When it comes to running any business, it’s important to spend time thinking about how to grow your business and improve its existing operations and not just stay stuck in the day-to-day minutiae of running a company. This can be particularly challenging in certain fields, such as the construction business. That’s because, in construction, you’re often focused on individual jobs and worksites, rather than how each of these projects connects to an overall thrust of work or trajectory for your company.
If you have your MBA, you already understand the significance of reference data management and the importance of setting goals for your company. However, you may not have spent a lot of time thinking about how reference data and MDM (master data management) software can be used to help build your business even more. The same can be said for OKR software, which helps you clearly define your construction brand’s OKRs, or objectives and key results. All of these pieces of data can ensure that you have the right analytics to ensure that each client account your company is responsible for is progressing correctly. Read on for a few tips, tricks, and best practices to keep in mind as you consider how you may want to change up your business process and improve your workflow.
Use MDM (master data management) solutions to keep the integrity of your data.
MDM software has a powerful role to play when it comes to ensuring that all of the data from your disparate job sites doesn’t stay siloed. A master data solution establishes a core reference data set and uses that to ensure data quality and integrity whenever you need to pull insights. Rather than looking at multiple spreadsheets during a vendor audit, you can simply look at your master data and see what the overall expenditures are for each separate vendor across all of your projects.
For example, if you have an electrician or plumbing contractor that you frequently use for commercial renovations, you can easily access the reference data set about this contractor to learn how much business you give them each quarter. This makes it easier to make data-informed decisions, allowing data integration to be handled simply and effectively every step of the way.
Set goals, and align your team members with OKR tools.
The OKR methodology, or OKR framework, is an impressive approach to setting goals and achieving them that has applications in a wide range of industries. OKR tools let you clearly define what tasks need to be completed each quarter, and beyond being a tool for goal setting and aligning all of your team members across the same major goals, OKRs can also help with employee engagement and performance management. When a worker understands the role they play in advancing a business’ overall goals, they’re more likely to not just perform their work in alignment with those goals, but also better appreciate their role in your organization. Especially when you think about performance reviews, having a clear list of objectives and key results to compare an employee’s performance to makes performance management much more streamlined. As such, it’s definitely worth looking into getting an OKR software tool for business purposes.
Ultimately, the data you collect is only as useful as the ways you can apply it. This is why it’s important to be able to track progress and measure results by having your entire organization understand your company objectives and how data governance works. Especially in a field like construction, where multiple projects are always in progress simultaneously, getting the entire company on the same page can offer major results.