Fragmentation is Your Enemy; Project Management 4.0 is Your Digital Ally

Traditional Real Estate industry project management methodologies have yet to fully deliver what asset owners and managers need most: planning that ensures maximum timeliness, cost-efficiency, and quality at every stage of an asset’s lifecycle. But that was then and this is now. There is a new approach to project management that comes closer than ever before to meeting this need. At Arcadis, we call it Project Management 4.0—a digital and completely integrated solution that overcomes the main deficiencies of traditional approaches to planning, decision-making, and executing. Fragmentation is your enemy; Project Management 4.0 is your digital ally—and a very powerful one at that.

The problem that existed before Project Management 4.0 came along was fragmentation. Previous project-management approaches did not offer an integrated solution covering the entirety of the asset’s lifecycle. Consequently, those approaches left the project without a digital strategy sufficient to overcome the tendency to place into disconnected silos things such as targets, outcomes, roles and responsibilities, common data environment, and interfaces.

The End of Silos

Project Management 4.0 is model-based information management that improves communication and collaboration, mitigates risk, and serves up rich data analytics in support of time efficiency, cost effectiveness, and quality from start to finish. It puts an end to silos. This is important because fragmentation is the enemy.

The impact of Project Management 4.0 on Real Estate acquisitioning, development, and investing is potentially huge, especially considering that the construction industry is among the least digitalized of any and that there simply is no alternative in this day and age to going digital. With Project Management 4.0, never-before-possible transparency is achievable since this integrated solution for managing digital workflows provides intensive insights into Real Estate assets—their every aspect at every stage of their lifecycle.

Project Management 4.0 is utilized by first gathering digital data and intensively analyzing it in order to first define the mission and its goals. Plans for carrying out that mission are then developed (these plans cover construction in both its digital and physical phases). Next, the fastest, most budget-minded and quality-oriented ways to implement the plans are identified. Once construction is completed, Project Management 4.0 continues to support the asset by mapping out all that needs to be accomplished in order to timely and cost-efficiently operate and maintain the property (and do so without cutting corners). Finally, if the asset later on requires modification, Project Management 4.0 produces plans for that as well.

Underlying every aspect of what Project Management 4.0 does is digital building information management (BIM) technology. At Arcadis, digital BIM is recognized as indispensible to success. We believe it is as necessary to a building as water is to a fish.

Arcadis Champions this New Methodology

Project Management 4.0 is embraced by Arcadis because the concept so powerfully aligns with our philosophy about digitization. We are convinced that Real Estate assets perform and deliver best when they go digital. In our opinion, digitization is the only way assets can survive and thrive in the face of the many forms of disruption now impacting the Real Estate industry. Project Management 4.0 is an integrated solution of the kind for which Arcadis is famous. It is project management based on digital methodology, and that is why we support it and promote it.

We often speak of our efforts at Arcadis to bring about strategic, focused partnering of ecosystems as well as platform-enabled collaboration among ecosystem partners. Project Management 4.0 is a perfect example of both. To provide this new methodology, we have collaborated with ecosystem partner vrame. Arcadis brings to this pairing best-in-class project management know-how while vrame brings best-in-class technical BIM management capability.

There are two points to keep in mind as you consider whether the time is right to contact Arcadis to discuss the significant value Project Management 4.0 can bring to your Real Estate assets. First, as noted earlier, fragmentation is your enemy—and fragmentation is what previous project-management methodologies cannot avoid. Second, decision-making today is extensively and exhaustively data-oriented. Project Management 4.0 is about as data-oriented as it gets—and that is a very good thing, as you’ll discover once you begin utilizing this vital new approach to planning. 

One thing Project Management 4.0 does not overcome is the foundational need to select the right partners before the planning even begins. Having from the get-go a team well-matched to the project and to its overall goals is crucially important. Equally vital is a team committed to remaining available and engaged after the project ends to help resolve issues that may arise later on down the road—and even to be ready, willing, and able to welcome additional partners long after the project gets underway. In short, without the right partners, the team and all the processes related to the project can easily fragment and slip into silos.