Spring Valley Construction Company

Identifying Technologies That Deliver Value

I start with the problem. I don't start with the product. Most bad technology decisions in construction begin with a demo. Someone sees a polished presentation, then goes looking for a problem the tool can solve.

I work the other way around. I try to spend a lot of time on our jobsites, and the best ideas come from watching where people lose time. That might be information entered twice, a superintendent chasing a document, or a PM building the same report by hand every week.

Then I ask a few plain questions. Does this remove a step for the person doing the work, or does it add one? Can a superintendent explain why it matters in one sentence? Who owns it after go-live? If nobody can answer that last one, the tool will fail no matter how good it is.

I also test cheaply before committing. If a tool can't prove its value on one project with a small group, rolling it out to twenty projects won't fix that.

Challenges in Introducing New Technology to Construction Teams

The biggest challenge isn't resistance. Field teams push back because they've seen tools come and go: a big launch, a training session, and six months later, nobody is using it. After a few rounds of that, skepticism is a reasonable response.

The real problem is that organizations underestimate how hard implementation is. Buying software is the easy part. Changing how people work every day takes process, ownership and follow-through long after the launch meeting. I wrote a book about this, The Implementation Gap, because I kept seeing the same pattern. The technology worked, but the implementation didn't.

Three things have helped us: treating training as ongoing instead of a one-time event, building each rollout around the role and making sure someone owns the change. When we introduced AI tools, we built onboarding for each department instead of handing everyone the same generic guide. If adoption is everyone's job, it's no one's job.

Improving Collaboration between Field Teams and Project Stakeholders

Most collaboration problems are really information problems. The field and the office aren't failing to get along. They're working from different versions of the truth. The technology leader’s job is to shorten the distance between what happens on site and what the rest of the organization sees.

“Most bad technology decisions in construction begin with a demo. Instead, spend a lot of time on jobsites. The best ideas come from watching where people lose time.”

That starts with a single source of truth and data that doesn't have to be entered twice. The data also has to flow both ways. Field teams feed information into systems constantly and rarely see anything come back. When a superintendent can see the reports and decisions his data supports, the quality of that data goes up.

The last piece is presence. I try to go to all of our project sites as frequently as possible, and that matters as much as any tool. You can't design good workflows for people whose work you've never watched. Credibility with the field comes from showing up, listening and fixing what they tell you is broken.

Emerging Construction Technologies That Will Matter

AI will have the greatest impact, but not in the way most headlines suggest. The near-term value isn't autonomous jobsites. It's the unglamorous work that eats up hours for project managers, estimators and coordinators.

We've built tools that compare a subcontractor's scope against drawings, specs and past scopes to flag gaps and exclusions before a contract is signed. That review used to depend on how much time a PM had that week. Automated status reports built straight from project data are another example. 

My caution is that AI amplifies whatever process it sits on. If your data is messy and your workflows are unclear, AI just helps you produce bad output faster. The firms that benefit most won't be the ones that adopt first. They'll be the ones that cleaned up their processes before they started.

Leveling Up in a Construction Technology Career

Learn construction first. The most effective technology people in this industry understand how a project gets built, how money moves and what a superintendent's day looks like. Walk sites, sit in OAC meetings and ask questions.

Think of yourself as a translator. Much of this job is explaining field problems to vendors and executives and explaining software to people who have built successfully for thirty years without it. If you can do both with respect, you'll be valuable anywhere.

Get good at the parts of the job that don't feel like technology, such as writing clear procedures, training people and following up. Those skills decide whether a tool gets used.

Finally, remember that deployment is not adoption. A tool installed on every project and used on none is a cost, not a success. Judge your work by whether people's jobs got easier.