The Construction Industry, ITSM and Agile

In efforts to achieve flexible and iterative continual improvement it seems the world is shifting from Waterfall to Agile methodologies for managing projects.  

Is the same also true for the construction industry?

Can massive projects with equally massive costs for building structures that last lifetime benefit from Agile?

During the build process, this may not be so straightforward. Structures are built sequentially; akin to the Waterfall approach.  You cannot build the first storey of a building without getting the foundation right, nor can the foundation be improved after the first storeys are in place. Equally, deliverables are not incremental pieces of value-add and handed over to the customer in construction as in software development.

But there is good news.  

Agile can lend itself well to the planning process and to an extent solve some issues at during the build process. Good project management systems that bring transparency, collaboration and  the flexibility to adapt to changing internal and external circumstances. 

Enter Cherwell Service Management.  

CSM does ITSM and does it well, and spreads outwards to other parts of the business. For those of you who know me know that regardless of the question, Cherwell is always the answer.

This is no exception, far from it. I can say this from experience because I have built an entire ERP system for the construction industry using only Cherwell. 

However, let's not reinvent the wheel here.  
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Cherwell offers its Project and Portfolio Management PPM mApp as part of its CSMe bundle. I won't explain the details, you can get them for yourself here. 

Suffice to say Cherwell's and it's PPM module is Agile, so let's get back to that. Where Cherwell comes into it's own is where lies Agile's biggest threat of failure: lack of organisational buy-in due to good-old resistance to change.  

Why? The right tool set.

Dedicated or developed PPM software solutions can quite easily become too much, too little, too expensive, too inflexible and too incompatible. Every sizeable construction company has IT, has HR, has facilities, has legal, has marketing and of course has PPM.

So why wouldn't any company seeking a new solution for any of these functions not want any of these additional systems as part of a centralised workflow ecosystem included? 

Here 's the Agile bit:

If any of these systems do not service the right people the right function at the right time then you (yes you, not developers - it's codeless!) can adjust, tweak and polish any aspect of Cherwell until you find the perfect fit for your business.

Which should never happen,

Because your company should be- and will want to be - constantly changing, given that change is a constant.