I’d like to congratulate Aconex customer Graham Construction on being featured in an ENR article on January 31.  “Private Funding Finds A Way Into Other Public Spaces” focuses on how public-private partnerships (P3) can save on long-term life-cycle costs.  We’re proud of the work we’re doing with them on the US$426 million expansion of the Kelowna and Vernon Hospitals, which is British Columbia’s largest P3 project to date.  Along with the cost and efficiency savings of using Aconex, ENR notes that the P3 approach is set to save the expansion about US$25 million, which is quite the accomplishment.

Read more about the two projects and how Aconex gives Graham “the visibility and accountability required” on a P3 in our website’s case studies section:

Kelowna General Hospital – Accountability, visibility on PPP project

Vernon Jubilee Hospital – Accountability on PPP project

In this week’s Collaboration for Grown Ups post, I’m diving into the second and final post of the collaboration tool considerations series. We’ve already discussed the technology considerations, so now it’s time to dial into what will ultimately drive adoption: users. Ensuring a quality user experience with the collaboration tool results in a higher adoption rate and also maximizes ROI.

Check out the full post “Top 10 considerations for collaboration tools: Part Two, users,” live on Computerworld.  Hopefully this collection has been useful to you.  Have anything else to add?  Let me know in the comments section.

Leigh

@leighjasper

For some just starting to explore collaboration and its benefits, the task of choosing a solution for an organization can be daunting. In this week’s Collaboration for Grown Ups post, I’m featuring part 1 of a 2-part series to help guide organizations through some key technology considerations to ensure a system meets expectations.

From deployment to search & analytics capabilities, I hope you enjoy the read. Next week, I’ll switch gears to finish out the Top 10 focusing on what the users need.

You can view “Top 10 considerations for collaboration tools: Part One” at its original location in the Computerworld blogs. Looking forward to your feedback – be sure to leave a comment to keep the discussion going.

Collaboration for Grown Ups is well underway and I’m kicking off 2012 with what I promised: the second part of my collaboration trend predictions for the coming year. Part one addressed trends like Big Data and social networking. For part two, I switched gears a little bit into cloud deployment and how it relates to mobile and the enterprise.

Enjoy Collaboration trends for 2012: part two! Please share on your social networks and link back if you have your own blog.

Now that 2012 is full steam ahead, I can gear up my next round of posts. Stay tuned for topics like collaboration vs. FTP and what to look for in a collaboration solution.

Back in 2009, Simon Bristow presented to the Agile Australia conference on how Aconex had incorporated “Inter-Sprint Breaks” into the Agile process to avoid burning out teams with the pressures of back-to-back sprint delivery. Included in the set of activities that Aconex undertakes in these breaks were Hackathons (one day to work on a project of your choosing that does not have to be related to Aconex and present back to the business what you learnt) and Howhardi Gras (one week to answer “How long would it take to…” question for a selected set of Aconex related projects). Both of these activities were primarily about Innovation and have been very successful except in one thing; very few of the projects were then prioritised by Product to be delivered to clients. Many of the projects demonstrated great potential, but few made it to the top of the queue for development and release.

In the last week before the 2011 Christmas break Aconex undertook a different activity; a “FedEx week” that focused more on delivery. The project criteria still required innovation, challenge and business value but they also had to be completed and delivered, ready for our next external release or immediately available for internal use. The term FedEx Day has been popularised by Atlassian who now offer to help other companies run their own FedEx days.

Engineering drove the project selection process after receiving over 160 suggestions from the broader business. The engineers were then able to pick their projects and form their own teams, giving them the opportunity to work with different people. We ensured that each project had the right skill mix to be successful, so there was some minor shuffling of people and projects before the week began, but most people worked on their first choice.

All seven projects that were selected were delivered at the end of the week, despite numerous technical challenges that were encountered along the way. One project was deployed immediately to production for some beta clients to try, three others will appear in our next major release of Aconex and the other three are available for internal staff to use. Overall it was a very successful and productive exercise, especially as it is usually a quiet week in the office before the Australian summer break.

We did observe some changes in behaviour, with many meetings cancelled and less collaboration between the teams since they were focused on their goal and not the overall goal for all the teams. The user experience team also had to rush the designs of some functionality, there was no time for any user testing and compromises were made due to the strict deadline. Therefore, this is not a sustainable approach to software development.

Hackathon’s and Howhardi Gras still have their place and we will continue to run them but Agile emphasises that business value has not been delivered until clients are using and paying for new functionality. Therefore, the occasional FedEx week is a good way of achieving innovation, challenging and motivating engineers, and delivering business value.

I hope everyone is enjoying my Computerworld blogs so far.  In this week’s Collaboration for Grown Ups post, Collaboration trends for 2012: Part one, I addressed the three hot topics that have been top-of-mind for me: Big Data, Social and Mobile.

The construction industry is no stranger to the marriage of collaboration and Big Data, especially when you consider the adoption levels of Building Information Modeling (BIM).  Additionally, social by definition is already collaboration and we will see it used for more enterprise and industry applications next year, including mobile.

Enjoy part one, I look forward to discussing more trends in early 2012.

This is the third installment in my Computerworld blog series, Collaboration for Grown Ups, and this week we’re tackling an issue that you don’t want to ignore: legal risk.

The first thing you should ask yourself when choosing a collaboration system should be: “what legal risks exist?” Most often overlooked is the simple fact that if information can be deleted by any party involved, then there is no legal record and the risk is increased.

Hopefully this post will encourage you to take stock of what you’re working with. It should also prompt you to consider the business value: No system meant for decision making can be trusted by partners if the information can be easily compromised.

You can view the full post, “Keeping Your Lawyers Happy – It’s not Impossible!” on Computerworld. The post also features some scenarios to help paint the landscape of possible risk – all comments and personal accounts of risk welcome!

Leigh

On my Computerworld blog series, Collaboration for Grown Ups, we’ve so far tackled the basic facts of collaboration. This week’s post, “If it isn’t neutral, it’s not collaboration,” is now live, and we’re digging in further, past the facts, to a discussion that revolves around the importance of neutrality in multi-party collaboration.

As I mention in the post, I spent a formative year in politically neutral Switzerland. What Switzerland has in neutrality is also crucial to the collaboration process because it ensures fairness and protection for all parties involved in a dispute or negotiation.

When considering how collaboration platforms are used and trusted to manage project information and processes, neutrality is a must! Visit the full post on Computerworld and be sure to let us know your thoughts in the comments section.

Trust is the new gold that makes collaboration work, according to this HBR article. It also makes the point that building trust takes commitment. I can relate to that.

Aconex recently achieved IS027001 certification – the gold star for information security management. This followed a 12-month internal review: of the information security management system (ISMS) and processes at Head Office and used by our tech team, as well as of some of our third party hosted environments.

An ISMS helps determine how information is handled and ours was evaluated for:

• Confidentiality: only those authorized to see the information have access
• Integrity: accuracy and completeness are safeguarded by robust sourcing, processing, updating and storage processes
• Availability: authorized users have access to information when they need it.

But why go through such a rigorous process to prove Aconex offers a higher level of information security than most businesses could achieve in their own right? Because we believe that neutral online collaboration can transform the way people work together on projects, and because we know that exceeding the security needs of even our most demanding clients is one way of helping that to happen.

Our data hosting and disaster recovery centers in the United States are not covered by the first round of certification. They’re already among the most secure in the world and host large volumes of US Government data. Despite this, work is underway to extend the scope of our ISO27001 certification to include these in early 2012.

With this certification, the Aconex collaboration platform has set a new benchmark of trust that clients can rely on.

It’s no secret that we at Aconex love collaboration. We believe in good communication through transparency, minimizing conflicts through neutrality, and that it all plays into the bigger picture of reducing risk and upping reward. While we primarily serve the construction industry, we truly believe that it’s a relevant topic addressing a multitude of fields, especially with the exponential-like growth of Software-as-a-Service and Cloud offerings. That passion is now translating into a blog series at an outlet that many IT decision makers turn to on a daily basis: Computerworld.

“Beyond cool: The cold, hard facts on collaboration” is the inaugural post in my Collaboration for Grown Ups series, now live on Computerworld. Here, I will be charting the waters of collaboration as it relates to understanding how organizations and their staff collaborate with business partners. Hopefully we can get some great discussions going!

We’d love to know what you think, so if you have any feedback or ideas for future posts, please leave it in the comments. Thanks!