SharePoint

Join Us for the 2016 AACE Western Winter Workshop

Events | February 19, 2016

We are thrilled to be Gold Sponsors at the 2016 AACE Western Winter Workshop happening March 3-6, 2016 in Indian Wells, CA.

AACE’s annual workshop provides an excellent opportunity for construction industry professionals to come together and discuss the latest in scheduling, cost engineering, and project management trends. We always look forward to occasions like these to share the benefits of our award-winning Construction Program Management Portal. Our solution enables construction PMs to increase project efficiency, reduce costs and stay on schedule.

Workshop attendees: Don’t miss our presentation on ‘Visio Services and PowerPivot Services for SharePoint – The One Two Punch’ on Friday, March 4th at 4:15 PM. We will be discussing how you can utilize Microsoft Excel PowerPivot and Visio with SharePoint to connect and share files, interactive diagrams, and flow charts across your organization. Check out our Excel PowerPivot and Visio blog posts for a preview on how you can super-charge these applications for your next construction project.

If you’re attending the show, make sure to stop by the Lydon Solutions booth. We’d love to say hi and give you a demo of how our innovative offerings can help your business!

Not able to make it this year’s AACE Western Winter Workshop? Contact us for more information about our services and schedule a free consultation.

Mobile Dashboards for Construction Project Management

Company News | December 3, 2015

We have good news for construction project managers. You can now easily provide real-time dashboards and KPIs to your team – no matter what OS or device they use.

We are big believers in the power of dashboards for construction project management. Our award-winning Construction Program Management Portal is built around robust custom dashboards. Construction projects are complex, with lots of moving parts and dependencies. Dashboards offer stakeholders a visual summary of a project’s status at a glance. And of course, more detailed information is always only a click away in our portal.

But wouldn’t it be great if your team could access these dashboards from anywhere on any device? We agree. Which is why we are very excited to offer construction project managers an even more powerful way to deploy dashboards.

Enterprise Mobile Construction Project Management Dashboards with Microsoft Data Zen

Lydon-Solutions-Construction-Project-Management-Dashboard-Example — Easily provide real-time dashboards and KPIs to your team with the Lydon Solutions Project Management Information System

Lydon Solutions now provides enterprise level dashboard and KPI reporting using Microsoft Data Zen. Now you can easily provide your team with interactive dashboards that show real-time KPIs in a visual and easy-to-understand format.

Your users can interact with these reports regardless of the device or operating system they use. That means mobile users see the same information as team members back in the office.

Best of all, no special coding is required. You can build and deploy these dashboards yourself. Data Zen makes it simple to combine information from virtually any system you use (including SharePoint).

With the Lydon Solutions Project Management Information System (PMIS) and Data Zen, you now have several powerful new capabilities, including:

Interactive charts – Display data in robust graphs, charts, tables, maps, and KPIs. Quickly drill down to more detailed information.
Real-Time Reporting – Build robust dashboards using real-time information from all your data sources. No custom coding required.
Support for multiple platforms and devices – Use your preferred device. Data Zen supports iOS, Android, and Windows phones, tablets, and laptops.
Better team Collaboration – Share KPIs and dashboards in real-time. Collaborate with team members using integrated instant messaging.
Dashboards on an enterprise scale – Deploy your dashboards across your entire organization and leverages SQL server and Active Directory for permissions.

Lydon Solutions continues to push the envelope of what is possible in managing your construction projects. Thought you knew SharePoint? Guess again. Contact us for a free consultation.

3 takeaways from the 2015 CMAA National Conference

Events | October 21, 2015

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.

CMAA National Conference SharePoint — Pictured: Rusty Ostboe, VP of Lydon Solutions & Paul Bedford, SharePoint Practice Director/Architect

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.

Excel as a Construction Project Management Tool

Reviews | July 28, 2015

Learn how you can unleash Excel’s hidden superpowers for your construction project team

Excel is currently the mostly widely used project management tool for construction professionals. You may not want to hear that – especially if you are a VP who just implemented a multi-million dollar project management system – but it’s true. Many of those overseeing programs in your company turn to Excel to handle day-to-day project management and reporting. They do this even if you have multiple in-house project management software packages at their disposal.

The widespread reliance on Excel for construction project management might surprise some readers. After all, using Excel for real project management tasks used to be a taboo in the construction industry. But most, if not all, of the construction project managers we talk with admit that Excel is their go-to tool for multi-million – even billion – dollar projects because it is easy to use.

Pros & Cons of Using Excel for Construction Project Management

Excel is a flexible and easy project management tool because it is simple for project teams to update data and create and share reports. Collaboration is easy, since everyone has Excel and is familiar with the software. This is not the case with the limited licenses and steep learning curve of proprietary project management tools.

But the same construction professionals who told us they relied on Excel were also quick to complain about its shortcomings. The most frequently mentioned limitation on using Excel to manage projects include:

• Files are stored locally so sharing and backups becomes a problem

• Consistency and control across spreadsheets isn’t enforceable

• There are often user errors and version control issues

• Excel isn’t a database

It is a classic love/hate story. The construction project managers we meet love Excel for its simplicity and ease of use, but dislike where that simplicity causes the tool to come up short.

The thing is, Excel in recent years has gained some lesser known capabilities – we consider them superpowers really – that make it an even better construction project management tool than most realize.

Unleashing Excel’s Superpowers for Construction Project Management

The good news for our fellow Excel-loving construction industry professionals is that recent enhancements to Excel enable it to be a more effective construction management software package.

So what’s changed? With the release of Microsoft’s Excel PowerPivot Add-in, which is already built into to Excel 2010 and 2013 and can be turned on from the COM Add-ins menu, Microsoft has morphed Excel into a relational DAX database. Combined with SharePoint Power Pivot Services, the entire project team can connect, report and share Excel files across the organization.

Imagine the possibilities. You can take existing Excel cost reports and other tracking spreadsheets and use Excel Power Pivot and SharePoint Power Pivot Services to turn them into full blown web-enabled applications that leverage SharePoint permissions. It’s now possible to connect Excel to many different data sources such as SharePoint Forms and Lists, SQL tables, Access tables, and even other Excel files. No longer do you need to purchase or build an expensive custom coded solution. These capabilities turn Excel in a project management superhero for construction professionals.

And this evolution of Excel and SharePoint places the power of building and managing solutions in your hands. Users can straight away leverage their existing Excel files that they know and love and immediately create robust cost management tools. No long and expensive development cycles, no coding and no complicated proprietary tools required.

Ready to unleash Excel’s superpowers for your team? All of these functions and more are incorporated into Lydon Solutions Program Management Portal for Construction. Contact us for your free demo or download our brochure.

Construction Project Reporting Made Simple

How-To | May 28, 2015

Lydon Solutions knows that it’s important for Construction Managers to quickly and easily provide the right information to management and project team members. This is why we integrate robust reporting functions into our Construction Program Management Portal using the inherent power of Microsoft SharePoint. Our Portal makes it simple to create, customize and share reports as needed. We provide visual tools such as dashboards that enable stakeholders to understand a project’s status at a glance – with more detailed information only a click away.

Example reporting tools in the Lydon Solutions Construction Program Management Portal:

Data Driven Dashboards:

Lydon Solutions puts critical project data in dashboards integrated into team homepages so that each group has everything they need in one place to easily determine project health. Data for these dashboards can be linked to Microsoft SharePoint lists and forms, pulled from external data or be manually entered. Information can be presented as standard charts (pie, line, bar, X/Y, heat maps, bubble charts, etc.) with drill down capability.

Scorecards:

Raw data can be overwhelming to consume. That’s why we use visual indicators such as traffic lights, custom icons, and color coding to represent the status of an item in lists or libraries of data. We also use scorecards on form libraries to provide an approval status of a record. Rules can be easily setup to determine which conditions drive the scorecard.

Microsoft Excel Services:

Everybody loves using Excel to manage day-to-day operations on a program. The Lydon Solutions Construction Program Management Portal allows you to quickly web enable your existing Excel reports/dashboards so that the entire project team can have access to them. Users can interact with your Excel files directly on the Portal using pivot tables, slicers and data selection, reporting and file downloads.

Microsoft SharePoint Reporting Service:

SQL Reporting Services allow developers to build standard reports with charts, maps, dashboards, and log information. Data can be filtered with user parameters and exported to PDF, Word, and Excel. Users can also subscribe to reports that can be automatically scheduled.

Reporting is situation dependent and having the right information at the right time is critical. With the Lydon Solutions Construction Program Management Portal, all your reporting tools are at your fingertips. Contact us to learn how we can help you simplify reporting for all your construction projects.

Discover SharePoint for Construction at the CMAA Capital Projects Symposium

Events | March 31, 2015

Don’t miss our ‘SharePoint Construction Program Portal’ presentation at this year’s CMAA Capital Projects Symposium, taking place at the Long Beach Hyatt Regency, April 12-14, 2015.

Every year, the 2015 CMAA Capital Projects Symposium highlights innovative uses of technology in construction/capital management with product demonstrations and educational sessions. Lydon Solutions is honored to have our presentation selected to be shared with attendees of this year’s symposium.

The Award-Winning Lydon Solutions Construction Program Management Portal

We enjoy attending events like the CMAA symposium because we love talking to construction professionals about IT solutions for the business issues they face. One of the top IT challenges we consistently hear from construction management companies and owners is that they have multiple information systems that do not “talk” to each other. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

This is why Lydon Solutions has developed a complete hosted Program Management solution that centralizes everything project managers and project team members need to manage and monitor a program, including dashboards, reports, scorecards, and more.

The Lydon Solutions Construction Program Management Portal utilizes Microsoft SharePoint as a foundation and integrates with Oracle Primavera P6, ESRI Arc GIS, and Microsoft Office. Other features of our award winning portal solution include mobile offline forms, collaboration tools, management of all project content, and integration with enterprise business applications.

Sound interesting? Be sure to join us at the 2015 CMAA Capital Projects Symposium to learn how Lydon Solutions has significantly reduced costs and increased efficiency for our clients on multi-billion dollar construction projects.

Can’t attend this year’s symposium? Contact our team for a free consultation and demo.