1. BEST PRACTICES GUIDE
Waste Not, Want Not –
Optimize Employee Productivity
Through Collaborative Software Tools
for Document Control and Workflow

2. Waste Not, Want Not
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According to an International Data Corporation (IDC)
whitepaper, the average knowledge worker spends
15-25% of his/her time looking for documents.1
That
means that in an eight-hour day, that worker spends
nearly two hours each day day looking for information.
For a five person team, that’s 50 hours a week wasted to
chase down documents. Consider if each team member
got back just one hour of that time every day, the team
regains 25 hours a week. Imagine how that time could
be more productively spent by effectively planning,
anticipating and coordinating – rather than searching,
chasing, and hunting. There has been a big effort across
the construction industry in the past few years to
eliminate waste for better efficiency and productivity.
Spending 50 hours a week to chase documents? That’s
wasteful on a colossal level!
A Common Scenario
Let’s put this problem into a more financial perspective
with a simple example involving curtainwall
prefabrication.
It’s obviously important to get the glass on a building
so interior work can commence without issues like
water intrusion. It may take 6-12 months to fabricate
and manufacture the glass and it’s critical to stay on
schedule with every day being productive. What if a
submittal just sat in your information sharing system
(for example, SharePoint or Dropbox) for two weeks?
Nobody was aware that the sub uploaded it! Without
a built-in workflow engine, notifications are not
automatically generated – so there, in secret, it sits.
It’s 3 AM: Do you know where your documents are??
Trying to track down project information in order to keep the project moving on
schedule can be a daunting task; it’s also a chase that takes a lot of time. Whether
you’re dealing with electronic files, hard copy documents, or a combination of both, the
hunt for information is a challenge facing many construction professionals. It’s likely
that someone in your organization (perhaps you) has considered questions like these:
• Who is currently reviewing the latest set of drawings or submittals? Who needs to
process them next?
• How do I ensure my subs are using the most current set of plans?
• Can I easily find a record of all the changes that were made to any given document?
These common questions have answers and a solution is available to contractors
seeking to reduce or better yet, eliminate the issues altogether.
1
“The Hidden Cost of Not Finding the Right Information.” Susan Feldman and Chris Sherman. IDC. 2001.

3. Waste Not, Want Not
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Let’s see this story unfold … so now Dan, the Project
Manager, realizes he doesn’t have the submittal and
starts asking his Assistant Project Manager, Susan,
where it is since it was due two weeks ago. Susan has
no idea because it hasn’t been sent to her. She now
starts searching and combing through her emails, in her
Dropbox account, and in their project SharePoint site.
Eventually Susan finds it and realizes it was uploaded
by the sub two weeks ago. So now Susan has to go to
her boss and explain that the submittal was uploaded
on time but since she never received notification of its
submission and she never checked the system for it, it
just sat there for two weeks untouched. Sorry, this one’s
not a happy ending.
Does it sound familiar? Having to constantly check a
system for new information is a waste of time. Losing
weeks as something sits in the dark is rotten. A mad
dash hunting for a document at a deadline is chaos. All
wasted time with lots of frustration mixed in. So how
can this be fixed?
Businesses that were exhausted living that wasteful
scenario have moved to a solution like Viewpoint For
Projects that includes workflow processes for document
reviews such submittals. So Susan comes into work at 7
a.m. and at 7:30 she receives an email letting her know
that there is a new submittal that needs to be processed.
From that notification, she accesses the submittal,
performs her review, and then passes the item on to the
Design Team for further review and processing. All of this
takes place automatically through the system for every
stage of the review process. At each of these stages (built
according to your firm’s or client’s needs), any time a
document moves from one stage to another there’s a time
limit and if no appropriate action is taken, the document
automatically moves on.
Having to constantly check a system
for new information is a waste of time.
Losing weeks as something sits in the
dark is rotten. A mad dash hunting for
a document at a deadline is chaos.
Figure 1. Example of a workflow diagram in Viewpoint For Projects.
Figure 2. Example of a workflow notification in Viewpoint For Projects.

4. Waste Not, Want Not
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So, instead of being reactive and wasting time
searching for documents she believes are past
due, Susan can now be proactive:
• View when a submittal is approaching its
due date
• Send reminders to the sub about the
required submittal
• Know exactly when it’s been uploaded
when she receives the automatic system
notification
You’ve Got Mail…Lots of Mail
So that scenario illustrates how a workflow
engine like that found in Viewpoint For Projects
can help eliminate time-wasting document
chasing by sending instant notifications to appropriate
stakeholders for review and processing.
You may agree that efficiency sounds great, but could be
thinking “I get hundreds of emails a day. The last thing I
need is a bunch of system notifications flooding my email
inbox!” An understandable reaction. Project teams have
enough day-to-day email to sort through without a batch
of notifications dumped to the inbox. Let’s demonstrate
an alternative solution by considering what a typical day
would look like for our assistant project manager, Susan.
Susan’s day at work begins with starting up her computer,
checking her emails, reviewing various Excel spreadsheets
for deliverables, and looking through her sticky notes of
to-do tasks. Using a variety of methods and systems, she
strives to keep up with all her responsibilities. It involves
quite a bit of juggling with room for error. Managing a
workload in this fashion can lead to a hectic day and
cause unnecessary stress and anxiety, as well as potential
for oversight, miscommunication, and costly mistakes.
Eradicate those issues by using a solution like Viewpoint
For Projects that provides a single location for access to all
tasks and documents that require your attention or review.
The “My Inbox” area essentially creates your to-do list for
you, putting items requiring your action and awaiting your
approval in your line of vision and at your fingertips.
You Can’t Spell Wait without IT
For many construction organizations, any document
control or collaboration solutions deployed on a project
are administered by someone in the company’s IT
department or by an internal software administer
responsible for handling all company projects in addition
to other responsibilities. In such cases, project teams
are typically required to submit an IT ticket in order to
have any needed adjustments made to their project
environment – things like giving access to a new
subcontractor, making adjustments to workflows, adding
new folders to the project directory. In candid speak: you
are at the mercy of that administrator and will have to
wait hours or days in order to see your needs met.
Managing time is critical to a project’s success. Project
managers can’t afford to wait for changes or additions
they need made; delays could place a serious damper
on productivity and overall success. The alternative to
waiting could involve ‘going rogue’ with PMs downloading
files directly, which could involve using unsecured
Figure 3. Example of an action item list in Viewpoint For Projects.

5. Waste Not, Want Not
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THINKING OUTSIDE OF THE ‘IN’BOX
Email may be named a necessary evil. It’s an absolute
necessity to business communication, and for many it’s an
essential tool for personal communication, too. Many also
consider it a time-sucking burden. Love it or hate it, we’re
stuck with it. Indeed, contractors and their external team
members rely on email as the de facto tool for all project
communication and collaboration. Everyone on a project
has an email account and messages can be delivered
almost seamlessly regardless of email client.
However, social media consultant Su Butcher recently
raised the issue of email and its use as a communication
tool in construction: “With project teams scattered across
your country (or the world for that matter) and fewer
opportunities for face-to-face meetings as our workload
gets ever more challenging, we need communications
tools that help, rather than hinder, the smooth process of
decision-making. Email just doesn’t cut it.”2
While she goes on to acknowledge email’s benefits
– stability, ubiquity, relatively private – Butcher also
emphasizes its drawbacks:
• Complete lack of any reliable audit trail (though many
pretend there is);
• The tendency of people to send emails to absolve
themselves of responsibility, instead of solving
whatever the problem is;
• A constant and unremitting drain on time and energy;
• Spam. Some are so busy doing proper work that they
never read their emails, which means that other people
are wasting hours and hours of their time and resource
composing long treatise which will never be read.3
These observed issues bring us to another point; too
often, email serves as a proxy for managing tasks.
Alexandra Samuel, online engagement expert and author,
contributed to the Harvard Business Review about the
problems this substitution can create:
“If you’re conflating email and task management, then the
job of simply communicating – reading and replying to
your messages – gets bogged down by all the emails you
leave sitting in your inbox simply so you won’t forget to
address them. This approach also makes managing your
to-do-list problematic: when you need to quickly identify
the right task to take on next, nothing slows you down like
diving into your inbox to scroll through old messages. The
reason so many of us fall into the trap of conflating email
and task management is that email is inextricable from
much of what we do in work and in life: many of our tasks
arrive in the form of email messages, and many other
tasks require reading or sending emails as part of getting
that work done.”4
As the experts have indicated, email is an indispensable
part of daily communication; without it construction
projects would invariably come to a screeching halt. But
email clearly lacks many of the attributes that a true
collaboration solution can provide, including audit trail,
file size capacity, open access to external stakeholders,
and Meta search capabilities.
2
Butcher, Su. “Killing Off Email.” The B1M Mail, Issue 4. http://www.theb1m.com/pdfs/The-B1M-Mail-Issue-4.pdf
3
Ibid.
4
Samuel, Alexandra. “Stop Using Your Inbox as a To-Do List.” Harvard Business Review. March 7, 2014.

6. Waste Not, Want Not
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systems, lack of processes, and opening the organization
up to technical issues, viruses, etc. So that’s clearly not an
option to pursue, but waiting cannot be the answer.
Instead of creating that IT ticket and hoping your request
makes it to the top of IT’s priority task list, what if you
could walk over to the Project Administrator and ask her
to invite the new sub into the environment or to make a
needed change to an existing review process workflow.
Instead of waiting hours or days, the process only takes
minutes. IT doesn’t become mired in a never-ending list
of PM requests and the clock doesn’t run out on PMs
trying to keep a job moving forward.
Conclusion
It becomes a story of embracing technology – leveraging
contemporary collaborative solutions as tools of the trade.
For those businesses feeling a struggle with time-sucking
file chasing, paper pile rifling, email overwhelm, and an IT
impediment, you’re succumbing to “the way it’s always
been done” while not acknowledging that your business
needs have changed, the industry has evolved, and better
solutions exist. Look beyond your current burden and
consider a more efficient way to collaborate, to improve
workflows, to allow confident decision-making, and to
bring a new level of productivity across your business.

7. viewpoint.com | 800.333.3197