CANA Group of Companies

Mishael Akinsunmade

Project Execution Champion

I don't think construction has an information problem. If anything, we have the opposite problem.

There's more information available to project teams today than at any other point in the industry's history. Drawings, RFIs, submittals, meeting minutes, schedules, site photos, deficiencies, changes, consultant direction—most of it digital, searchable and accessible from almost anywhere.

And yet we keep running into the same familiar problems. Someone's working from an old drawing. A decision gets buried in an email chain. An RFI gets answered, but not early enough to actually help. An action item comes up in a meeting, then comes up again the following week because nobody was ever really clear on who owned it.

So I don't think the issue is information. It is what happens between receiving information and actually doing something with it. On complex projects, that gap gets expensive fast.

Complexity Creates More Interfaces

Something I've noticed working on institutional and healthcare projects is how many people can be pulled into what looks, on the surface, like a fairly simple decision.

The owner has an operational requirement. The consultant is protecting design intent. The trade has constructability concerns. The field team is trying to figure out what can actually be built, and when. Facilities are already thinking about how the system gets maintained five or ten years down the road.

None of those perspectives is wrong. The challenge is getting them aligned quickly enough for the project to keep moving.

Researchers have a name for this: information fragmentation and coordination complexity. In the field, it usually just sounds like:

"Who are we waiting on?"

That question alone tells you a lot about the health of a project.

Delays Often Start Earlier Than We Think

Most project problems show up late. We notice them when a procurement date is missed, when an activity slips on the schedule, or when someone's suddenly talking about additional cost.

But the real problem usually started weeks earlier. Maybe a design question got raised, but never escalated. Maybe the right stakeholder wasn't brought in soon enough. Maybe everyone just assumed someone else was following up.

There's a useful concept here: decision latency, which is the time between recognizing that a decision is needed and actually getting it made.

That time matters. A five-day delay on an RFI doesn't automatically mean a five-day project delay. But if that RFI is tied to fabrication, procurement or an upcoming sequence of work, the consequences can multiply quickly.

This is why I think construction managers need to treat decisions as project constraints in their own right, and not just ask "is this overdue?" but "when does this actually become a problem?" Those are two very different questions.

Technology Helps, But Only If the Process Actually Works

This is where I see the real value of construction technology, and it's not another dashboard, and it's not that every process needs an app.

The value is in reducing the friction between someone spotting an issue and the team resolving it. Good digital systems improve document control, create better visibility, and make it clearer who owns what. Researchers call part of this information traceability.

Can we see where a decision came from? Can we see what changed? Can we tell who needs to act next? Can the superintendent in the field pull up the same current information that the project team is discussing back in the office?

That matters far more to me than how many features a platform has.

But I also think our industry has a habit of assuming that once something's digitized, the process has automatically gotten better. It hasn't. You can have a very sophisticated platform and still run bad meetings. You can track every RFI and still respond too late. You can assign every action item and still have no real accountability.

Sometimes all we've actually done is digitize the confusion.

Projects are Sociotechnical, Whether We Call Them That or Not

There's another research term I think describes construction pretty well: sociotechnical systems. The basic idea is that technology and people can't really be separated. A project management system doesn't operate on its own. It sits inside a project team full of personalities, responsibilities, contracts, habits and varying levels of experience.

So if the process is broken, the technology isn't going to fix it on its own. If nobody's willing to escalate an issue, the software can't escalate it for them in any meaningful way. If responsibilities are unclear, another notification isn't going to create ownership out of thin air. If meetings end without clear actions, posting the minutes online doesn't change that.

The human part still matters a lot.

The Construction Manager's Role Is Changing

The more projects I work on, the more I see construction management becoming, in part, an exercise in managing information flow. That doesn't replace understanding drawings, contracts, cost, schedule, or what's actually happening in the field. Those are still fundamental.

But there's another layer to the job now. You're constantly connecting people who are looking at the same project from completely different angles. You're trying to figure out which information matters right now, and which is going to matter three weeks from now. You're trying to understand who needs to make a decision before that decision turns into a constraint.

Researchers sometimes describe roles like this as boundary-spanning roles. Honestly, I think that's a pretty good description of a construction manager.

We sit between design and construction; between the owner and the trades; between the office and the field; between information and execution.

And increasingly, I think that's where the real value is.

Construction doesn't need more information for the sake of having more information. We need to get better at knowing what matters, who needs it, and what has to happen next.

Technology can absolutely help with that. But it's still people who move the project forward.