3 takeaways from the 2015 CMAA National Conference

Photo courtesy of CMAA. View more event photos on their Flickr page.

We are proud to have been a Bronze Sponsor at the 2015 CMAA National Conference held in Orlando last week. Thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth and came out for our presentation, ‘Microsoft Excel PowerPivot and SharePoint – The Perfect Solution’.

We always enjoy the opportunity to show the powerful features of the Lydon Solutions Construction Program Management Portal in person to industry professionals looking for a better way to manage their next project. Visitors to our booth were able to see firsthand the robust features of our Portal, including custom dashboards, collaboration features, and easy reporting tools.

Attendees at the CMAA conference came from construction companies ranging in size and resources. But all the industry professionals we met faced similar challenges.

Here are our three takeaways from the conference:

1.   Construction professionals love Excel: Our presentation on Microsoft Excel PowerPivot and SharePoint was a big hit with conference attendees. Several people came up to us afterward to say they were amazed at what is possible with Excel and SharePoint. They were unaware of the inherent functionality of these two applications and how simple it was to use them together. You can read more in our recent blog post about the power of Excel and SharePoint.

2.   Companies are looking to do more with Microsoft SharePoint: It’s no secret that we are big believers in SharePoint as an ideal Project Management Information System (PMIS). So we were thrilled to hear from companies big and small who were actively using SharePoint for every project. What they needed now was help taking SharePoint to the next level. We had several great conservations about simple enhancements to make SharePoint an even better fit for their workflow and business needs.

3.   There is a lot of frustration with custom solutions: We spoke with construction professionals from several companies frustrated with custom built PMIS solutions. These tools had been expensive to deploy, didn’t meet their needs and were poorly supported. This is a big problem for our industry. We’ve talked about why most construction PMIS implementation fail before.  And we’ve shared tips on how to deploy a PMIS for your construction business the right way.

The CMAA National Conference was a great chance to connect with friends, old and new. We especially enjoyed sharing our solution as well as learning from conference attendees. Not able to make it to this year’s event? Contact us to see how Lydon Solutions can help streamline your next project.