couple minutes, introduce yourself, and talk a little bit about your experience. 

Steve Jones   0:35
Sure. I have been in this AEC industry my whole ride. I did six years as a design build contractor and then I went full time into the design side of things and I ended up as a principal with a big AE firm here in the northeast part of the US, which then became the main component of Stantec when they moved
down into the US. And then I took the.com plunge right at the end of that century and went with Primavera and helped them get going on the web. And that was an amazing experience for me personally, because, you know, I’ve been running an office for a big firm. I thought I knew all about this business until I started going on these massive projects all over the world with Primavera.
I’m like, oh, dude, this is the construction industry. Man. And then I kept bumping into an old buddy of mine, another recovering architect named Norbert Young, who was running Dodge and Suites and ENR and Arc Record and all that. And he asked me to come and start a research function. So I’ve been doing that for 23 years.
You know, this is the biggest industry on the planet Earth by a large measure, but it is so fragmented. It’s really difficult for anybody to know what the guy across the street’s doing. You know, where do I fit in this? Am I ahead? Am I behind? What are they doing that I might get smart about doing? I don’t have to invent it myself. So all we do is attack
topics like that, safety management, risk management, project controls like we’re doing with you, all the technology out there. And look, all we’re trying to do is help people understand where they fit among their peers and what other people are doing that they can take advantage of. 

Andy Verone   2:14
Yeah, Steve, appreciate that. And your work is well recognized across the industry. And it’s people like you that bring that awareness that is just so important to everyone. And I love what you said, right? It’s all about the research. And today, we have an opportunity to dive into a topic
That’s becoming mission critical across.
capital intensive industries, and that topic is digital maturity in project controls. As we see programs scale across infrastructure, energy, data centers, the ability to deliver with precision and speed and predictability is becoming a real differentiator in our industry. 

Steve Jones   2:55
Yeah. 

Andy Verone   2:56
What makes today’s conversation especially interesting is that we’re not just talking about market trends. We’re talking about a benchmark grounded in a structured framework.
But the latest and greatest smart market insights that we’re going to be delivering alongside Dodge here in early June.
is built on contruance project controls maturity model and evaluating how organizations perform across key project control functions like cost, risk, procurement, and field execution. So Steve, let’s start there. How did you use the maturity model?
to build the survey that you guys went out and did for us. 

Steve Jones   3:41
That’s a great question, and it was a terrific starting point to have. Let me take you through how we did this. First of all, it’s a survey that we did of very large owners in the US, but I think that owners trying to drive a digital transformation, this is true for everybody under every flag, everywhere on the planet Earth.
They’re trying to get their house in order with this, right? Half of them are public, half are private. They tend to be the larger guys. 40% of them are doing between 100 and 500 million a year. The rest are doing over 500 million a year, some, you know, well north of a billion a year. And they’re doing all these kinds of projects. You know, to your point, right, this is intense, difficult, challenging construction to do.
It is incredibly important to do it right the first time and to do your best to stay on schedule and to stay within cost and deliver the quality that you need, not to have to cut back scope, right, and then do it safely, of course. So we took all this hard work you guys had done, looking at these 10 key activities from estimating,
through reporting and analytics.
And we also looked into the degree to which people are integrating, because as you’ll see later on, you know, this really becomes an important factor in digital maturity and the success of using technology. And then for those folks who have an engineering team in-house, we also looked into how they’re managing that. That wasn’t everybody, but a lot of them do.
But we took these activities in terms of how folks are doing them today, and we put them across these maturity metrics. We had every single respondent say, all right, in terms of estimating, how would you rate your general expertise? And each one of these metrics, and we have definitions for them, and they put themselves in kind of a low, moderate, or high bucket
for each one of these. And that gave us this amazing amount of information. So not only could we then turn around and say, all right, for each of these 10 functions, here’s how digitally mature it is across all the owner population. We knew a lot about each owner, exactly how they’re behaving in each of these areas, right? So it allowed us in this report
not only to talk about the digital maturity of each of the functions, but also provide some real insight and intelligence about where owners stand. And so anybody reading this can find themselves somewhere in this mix and say, all right, what are the guys ahead of me doing that I can start doing that’s going to make a difference for me? And so we have this
large radial chart here that just shows the differences between how all these came out when we scored all these different metrics on a 100 score. And for each one of these, you know, say the procurement, for example, in the report, every one of them has
its own page like this, where you can see the maturity score, right? But you’ll see how it’s made up. And this gets back to what all the owners were saying. How many of them were high, how many of them were moderate, how many of them were low, for expertise, for integration, for deployment of digital tools, right? How many of them are still throwing paper at this thing?
versus how many of them have a really sophisticated platform. And so you have these kind of backing facts for each one of these 10.
You see in terms of the digital also, it’s not just do we have the software somewhere? Is it hiding in some place on some server somewhere? Or are you actually applying it to the workflows that make sense for you? And in each one of these pages, they’re tailored to, in this case, it’s procurement, right? These are very specific procurement functions. We have those.
very specific tasks, specific functions for every one of the 10 activities, right, to see, are you really using it or are you kind of using it or are you barely using it? All this stuff rolls up towards a digital maturity score for each of these owners.
And then really importantly, are you accessing real-time data or are you looking at past stuff? And that is one of the really hard challenges in the industry. 

Andy Verone   7:48
Yeah, Steve, that’s super insightful. I think one of the big takeaways that, you know, when I was going through all the details that your team provided, you know, one of the biggest takeaways, you were seeing 80% plus adoption of digital tools across most functions.
But the overall maturity was still kind of in that low to moderate range. I mean that that was really insightful, right? 

Steve Jones   8:16
Yeah, it is interesting that that radio chart has so jagged. Even though a lot of people are using tools, a lot of it has to do with how they’re using them, right? When you look at these top three, all of these rely very heavily on integration and data coming from across your organization. So you’ve got to integrate those.
They can’t really operate very well functionally in silos, right? So they’re very strong candidates for folks investing in integration and in real-time access. And that’s actually where we saw scores higher for those. And these, it just makes sense, right? People are following where the need is.
Frequency of conducting reviews and updates, organizations that integrate cost and risk management, you know, doesn’t always correlate to real-time access. As you can see right there, you’re only getting monthly. So it’s not universal, right, in those two. But it’s moving in the right direction. And then for those
Three that were at the bottom, relatively few reported that they’ve got any kind of institutionalized enterprise-wide process, right? And this is where you may have 5 projects going with five different project managers. Each one of them likes to do X, Y, and Z functions their own way.
And it’s just difficult to function as a highly tuned, orchestrated operation if you have so much freedom of choice, essentially, in how people go about doing things. So I think one of the things that came out is the folks who’ve done the hard work of saying, you know,
We’ve looked at how every, all these projects have been done this way in terms of field management or in terms of procurement. Let’s land on this as our standardized way and let’s really put it in. And that ended up being a pretty key metric to the digital maturity for every single owner as we went through. 

Andy Verone   10:16
Yes, super insightful. I think the other thing that really stood out was, you know, and you just hit on it, right? Tools versus outcomes. Even though with that level of investment, many organizations still struggle to access that real-time data across functions. And you guys, you guys did a great job. 

Steve Jones   10:24
Yeah.
I know, I know. 

Andy Verone   10:35
you know, on what was preventing that when you asked those questions. 

Steve Jones   10:39
It’s really astounding. I mean, I pulled together each one of those 10 activities in terms of the real-time access, and you can see how it spans here. The darker bars, those who always have it, and the lighter bars, those who occasionally have it, and then you’ll see the total out there. We’ve gone from 8% up to 82%.
What drives that, right? I am so interested in behavior and I have a pretty strong theory about this, which for the lack of a better term, I just call urgency. On those top two, when you’re doing reporting and analytics, that’s what executive decision making is based on.
right? And also anything to do with cost, right? Because as soon as some kind of a cost damage happens, it’s very difficult to undo that. You just basically end up going over budget. And so what I think of as this urgency, it makes sense that this is where people have put the most focus in and making sure
they’re going to get, and it’s not everybody, right? I mean, only about half of them are getting it all the time, which is what you’d like to see everybody getting, right? But it’s stronger than anything else. It’s because that’s where this having non-current information will really bite you and fast and hard, right? And then the maturity tends to, by nature, expand
From there, right? You’ve got, you’re slightly less urgent, okay? Something happens in terms of schedule. Well, you do have some ability to shift stuff around and maybe keep your end date in place, okay? Or maybe do some planned overtime or something like that, right? And in terms of field management, it’s not that you have to react instantly to everything from the field.
Certain things, yes, especially if they result in some kind of cost impact, but a lot of stuff, it’s just you’re keeping track of it. You don’t necessarily need it quite as fast. And then the rest of these, they’re just in there by their nature, somewhat longer cycle processes, right? The process of risk management, the process of handling change management or resource management. They don’t have the same kind of urgency. And it’s not that they wouldn’t
perhaps improve? Were they able to make sure they’re always acting on the most recent information, right? But they have a longer decision driving cycle than those ones that are far more urgent. 

Andy Verone   12:53
Yes, great, great feedback and analysis there. Steve, you came up with a term that I hadn’t heard before, but it’s one that I’ve written down. I’ve actually used since our talk, but I love this silos of excellence where individual fun. 

Steve Jones   13:05
Yeah.
Yeah. 

Andy Verone   13:12
but not fully connected. What did you guys learn? 

Steve Jones   13:16
Yeah, yeah, that’s a term I came up with a long time ago as point solutions. You know, kind of wave one of automation in our industry did too good of a job. You’re right. Yes, we drove out most of the manual processes, but now, you know, those people who went through pain and strain to get rid of that manual process will be damned if they’re going to give up their happy point solution. 

Andy Verone   13:16
Ann.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Right. 

Steve Jones   13:40
right, for some platform that maybe or maybe doesn’t do it as well. And it’s funny, the wave one is almost our challenge to wave two.
This is not unique to project controls. Every time we do tech studies here, here’s one we did about optimizing tech for large owners. You know, only 31% were used, and these were big guys too, only 31% were using any kind of commercial platform. 88% of the ones who have point solutions,
are using multiple ones, in some cases as many as eight, that they’re just paying the license fee for because Eddie really likes that one, you know, and Janet down in the Atlanta office, so she really likes that one. We’re just going to keep it. It’s, they’re so embedded. 

Andy Verone   14:16
Thank you. 

Steve Jones   14:28
And don’t even mention the homegrown stuff, right, which has the pride of authorship attached to it. So what happens, of course, is the data gets locked up, right? That integration functionality is no longer adequate and migration challenges between solutions. You’ve got
people saying that what they want to do.
right, is really try and drive some integration. And the owners with the optimized individual systems, right, are now realizing that their real problem is orchestration and integration.
Same thing when we did this big study on connected construction, right, which is trying to make sure that owners are really tied out both with their internal departments and with external department, external people on the project teams. 62% said that they’re really good at doing the internal stuff, but only 41% could say that. 

Andy Verone   15:06
Yes. 

Steve Jones   15:27
Same about working with any kind of project team members. They get very good at optimizing within their departments or within any one function, but it’s that ecosystem that is the challenging part. 60% of them said they exchange half or more of their project data internally, but only 28% are doing it at that level externally.
And again, almost 60% of owners using multi-company workflows still have connectivity breakdowns. Right? So just having tech by itself does not solve this kind of fragmentation. The weak points generally because this is in that connection layer.
between the organizations and your workflows. And this isn’t just true with owners. Trust me, man. I mean, all the construction tech research that we do, we are really good at digitizing functions. And that first wave did a great job of driving out the paper and the manual processes to a large degree, right? It’s usually 10% or less.
in any studies that we do. But it’s these isolated point optimizations, right? And so where the industry hasn’t been as good and really needs to mature is about connecting. Because the value of being digital is being able to integrate and orchestrate numerous players
to work in harmony in these shared data environments. So we really think this next wave is going to be about connecting decisions, because this is the point of having all this information, is to improve your decision making. 

Andy Verone   17:04
Yeah, that’s good stuff, Steve. Steve, if memory serves me, only about a third of the organizations are reporting full integration with real-time access across systems. I mean, that to me, that that was that was a stunning statistic. 

Steve Jones   17:15
Yeah.
Down.
It is, it’s 36%, because again, we asked them to put themselves in one of these three buckets. Either they’ve got it fully integrated, real-time updates, single system access, and obviously those folks earned the highest points towards their digital maturity. And then you had the middle zone, where yeah, we’ve got digital tools, and we have done some integrations.
probably point-to-point type integrations. And then you’ve got that 8% that still just have a whole bunch of things that aren’t even tied at all. No integration with the important functionalities, right? And so among that 92, we did something which I hope readers are going to find very valuable.
Because when you look at 10 different activities and you think about integrating, there are, you know, whatever the math is, it’s way more than 1000 possible iterations of things that you could look at integrating. Where’s the value? And oftentimes, you know, you want to know what other people are doing. And we did that, right? And so in the report, you’ll see.
What the most frequent among that 92% of owners who are doing some degree, all of them have integrated their change cost and schedule. So if you haven’t done that, that’s a pretty clear indicator. You ought to focus on that one. Same thing with reporting that’s integrated across all kinds of
multiple functions, right? Everybody, all 92% are doing that. It begins to dial down a little bit after that. And these are the ones that are at least 50%, right? There’s few that get into the smaller things, but this is the ones that any of these that you’re not doing now and you want to know what your peers are doing,
Hey, this is where you should probably focus some effort because clearly people wouldn’t be doing it if they weren’t getting value out of it. 

Andy Verone   19:14
That’s super helpful, Steve. One thing too, which I thought was very interesting, was kind of the speed of insights. One stat that really stood out to me, right, was that about 80% of those mature organizations can generate data within hours compared to something like 13% for all others. And that is a… 

Steve Jones   19:20
Mmh.
Yeah. 

Andy Verone   19:34
That’s a huge gap for those that are more digitally mature. 

Steve Jones   19:36
That, that, yeah, yeah, that’s one of the big wows in the findings here. You know, and it’s because these top performers, they’ve connected things and they have standardized their processes enterprise-wide with some accountability. And they’ve integrated at least their cost schedule
and then their risk change, right? And as a result… 

Andy Verone   20:24
Sure. 

Steve Jones   20:25
And, you know, the top performers, it’s…
you know, it’s clear they can prevent the small issues, right? 

Andy Verone   20:37
Yeah, for sure. Steve, I think that leads us into kind of business outcomes, right? When you look at performance, it’s pretty meaningful gap, right? So for me, 90% of the most mature organizations are delivering on time and budget. 

Steve Jones   20:42
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mmh. 

Andy Verone   20:53
I mean, that’s a great number for our industry. 90% of those mature organizations are ordering on time and budget. About 1/3 of the rest are hitting that number. So that to me, that just shows the importance of all the things we talked about, connectivity, you know, not having those silos of excellence. What outcomes did you drive?
Drive through this report. 

Steve Jones   21:14
Yeah, this is the so what. You know, when you think about the owner’s life, they’re so busy and they’ve got all these tech companies waving shiny objects in their face going, I’m going to reinvent your whole process. And I mean, look, why should I care? Why you and not that one, right? 

Andy Verone   21:16
Yeah, exactly. 

Steve Jones   21:34
What, why should I care about being more digitally mature? Right? It’s just something else I got to worry about. Well, let me show you the difference between, you know, we pulled out after, we had a score for every single respondent. So we took those who were really, really good.

Andy Verone   21:42
I. 

Steve Jones   21:53
And we share in the report here. How many of them say they can generate data when something crops up or schedule as you arise in hours? 

Andy Verone   22:06
Amazing. 

Steve Jones   22:06
80% of them, man, and only 13% of everybody else, regardless of where else they were on the digital maturity curve. That is just astounding. How powerful is that? Right. And then change orders, right? Keeping these change orders within 5% of the original contract value. Now the gap isn’t as big.
But if you had a choice, which bucket do you want to be in? You want to be in the 80 bucket? I would, right? And then in terms of outcomes, it’s the same thing. It’s like, look at this in terms of, I can say 75% or more of my projects get completed either on or under budget. 90% versus 33%. Which bucket do you want to be in there? 

Andy Verone   22:33
Yeah, for sure. 

Steve Jones   22:47
And the same with schedule. Schedule is notoriously the most difficult thing to comply with in this industry. So you only have 40% saying that at least 3/4 of the time, they’re either on schedule earlier, right? That’s still a way better bucket than being in that 5% bucket. And then just 

Andy Verone   22:49
Yeah. 

Steve Jones   23:06
keeping your overall costs within 5% of what you told the board of directors it was going to be, and you’re being held to, again, you know, do you want to be in that 100% group? I would any day. 85%, you’re still running some risk, right? And so these kinds of findings are so powerful in terms of saying,
This is why you should put yourself on this journey towards digital maturity. It’s not, you don’t flip a switch and get there overnight, but you point in a direction, you know, work with guys like you who know how to do this with folks and get the organizations in shape and move in this direction. 

Andy Verone   23:45
Yeah, Steve, I think it comes to, for me, it really boils down to those organizations that have that digital maturity, have predictability, right? And in this business that you and I have spent our entire careers on, when you can have predictability, you know, in those organizations and to be in that plus or minus 5% of forecast, 

Steve Jones   23:51
Mhm.
Yeah.
Yeah. 

Andy Verone   24:05
I mean, that is absolutely critical. As projects continue to get more complex and huge in size and cost. What do you see there, Steve, from kind of enabling that predictability? 

Steve Jones   24:16
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we wanted to find out why it is that those mature owners are actually able to perform better. And, you know, they’re more disciplined operationally. They’ve made those decisions about standardized workflows. They are more integrated organizationally.
right? They’re actually orchestrating multiple players to work together. And they’ve institutionalized things with accountability to the point that this is the way we do it, right? What you see is that, again, with these, the less mature organizations, they’ve got good digital capabilities.
but it’s mostly targeted on that kind of isolated optimization, right? As opposed to these ones at the upper part of the scale, they’ve connected things operationally, and that is always going to drive performance a whole lot better. 

Andy Verone   27:40
Steve, great insights. One of the things that, you know, you guys have really brought forward is the business outcomes this drives. When you look at performance, it’s pretty meaningful gap. Roughly about 90% of the most mature organizations
are delivering on or under budget versus about a third of all the rest. What did you guys learn? 

Steve Jones   28:06
Yeah, this is where the magic really is in the question of why should I care about digital maturity? What’s it going to do for me? Right? It just sounds like something else I got to worry about working on, right? But all you have to do is to say, and again, you don’t have to try and convince somebody, this is all their peers sharing 

Andy Verone   28:18
Yeah. 

Steve Jones   28:26
actual results, their project process improvements, as well as outcomes.
Look at how many more of the best of the digital mature owners can generate data just within a few hours when there’s some kind of cost or schedule issue arises. 80% of them and all the rest, only 13% said they can do that, right? That is a massive gap, right? What an incredibly powerful position to be in 

Andy Verone   28:46
Shh. 

Steve Jones   28:53
if you keep your projects on track, right? Because you’ve invested in digital maturity. And also in terms of change orders, keeping it within 5% of original contract value. Change orders are endemic in the industry. We just finished a project looking at change orders and everybody we survey said they’re getting worse. They’re getting more of them and they’re getting more intense.
And I’d rather be in the 80% bucket than the 71% bucket anytime. And then in terms of looking at how the projects finish out, 75% or more of my projects are completed on or under budget. 90% of those high digital maturity owners can say that. Only a third.
of the other ones. Same thing around schedule, which is more difficult to achieve in this industry, but still 40% are saying that at least recorders of their projects are either at or earlier than scheduled than 5% of everybody else. And in terms of keeping your costs just in line with your forecasts, right?
I’d rather be in a 100% bucket than be in the 85, because you’re still running some risk there. And when you think about what the differences are between these really mature organizations, they’ve just become disciplined operationally. They are more integrated organizationally, right? They’re tied out.

Andy Verone   30:30
Yeah. 

Steve Jones   30:31
The less mature organizations, right, as we’ve seen, they’re all into tech. Okay, that battle’s been won. But they’ve applied it just to these individual functions. And in some cases, that’s upkeeping them from getting any better. But once you actually do what
the digital mature folks are doing, you’ve connected things, right? And you’re just getting so much better performance. These numbers are, we don’t see numbers this dramatic in very many of our surveys. It’s astounding. 

Andy Verone   31:04
Yeah, amazing, Steve. Amazing insights. Steve, I think about that, right? That really gets these firms, you know, the word that I think of is predictability. Even when projects do go over, the most mature organizations are keeping costs within plus or minus 5 percent. That is really a level of control that people should pay attention to. 

Steve Jones   31:13
Mm.
Yeah.
Yeah. You know, you’d like to think, well, they’re just better at predicting. They got a better crystal ball than I do, right? That’s the easy thing to think, and it’s not the truth. It’s more subtle than that. What they’re able to do is detect deviations earlier, and that allows them to respond a whole lot faster, right? 

Andy Verone   31:33
Yeah. 

Steve Jones   31:49
The mature kind of cost management, it involves doing planned actual remaining type forecasting. It involves doing integrated performance baseline. It involves doing scenario modeling and what if analyses, right? These put you in a position to be able to, as soon as something happens,
very shortly, collect the information you need in real time, and know what your best next move is. 

Andy Verone   32:15
Yeah. 

Steve Jones   32:15
So it’s really not about, oh, they’re great predictors. It’s about early visibility, fostering way faster intervention. 

Andy Verone   32:25
Steve, I think one thing, you know, as we work through all these different areas that you and the team researched, right, there is a solid business case for any owner organization delivering those mission critical assets.
It’s really not a belief in digital, but it’s really, really concerned about the implementation barrier. About 76% of the organization say the biggest challenge is implementation complexity. What did you guys learn? 

Steve Jones   32:53
Yeah, yeah, it’s true. It’s not unlike other studies that we’ve done when we put 12 different barriers out there and we said,
Among these 12, pick the three that are the most difficult for you, the most challenging. And so these are the percentages that are in the report here. And, you know, oftentimes that tends to mute the individual responses somewhat. 76 in a pick three question is really high. So this tells you this is very serious.
for the majority of the industry, right? And of course, you’ve got resistance to change from staff, which is generally among the top three that we get every time we do these things. And then difficulty integrating new tools with the old systems, right? That’s becoming increasingly important.
What’s nice is that the ones on the right you see are, you know, think of them as moderate, right? They’re not as challenging to do.
But this complexity is very real. Again, when you try and put yourselves in the shoes of an owner, you’re facing a situation where you have decades now. I mean, this point solution adoption and implementation has been going on since the 70s.
right? When you’re now you’re in a situation where you’ve got to take any of those plus all the spreadsheets, manually, internally developed things, or stuff where they’ve taken a generic tool and then twisted it and tortured it to work in construction. Plus, you’ve probably got to comply, and these are big organizations with some degree of
corporate IT requirements, just the quantitative side of this is challenging. And then you got the organizational side, you got the people side. You’re going to be disrupting your organization. You’ve got to redesign some processes. You have workflow standardization, you’ve got to get people to agree on, right?
And then how are you going to integrate it? You’re basically doing a transformation of an operating model. You’re not just sticking some software into something. And then you’ve got to figure out, once it’s up and running, how do we deal with data governance? And how are we going to hold people accountable for actually doing the redesign process and doing the right data governance across all your teams? This is a behavior change.
And the resistance to that, it’s true in every study that we do. It’s not unique to this situation, right? And I think it bears some further examination about what people are doing in terms of dealing with that well. And of course, meanwhile, every owner out there has got a ton of projects already rolling. They’re trying to change the
tires at 100 miles an hour going down the highway. It’s not like you buy a new house and you’re starting from scratch, right? There’s not a clean restart. I think part of the really good news here, though, is that these are the ones that scored very low. Less than 10% of people, even when they had the chance to pick three out of that list, picked any of these. So they’re not really worried so much about the data or cybersecurity, which is
of a higher concern in other aspects. Lack of budget to do this, that doesn’t seem to be a problem. They have lots of options that they could use. It’s not that the executives don’t want them to do it. And I always like to ask this question because there are always a few folks, right? It’s a small group. And again, there’s a small group that’s, yeah, we’re fine. We’re getting it done.
But thankfully it was very few. I think that they’re okay and really don’t need to get any better. 

Andy Verone   36:31
Yeah, Steve, super helpful. Steve, I think we know what good looks like, right? So, you know, the research shows that in some areas like cost and reporting and risk, they seem to be more mature, at least from my understanding. What can organizations learn from those areas?
as they try to improve the overall digital maturity. 

Steve Jones   36:53
Yeah, that’s a good one, because it’s worth having some perspective on where you’re succeeding and how you might be able to scale that. You know, again, when you look at what those three most digitally mature functions are across all these owners, as we looked at who those people were,
who were doing those in the best ways, it came down to three main things. The degree to which those owners have invested in really institutionalizing the processes. What’s your best practice for doing this? All right, put it in place, support it with the technology, and then hold people accountable for doing it.
And also, it’s that ability to have real-time data, right? That’s what really differentiates your ability to extract power for decision-making out of any of these processes. And it’s the owner’s use of a platform, getting, breaking down all those point solutions, right?
And even if you’re integrating them, or if you’re getting a very robust platform, somehow get all this stuff to work together. Those are the three main things that we could correlate back to better performance in this, among these mature functions. And then… 

Andy Verone   38:12
Steve, I think. 

Steve Jones   38:13
how it does dr performance. I mean, most owners are at least at some moderate level of maturity, but very few of them are integrating these functions, right? The less mature ones usually have some pretty good capabilities, but they’re in those silos we talked about. But what these high maturity owners
are doing, and this is true across contractors and design firms as well, is you are making yourself a digital organization. Software isn’t this extra thing that’s sort of floating on the outside. You turn it on, you turn it off. It’s embedded into who you are and how you function.
right? Operationally, you become a digital organization, right? And you are more integrated organizationally and you’re more disciplined about it with accountability. These things really make a difference. 

Andy Verone   39:06
Sure. Steve, I think that’s what it tells me is the data is very clear that those that are on that track for digital maturity truly have a competitive advantage when they’re connecting costs, schedule, and risk and doing that in real time. 

Steve Jones   39:20
Hmm. 

Andy Verone   39:25
It just makes those owners pull ahead. What do you see there, Steve? What’s your thoughts on that? 

Steve Jones   39:30
Yeah, I agree. And we see this also not just with owners, but with contractors, suppliers, everybody out there who gets good at this stuff, right? They’re just a lot more effective. And for the owner’s world right now, the cost of poor visibility and slow decision making is
becoming materially higher. I mean, honestly, you think about maybe a decade ago, schedules were generally longer, capital was cheaper, supply chains were a heck of a lot more stable, projects were generally less complex, both digitally and operationally. But now,
Time actually is a critical financial variable. People are carrying debt costs. You’re dealing with delayed revenue. If you’re in any kind of educational institution, you’ve got an enrollment cycle, man. When those students show up, that stuff better be ready. In the manufacturing space, you’ve got all kinds of startup timing that’s dependent on you having that facility ready.
for all these data centers, right? The market demand is enormous. You’ve got to be able to meet that. And there may actually even be contractual milestones, right? And so those folks who are digitally mature can just be so much more predictable, responsive. It just accelerates their decision velocity.
They’re just way better as competing entities in a very challenging market. 

Andy Verone   42:04

Steve, we’re about at time. And I think the biggest takeaway for me from this conversation is digital maturity isn’t just about adopting tools. It’s about how well organizations connect their data, their processes, their teams, to drive better decisions and outcomes. Steve, I always like to leave.
the last word for my guest. What’s your thoughts on that? 

Steve Jones   42:38
Thanks, yeah. When I reflect on everything that we’ve learned by doing this, I think the good news is that
Owners are already into digital. Okay, this isn’t a battle that needs to be fought now. The challenge is about how do you tie these things together, right? So you can actually get the right information to the right people, the right moments, so they can make the better decisions. And the organizations that are actually doing well with digital maturity, it’s not magic, right? It’s not some big material, serious voodoo 

Andy Verone   43:09
If… 

Steve Jones   43:12
thing that they’re doing. They’re just more disciplined and intentional about connecting the things that need to be connected so that they can have a unified operating model. And also, you just have to understand, digital maturity isn’t some switch you flip. Hey, we’re there.
It’s A continual commitment to this process of transformation, right? So you just incrementally get a little better all the time. And I think that’s where folks like you can really help people because you’ve worked with so many other companies doing this, right? Have people sit down and do that digital maturity assessment for themselves.
And then you can see what the right steps are for them to do going forward. 

Andy Verone   43:57
Yeah, Steve, I think, yeah, exactly. 

Steve Jones   43:57
And it’s achievable. You can do this, guys, right? It’s within your grasp. 

Andy Verone   44:03
Got it.
No, I appreciate that, Steve. Listen, I think for me, right, because we based this whole insight and we had it grounded in the, you know, project controls maturity model, organizations now have a way to benchmark where they are, identify gaps, and take a more structured approach to improving performance.
Steve, as always, man, I really appreciate your partnership. I love the work that we’re doing together, not only on the insight side, but how we’re using the Dodge data and the network. And to the audience, I mean, we’ve shared incredible data and insights with you. Please, as this Smart Market Report
becomes published the first week of June. Please engage with it. Please reach out to Steve and I. I’d love to walk you through how we can actually assess your organization and help you guys get better. So Steve, as always, thank you for joining and we’ll talk to you soon, my friend