Four ways a Common Data Environment can help your University Estates Department

Keepsite can save time and money across your Capital Plan

Universities are complex organisations to manage a project in. That level of complexity is increased significantly for a construction project. Internal project managers are expected to align the needs of internal stakeholders including end users, maintenance, IT, security and others and act as a conduit to a team of external designers, consultants and a main contractor.

The difficulty of the internal PM role is often not fully understood by either side of the internal or external stakeholder groups. Sharing information between these two sides of a project team requires a project environment that can be accessed by all. Keepsite is cloud based project and portfolio environment that doesn’t impact on any internal IT systems, nothing to download, all that is required is an internet connection.

By reducing the complexity of the project it will save time, reduce scope creep, save money and give better project outcomes.

Here are the top four ways that Keepsite can help University Estates Capital teams manage information more efficiently and be more proactive in managing projects;

1. Take control of the process

University capital plans can be in the hundreds of millions of pounds over a five year period. Yet often Estates use whatever process or software their consultant teams or main contractors use. That means that the outputs or format of information across projects aren’t necessarily what’s best for the university.

Keepsite’s tools can help you standardise process and workflow to fit in with your internal governance, delegation and approvals. By doing this your capital team will have an easier time running projects. Your internal and external stakeholders will start to know what to expect when they are part of the Estates project process.

2. Own your information

Keepsite provides a document management tool or common data environment (CDE) where you and your teams can share information relating to the project. We understand there are concerns of getting shut out of a CDE if it’s run by a consultant or contractor. With Keepsite this can’t actually happen no matter who is running the CDE but one way to be sure is to lean into the issue and run your own CDE. That way you are in control of how project teams are created and can have confidence that you are able to access your data anytime.

3. Free up you Inbox

The amount of data being produced during a construction project is only set to increase. Are your project managers inboxes full with drawings, site photos and reports? All documents can be shared within Keepsite so they don’t have to be duplicated. A document can also have tasks allocated to it so if an approval or comment is required from a member of the project team that can all happen within the Keepsite CDE.

4. Portfolio Management

Capital teams are running more than one project at a time. To manage your portfolio you need a way of aggregating all the data from your projects. Keepsite allows you to do this.

Take our Risk and Issues tool as an example. You are able to produce an aggregated view of all your project risks. This will allow you to manage the amount of total risk you are holding across your portfolio.

We can also help you manage your external consultants by creating easily measurable KPI’s within Keepsite. For example, tasks outstanding and speed to rectify or respond to a task.

What portfolio management really boils down to is more clarity across your entire capital plan.

There are many more ways Keepsite can help you manage your capital plans or master plans more efficiently. We hope that the list above has got you thinking about how we could work together.

We are currently working with University of Hull to help them fully understand their needs for a project environment with a 12 month trial. This is a learning curve for both of us. To acknowledge this we would like to offer a significant discount to university estates teams who are interested in carrying out a similar trial.

In order for both sides to get the best out of a trial we are only offering this to a small number of university estates teams.

Please get in touch if you are interested in talking about how a trial might work. We would love to hear from you. david.hughes@keepsite.com, www.keepsite.com