Industrialised construction is generating more project data than ever – but without common metrics, connected systems and disciplined benchmarking, that data will not translate into better productivity. Dr Danny Murguia, Assistant Research Professor at the University of Cambridge, sets out how the Cambridge Framework for Construction Performance and Productivity can turn fragmented project information into actionable insight.
Why Productivity Measurement Must Evolve
Industrialised Construction is transforming how projects are designed, manufactured, and delivered. Through Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA), off-site production, and increasing use of digital technologies and AI, the industry now generates unprecedented volumes of data across the project lifecycle. Yet despite these advances, construction continues to face a long-standing challenge: improving productivity.
National statistics consistently show that construction productivity has remained largely stagnant when compared with sectors such as manufacturing. However, these macro-level measures often fail to reflect what is happening within individual projects, where innovative methods, digital tools, and industrialised approaches are increasingly being deployed. The challenge is not simply productivity itself, but how it is measured.
Traditional productivity indicators, such as economic output per hour worked (£/hour), provide little practical value to project teams seeking to improve delivery performance. At project level, organisations often rely on Gantt Charts, activity counts, or planned versus actual progress metrics. While these approaches can identify delays, they rarely explain why performance varies, where bottlenecks occur, or how resources can be deployed more effectively.
As a result, project teams often lack a clear understanding of current productivity levels and the factors influencing performance. In an industry under pressure to deliver more efficiently, a more structured and actionable approach to productivity measurement is required.
Building a Common Framework for Industrialised Construction
Industrialised construction creates new opportunities to measure performance because data is generated throughout design, manufacture, logistics, and installation. The challenge is not the availability of data, but the ability to connect it in a meaningful way.
To address this challenge, the Cambridge Laing O’Rourke Centre has developed a practical framework for measuring and benchmarking construction productivity. Developed in collaboration with major developers and Tier 1 and Tier 2 contractors, the framework provides a structured methodology for measuring productivity at project, work package, and activity levels.
Central to this approach is the adoption of a common measurement framework. Standardised productivity metrics, data templates, and blocker classifications enable all project participants to interpret performance using consistent definitions. This creates a shared language for productivity improvement across organisations and supply chains.
The framework also promotes the creation of a connected digital ecosystem. Digital models, programme schedules, installation records, labour data, logistics information, equipment utilisation records, and site monitoring technologies can all be linked through common project identifiers. This allows project teams to track performance across the entire delivery process rather than viewing individual activities in isolation.
Converting Project Data into Performance Improvement
The real value of productivity measurement lies in its ability to generate actionable insight.
This approach was applied to a major hybrid steel and CLT development delivered by Landsec and Mace. By integrating project, production, and site data, the project team gained near-real-time visibility into performance across work areas, enabling more informed decision-making.
The results demonstrated the potential of a structured measurement approach. The average structural frame production rate reached approximately 45 m² per day across the development, while labour productivity exceeded benchmark levels typically observed on comparable projects. Peak production rates surpassed 70 m² per day when logistics, sequencing, and resource allocation were aligned effectively.
Importantly, the benefits extended beyond headline productivity figures. Continuous monitoring of workflow interruptions, resource utilisation, and operational constraints provided a deeper understanding of performance variability. Rather than simply recording outcomes, the project team could identify the underlying causes of underperformance and implement corrective actions more rapidly.
Scaling Productivity Through Measurement and Benchmarking
While individual project improvements are valuable, the greatest opportunity lies in scaling productivity improvement across the industry.
Consistent measurement enables organisations to benchmark performance, understand variability, and identify the factors that drive successful outcomes. Over time, this creates a growing evidence base that supports more informed decisions during planning, procurement, design, and delivery.
The framework supports several practical applications, including productivity benchmarking, performance visualisation, root-cause analysis, predictive analytics, and machine learning-based forecasting. As datasets expand, organisations will be increasingly able to understand how different procurement strategies, delivery models, technologies, and construction methods influence project outcomes.
Achieving this vision requires collaboration across the construction value chain. Clients can play a critical role by establishing productivity data requirements and promoting transparency in performance reporting. Designers can use productivity evidence to inform decisions on constructability and standardisation. Contractors can implement systems to capture performance data. Manufacturers and suppliers can contribute fabrication, delivery, and installation information linked to project models and programmes.
Industrialised construction generates more data than ever before, but the challenge is no longer data collection, it is converting data into meaningful insight and sustained performance improvement. The Cambridge Framework for Construction Performance and Productivity provides a practical pathway to achieve this by establishing common definitions, structured measurement methodologies, and data-driven benchmarking processes that enable organisations to understand what drives performance, identify improvement opportunities, and replicate successful practices across projects and portfolios. As adoption grows across organisations and supply chains, the industry can move beyond fragmented reporting and isolated success stories towards a shared evidence base that supports more productive, predictable, and sustainable project delivery.
For more information visit www.construction.cam.ac.uk
Nicola Carniato of AKT II examines how DfMA, digital coordination and disciplined interface management helped turn one of Oxford’s most complex civic buildings into a deliverable, systematised construction project.
The Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities is one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken by the University of Oxford.
The building brings together seven faculties, six libraries and a major new cultural programme within a single 25,000m² building.
The spatial, functional and technical requirements introduce a level of complexity rarely encountered in higher education projects.
For AKT II, the project was as much about engineering certainty into that complexity as it was about delivering structure. The challenge was not simply to design a building of scale, but to make a highly diverse, multi-use campus buildable, coordinated and deliverable—while meeting exacting architectural, performance and sustainability ambitions.
A project defined by integration
The architectural vision – led by Hopkins Architects – centred on a series of interlocking spaces organised around a Great Hall which is the hearth. Below that, there are the concert and performance halls which are acoustically demanding venues, while above, library and academic spaces extend across multiple storeys.
From a structural and coordination perspective, this meant managing fundamentally different building typologies within one coherent system: large-span public volumes, highly controlled acoustic enclosures, and dense, cellular academic space. The solution required early clarity in structural strategy and a disciplined approach to interfaces from the outset.
AKT II’s role was to act as part of an integrated design team, working alongside the architect, services engineers, contractor and specialist suppliers to ensure that structural decisions supported – not constrained – the architectural and operational ambitions.
Managing complexity through systematisation
A defining aspect of the project was the vision from Laing O’Rourke to adopt Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) at scale. More than 3,000 precast structural components were fabricated offsite using low-carbon concrete, including slabs, columns and wall elements.
This approach was not about modularising the building in the conventional sense, but about systematising it. The building’s apparent architectural diversity is underpinned by a disciplined kit-of-parts: precast columns with mechanical joints, standardised floor units with in-situ toppings, and repeatable connection details.
The benefits were significant. Offsite manufacture improved quality and consistency, reduced site congestion, and accelerated construction. It also enabled tighter tolerance control – critical in a building where structural coordination with façades, services and acoustic treatments was essential.
The central dome and Great Hall
The completed Great Hall at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre, where the glazed timber dome, precast structure and surrounding academic spaces come together through tightly coordinated DfMA-led design. © AKT II
At the heart of the building lies the Great Hall, a four-storey atrium that acts as both circulation space and social focus.
Structurally, its defining feature is a glazed dome spanning approximately 18 metres and rising above the roofline. This oak timber structure is supported by the precast columns and brings natural light deep into the building.
From an engineering perspective, the dome represents a convergence of architectural ambition and buildability. Its geometry, materiality and load paths required careful integration with the primary frame, while its prefabrication demanded precise coordination between structural design, fabrication and installation sequencing.
Performance spaces and acoustic engineering
The performance venues which are sitting beneath the ground floor, are the most technically demanding elements: the. These include a 500-seat concert hall, a theatre, and flexible black-box spaces, each with stringent acoustic requirements.
The integration of these “box-in-box” spaces within the structural system required careful and defined strategies. Acoustic isolation, servicing, maintenance and fire strategies had to be resolved considering structural efficiency and installation sequence.
Evidently the coordination between disciplines was critical. The design evolved through close collaboration and was supported by detailed digital modelling and early engagement with specialist contractors.
Digital coordination and delivery certainty
Digital tools played a key role in managing the project’s complexity. Building Information Modelling (BIM) and the formation of a Digital Twin were at the centre of the coordination of the design including also the supply chains. This process was pivotal to ensure the interfaces were resolved before construction.
The digital approach was the key stone of the DfMA strategy and allowed the prefabricated elements to be designed, manufactured and installed with confidence. The digital twin also embedded performance requirements – such as fire safety and sustainability which are part of the material passport for each element.
The digital coordination was at the core of the coordination process and allowed to achieve an elevated degree of certainty for the delivery.
Sustainability shaping engineering decisions
The Schwarzman Centre is one of the largest Passivhaus-certified buildings in England, with exceptionally low energy demand and high levels of airtightness and insulation.
Achieving this on a building of such scale and diversity required careful alignment between architectural, structural and services strategies. Therefore quality of the off-site structural solutions allowed needed to achieve airtightness and thermal continuity, while accommodating complex functional requirements.
The use of low-carbon precast concrete and offsite manufacture also contributed to reducing embodied carbon.
In this sense, sustainability was a driving factor which reinforced the need for early coordination and integrated design.
Lessons for the wider sector
The Schwarzman Centre offers a number of lessons for the delivery of complex buildings.
First, industrialised thinking does not require standardised architecture. Even highly bespoke, civic buildings can benefit from systematisation, provided it is applied thoughtfully and early.
Second, complexity must be managed, not avoided. By establishing clear structural and delivery strategies from the outset, the project team created a framework within which complexity could be accommodated without risk.
Third, integration is critical. The success of the project depended on close collaboration between disciplines, supported by digital tools and early contractor involvement.
Finally, certainty is a design outcome. Through DfMA, digital coordination and disciplined interface management, the team was able to deliver a project that might otherwise have been considered unbuildable within conventional constraints.
A model for future delivery
In many ways, the Schwarzman Centre challenges conventional distinctions between bespoke and industrialised construction. It demonstrates that the principles of industrialisation – repeatability, precision, early coordination – are as relevant to complex cultural buildings as they are to more standardised typologies.
For AKT II, the project reinforces a broader shift in thinking: from designing structures to designing systems of delivery. In doing so, it shows how engineering can do more than respond to complexity – it can create the conditions to control it.
By Darren Richards, Managing Director, Cogent Consulting
Industrialised construction is no longer a niche ambition or a conference buzzword. It is rapidly becoming the defining direction of travel for a sector under pressure to deliver more homes, more infrastructure, and better-performing buildings—faster, safer, and with dramatically reduced carbon impact. Yet there remains an uncomfortable truth at the heart of construction’s transformation: we are trying to industrialise a sector that still struggles to treat productivity as a core measure of success.
In automotive and aerospace, productivity is not an abstract concept or a retrospective KPI – it is a living operational discipline. It shapes decision-making, drives investment, defines leadership expectations, and provides a benchmark for continuous improvement. In construction, productivity is too often viewed as a secondary outcome: something that might improve if we digitise, standardise, or modernise. That mindset is the difference between incremental progress and true industrialisation.
If industrialised construction is to fulfil its promise, productivity must move from the periphery to the centre of strategy. And with that shift must come a deeper recognition: productivity is not simply about outputs per hour. It is about culture, behaviours, innovation systems, leadership maturity, and the willingness to change how we work.
Why productivity matters more than ever
Construction has long been measured in terms of cost, programme, and quality. These are essential metrics, but they can mask the deeper performance question: how efficiently and consistently can we deliver outcomes at scale? In other words, productivity.
In automotive, productivity is the engine of competitiveness. Manufacturers obsess over cycle time, takt time, yield rates, rework, and overall equipment effectiveness. In aerospace, productivity is intertwined with safety, reliability, traceability, and precision engineering. Both sectors operate in environments where variability is the enemy, and where every inefficiency compounds across a production system.
Construction, by contrast, has historically normalised variability. Projects are frequently treated as one-off prototypes. Teams are assembled and disbanded. Supply chains shift from job to job. Designs change late. Information arrives incomplete. Productivity becomes hard to define, harder to measure, and easiest to ignore.
The issue is not that construction professionals don’t care about performance – they absolutely do. The challenge is that the sector’s structures and commercial models often reward activity over efficiency, and short-term delivery over system improvement. As a result, productivity rarely becomes the primary lens through which strategic decisions are made.
Industrialised construction changes the stakes. When construction moves into manufacturing-style production – whether through offsite, modular, panelised systems, or platform-based design – productivity is no longer optional. It becomes the only way to make the model commercially viable.
Lessons from automotive and aerospace: what transfers – and what doesn’t
There is a growing temptation to borrow language from other industries: platforming, lean, automation, DfMA, digital twins, standardisation. These are all valuable concepts, but the real opportunity is not copying terminology – it is understanding the systems that make those industries productive.
Standardisation and repeatability sit at the heart of manufacturing performance. Automotive productivity is built on repeatable platforms. Aerospace productivity is built on controlled processes and engineering rigour. Both treat design as a driver of manufacturability, not an isolated creative exercise.
Construction has traditionally valued bespoke design and project-specific optimisation. The shift to industrialised construction requires a different philosophy: designing for repeatability, assembly, and scalability. That means fewer unique components, more common interfaces, and product thinking rather than project thinking.
In manufacturing, quality is productivity. Rework is waste. Variation is cost. Construction has often tolerated rework as a “normal” part of delivery. But as construction industrialises, defects don’t just affect a single site – they can replicate across production runs. Industrialised construction demands far greater discipline around tolerances, verification, traceability, and testing.
The same is true of supply chain performance. Automotive and aerospace invest heavily in supplier integration and long-term partnerships. Construction procurement models can still be fragmented and adversarial, optimised for lowest cost rather than best value. But you cannot build an industrial system on unstable relationships.
At the same time, we must recognise a hard truth: construction isn’t a factory. Buildings are delivered in changing environments, with complex stakeholder interfaces and site-specific constraints. That doesn’t mean construction can’t become more productive – it means it must be smarter about where industrialisation creates the most value. Hybrid models will dominate: manufacturing precision in controlled environments, combined with more predictable site assembly.
Productivity is culture: lean, continuous improvement, and innovation
One of the most overlooked aspects of productivity is that it is not primarily a technology challenge – it is a culture challenge.
In high-performing manufacturing sectors, lean practices are not a toolkit. They are a way of thinking. Continuous improvement is embedded into daily operations, and teams are empowered to identify waste, solve problems, and standardise best practice.
Construction can sometimes adopt lean as a “programme” rather than a mindset. Industrialised construction will expose that weakness. If we build factories and digitise workflows but don’t create a culture of disciplined improvement, we will simply industrialise inefficiency.
True productivity gains require stable processes, standard work, feedback loops between design and delivery, data-driven decision-making, and leadership commitment to long-term capability building. Productivity is the outcome of an organisation that learns faster than its competitors.
The skills challenge: industrialisation needs new thinking
Perhaps the most significant barrier to industrialised construction is not technical feasibility – it is people.
If construction is serious about productivity, it will need to attract and retain talent with experience in manufacturing, aerospace, automotive, logistics, digital engineering, and operations excellence. These individuals bring systems thinking, process discipline, and comfort with standardisation and automation.
But attracting them is not straightforward. Construction still struggles with a perception problem. Career pathways can appear unclear, and digital maturity varies widely. The sector cannot wait for perception to improve organically – it must actively position itself as a modern, technology-enabled, mission-driven industry.
That story must be authentic, backed by real opportunities in digitisation, advanced manufacturing, automation and robotics, DfMA, platform design, and continuous improvement. Industrialised construction should be a magnet for ambitious engineers and technologists – but only if the sector presents a compelling narrative of meaningful, future-proof careers.
A more attractive future – and the leadership required
There is a powerful alignment between productivity and sustainability that construction has not fully capitalised on. Higher productivity means less waste, fewer defects, fewer delays, and fewer emissions from repeated work and inefficient logistics. It also means better affordability and better outcomes for clients and end users.
Industrialised construction will not scale through isolated initiatives. It requires stable demand signals, aligned procurement models, supportive regulation, and long-term investment in capability. Above all, it requires world-class leadership – leadership that understands industrialisation is a systemic transformation of how value is created and delivered.
Industrialised construction can be the catalyst for a more productive, more sustainable, and more attractive sector. But the key is to stop treating productivity as an uncomfortable topic and start treating it as the defining metric of industrial maturity. The prize is significant: a construction industry that is more efficient, more innovative, more resilient, and more inspiring to the people we need to build it.
Image credit: Vision Volumetric
For more information visit www.cogent-consulting.co.uk
By Brett King, Director of Industry Transformation, EMEA at Procore.
Industrialised construction is usually framed as a manufacturing challenge. We talk about factories, offsite production, repeatable components and logistics. Those things matter, but they are not where most industrialisation efforts succeed or fail.
The real constraint is information.
Industrialisation promises predictable delivery, repeatable outcomes, less waste and better margin control. All of that depends on a single capability: creating, trusting and reusing information at scale. When that breaks down, industrialisation becomes theatre – the language changes, but the outcomes do not.
Version control is not a meeting agenda
Many organisations still operate with fragmented data structures. Every project invents its own naming conventions, reporting rhythms and approval processes. Critical information lives in disconnected tools or private spreadsheets. It shows up when teams spend time reconciling versions of the same truth – the latest drawing, the latest cost plan, the latest programme – and nobody is fully sure which one is ‘live’. Decisions are made on partial visibility. Under pressure, teams revert to local workarounds that feel efficient in the moment but quietly erode consistency.
That environment simply does not support industrialised delivery. Repeatability is not just about physical components. It is about repeatable information. If design intent, commercial controls, programme data and quality records vary from project to project, learning cannot accumulate and performance never compounds.
Standard products fail on non-standard information
You see this most clearly when projects attempt to scale prefabrication or standardised delivery models. Components may be repeatable, but the surrounding information is not. A design revision moves through change control differently from one job to the next. Commercial changes sit in isolated systems. Programme assumptions are rebuilt from scratch. The physical system promises efficiency, yet the informational system keeps resetting to zero. Industrialisation cannot compound value if the data foundation keeps being reinvented.
The practical consequence is visible on live projects. Teams spend disproportionate time validating information instead of acting on it. Meetings become exercises in reconciling versions rather than making decisions, slowing cycle times and pushing risk downstream.
This is where many industrialisation strategies stall. Investment flows into production capability while the information backbone remains improvised, leaving a persistent gap between ambition and execution.
Procore’s field-first platform connects site data, visual records and issue tracking, helping teams maintain a shared source of truth from the field to the office. Image credit: Procore
The Golden Thread makes traceability non-negotiable
The external pressure is only increasing. Regulatory frameworks now demand auditable information trails, clients expect greater transparency, and margins remain tight. In the UK, this is no longer theoretical. The Building Safety Act and the Golden Thread require structured, traceable information – evidence of decisions, changes and accountability – across the lifecycle of an asset. Industrialised delivery magnifies these pressures because scale exposes weakness. When information is inconsistent, assurance becomes reactive, compliance becomes fragile and commercial risk grows. In this environment, fragmented data is not just inefficient. It is a structural liability with legal and insurance consequences.
Build the information backbone, then scale the delivery
Industrialised construction forces a different discipline. Data standards stop being an IT concern and become operational infrastructure. When information is trusted, teams spend less time validating and more time delivering.
Technology plays an enabling role, but tools alone do not solve fragmentation. The real work is agreeing how information is created, structured and governed, and then holding people to those agreements. That requires leadership alignment, operational clarity and a decision to treat information discipline as delivery infrastructure, not admin.
Predictable delivery is what protects margin – and that only holds when teams operate inside shared structures. When information is inconsistent, commercial controls weaken, programme decisions become reactive and local workarounds fill the gaps. It can feel restrictive at first, but consistency is what turns individual experience into institutional knowledge and allows performance to compound rather than reset on every project.
The prize is significant. When data is consistent, learning becomes portable and performance patterns emerge. Planning improves because it is informed by evidence rather than anecdote. Commercial decisions become more grounded. Quality issues surface earlier. Most importantly, repeatability becomes real rather than rhetorical. Organisations stop chasing isolated wins and start building compounding capability.
Industrialisation is often sold as a step change in how we build. In practice, it is a step change in how we manage knowledge. Organisations that understand this treat information as infrastructure. They invest in it, protect it and design around it. Factories can manufacture components, but only disciplined information management can manufacture predictability.
Industrialised construction does not fail because we cannot build at scale. It fails when we do not learn at scale
To find out more about Procore’s construction management programme, visit www.procore.com
By Victoria Pomarnevska, Director of Strategy and Transformation, and Katie Liszka, Client Director at Laing O'Rourke
Why does industrialised construction still struggle to move from promise to system-wide delivery? Victoria Pomarnevska, Director of Strategy and Transformation, and Katie Liszka, Client Director at Laing O'Rourke, argue that real progress depends on clients and procurement models being aligned with repeatable, manufacturing-led outcomes.
Industrialised construction is proving that productivity improvement in construction is possible. Design for manufacture and assembly (DfMA), platform strategies, kit-of-parts methodologies and offsite production are reducing waste, shortening programmes, stabilising labour demand and improving whole-life performance. But industrialised construction will not scale by simply doing more offsite. It will scale when procurement and delivery models make productivity-led outcomes commercially normal.
Industrialised approaches can unlock a step change in productivity while improving certainty, quality and workforce experience. Yet outcomes remain uneven. Similar tools, manufacturers and supply chains can produce very different results depending on the client and sector. In some settings, industrialised delivery is embedded. In others, it remains marginal, fragile or abandoned.
Construction delivers what it is designed to deliver, and in this industry the most powerful design mechanism is procurement. It determines whether productivity gains are captured and reinvested, whether contractors can invest with confidence, and whether learning compounds across programmes or resets with every project.
To understand how productivity-led, industrialised delivery becomes the norm rather than a risky exception, it is worth looking at sectors where procurement has been deliberately shaped to encourage learning, investment and repeatability.
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Infrastructure: Digital bridges
Digital bridge systems – product-based, digitally configured solutions built around standard components and repeatable interfaces – provide a clear example of industrialisation working when procurement supports it. Procured through programmes or frameworks, they can reduce programme, labour and disruption while improving certainty compared with bespoke delivery.
Laing O'Rourke has developed solutions that compress design and delivery from weeks to hours and from months to days, respectively. Recent examples include cutting onsite resourcing from 110 operative weeks to 18, taking six months off a programme of eight structures, and improving embodied carbon by 30%.
This approach works best when procurement recognises the bridge as a product system rather than a one-off structure. Forced to compete purely on lowest price, the value of standardisation and manufacturing readiness is diluted. Procured for repeatability and whole-life value, industrialised bridge delivery becomes faster, more predictable and more scalable.
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Custodial sector: kit-of-parts only works when procurement supports it
The custodial sector, particularly prisons, offers one of the clearest examples of industrialisation at programme level rather than project level.
The standardised design used in the New Prisons Programme shows how a kit-of-parts and reference design approach can be deployed at scale. Thousands of repeatable components have been used across multiple prison projects, improving quality, safety and speed through predictable assembly from controlled manufacturing environments.
A key strength of this approach is continuity across programmes. Lessons are used to refine the reference design from one project to the next, removing inefficiency and increasing value. That model is reinforced through procurement, with Pre-manufactured Value (PMV) set as a formal KPI across the 20,000 places programme.
This is not just a technical solution. Alliance-style arrangements and accelerated procurement have enabled knowledge sharing across contractors and sites, while reference designs developed and market-tested at programme level allow teams to focus on local conditions rather than reinventing the asset each time.
The result is not simply faster delivery, but better programme performance: learning compounds, risks reduce, and industrialised methods become embedded.
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Energy & nuclear: industrialisation enabled by necessity
Energy and nuclear environments demand a level of certainty that traditional construction models struggle to provide. High-consequence risk, regulatory scrutiny, constrained specialist skills and long programme horizons make late decision-making and fragmented delivery models untenable.
What matters at this stage is not yet widespread deployment, but the way procurement and supplier engagement are being reshaped in anticipation of scale. Energy and nuclear programmes are starting to hardwire collaboration into commercial structures through risk and reward mechanisms, earlier engagement and programme-level governance.
This shift is foundational. Industrialised construction has high potential here because the evolving delivery model makes traditional approaches progressively impractical. As programme volumes grow and delivery timelines compress, early engagement, coordinated decision-making and aligned incentives become structural necessities.
When procurement aligns decisions, incentives and risk across delivery, industrialised construction shifts from a one-off intervention to a credible, repeatable model.
Three procurement shifts that enable industrialised outcomes
- Design for repeatability, not bespoke delivery
Collaborative contracts should align incentives and reflect the acquisition of product systems rather than one-off assets. - Engage delivery partners before design is fixed
Early involvement tests buildability and supports price certainty. - Use contracts that support integration
Collaborative contracts should align incentives and reflect the acquisition of product systems rather than one-off assets.
In conclusion: clients as system architects
Industrialised construction at scale will not happen simply because the industry develops a better platform, smarter software or a faster factory. Those matter, but they are not the bottleneck.
The sectors making the most progress reveal a harder truth: industrialised construction becomes viable when clients shape procurement around certainty, early engagement and learning at scale. Energy and nuclear point towards integrated, incentivised collaboration. The custodial sector shows that kit-of-parts and reference designs only succeed when backed by programme-level procurement.
There is, however, a harder commercial reality that must be acknowledged. Manufacturing-led delivery requires significant upfront investment in facilities, tooling and skills. Yet too often, industrialised solutions are asked to compete directly with traditional delivery on lowest tender price, under procurement models that neither reward certainty nor recognise the capital risk embedded in manufacturing.
In that environment, margins are squeezed, pipelines are fragile, and investment risk sits disproportionately with manufacturers. It is therefore unsurprising that many modular businesses have struggled – not because industrialisation does not work, but because the market too often fails to provide the certainty needed to sustain it.
If industrialised construction is expected to deliver productivity, safety and sustainability at scale, procurement models – and where appropriate government mechanisms such as long-term frameworks or co-investment – must evolve to treat manufacturing capability as strategic infrastructure, not speculative overhead.
The critical question for every client is not whether they want industrialised construction. It is this:
Have we designed a procurement system in which it is commercially viable to invest in making it work?
Because, ultimately, the system we procure is the system we get.
What will it take to make industrialised construction commercially viable at scale? At the Industrialised Construction Conference on 21-22 April 2026 at the RCP, London, Victoria Pomarnevska, Director of Strategy and Transformation at Laing O'Rourke, will bring a sharp, procurement-led perspective on the commercial conditions needed to turn ambition into repeatable delivery.
Book your place today and hear from industry leaders tackling the commercial, procurement and delivery challenges behind industrialised construction – BOOK HERE
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Helen Gawor, Consultant Director at Building Strategy, argues that Industrialised Construction 2.0 will not scale on technology, factories and capital alone – leaders need to build culture early, lock in operational excellence and develop a product strategy that enables innovation without diluting delivery.Industrialised construction is the ‘disruptive start-up sector’ of the built environment.
The similarities to the businesses I worked with in the tech start-up era of the early 2000s are strong:
- Creating products for an industry that is only just learning how to use and trust them.
- Calculating how to commercialise and operate cost-effectively, based on how the market already procures and plans work.
- Building confidence in new ways of working with new skills and capabilities.
- Investment that comes with aggressive stages of planned growth and a need to build value quickly.
The businesses in Industrialised Construction 2.0 enter 2026 in a market more primed than ever to accelerate MMC adoption.
But as our businesses move towards early maturity, we require a clear strategic focus to navigate the market dynamics, macroeconomic factors and regulatory landscape that have constrained the broader built environment market for decades.
Technology, factories, and capital alone are insufficient to navigate the nuances of our industry and deliver the repeatable value that converts potential into profitability.
So how do we ensure our businesses are resilient as we move through the growth cycle to early maturity? What can we learn from sectors like tech where the disruptors have thrived?
The answer is not more rhetoric about modern methods – it is leadership discipline that turns repeatability into commercial advantage.
Three leadership priorities for Industrialised Construction 2.0
1. Invest in building culture early
Don’t assume that the right culture will propagate organically. Traditionally, construction has not built a healthy cultural ecosystem for learning, innovation and optimum performance.
The most successful manufacturing and technology organisations understand that all high performance and continuous improvement starts with people. Machines and processes alone will not make up for weaknesses in the cultural environment.
Some of the best research into high-performing teams came out of Google’s ‘Project Aristotle’, reinforcing Professor Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety – the idea that teams perform best when people can speak up, challenge and learn without fear of blame.
Silicon Valley’s ‘Fail Fast’ mantra applies here. If you don’t invest in building leadership and team dynamics that promote an ability to comfortably talk about what isn’t working, what has failed (without blame) and share ideas, you can’t learn and adapt quickly.
So, consider how you need your people to make decisions, solve problems, collaborate and adapt to change. Build this deliberately into your strategic development and how you visibly lead your teams and organisation.
Because strategic growth and operational excellence become unachievable without the right cultural foundation.
2. Balance operational excellence with disciplined growth
This sector is poised to deliver what traditional construction has long struggled to achieve: measurable productivity gains, consistent quality, and the systematic application of data and technology to drive efficiency and outcomes.
There is a risk, however, that this can be lost where there is pressure to scale quickly. As the market and demand grow, there is potential for increased consolidation and investment, which will bring inevitable operational and commercial tensions.
By building value in processes early, along with robust continuous improvement systems, you can mitigate later pressures if the business moves into a growth or diversification iteration of its strategy.
Breaking down clearly what operational excellence means for your business is paramount in ensuring that the whole organisation understands its role in delivering it. For example, ‘application of data for decision making’ requires a holistic data strategy for data collection, quality management and governance. Make these elements clear.
3. Build a product strategy that allows innovation to sit alongside operational maturity
I worked with a modular business stuck in the product development and new market opportunity loop. Despite the Board being excited about the entrepreneurial approach, it was clear very quickly that it was diluting focus and resources, especially impacting the ability to improve factory operations.
Developing a clear product strategy was the solution to give visibility to the considerations around risk and opportunity and, therefore, calculate where effort and resource could be allocated.
This is a portfolio approach to validated growth and works in many other sectors. The simplest approach to developing this is the Ansoff Matrix – a well-established strategic framework – where you classify your current and potential products to determine risk and resource requirements – listed here from least to most risk:
Market penetration: Existing products in existing markets
Market development: Existing products in new markets
Product development: New products for existing markets
Diversification: New products in new markets
Taking this approach, you can create balance in strategic focus that does not dilute commercial and operational performance of products reaching maturity, whilst maintaining agility for innovation and new product development.
Opportunities in 2026
A recovering 2026 landscape, alongside early-stage business growth, presents a real opportunity to be a catalyst for change across the whole construction industry.
Industrialised construction sectors require a different type of leadership and approach to strategic implementation that draws on the best of manufacturing and construction processes, with the agility and entrepreneurialism of start-up and scale-up culture.
It should turn cultural strength into competitive advantage, delivering measurable productivity, quality and value where traditional methods have faltered. Industrialised construction isn’t just about factories: it’s about building better ways of working through people, processes and technology.
Helen Gawor, Consultant Director at Building Strategy joins the speaker line-up at the Industrialised Construction Conference on 21-22 April 2026 at the RCP, London.
Book your tickets today and hear from the leaders shaping industrialised construction at scale – BOOK HERE
For more on turning your industrialised construction ambition into deliverable strategy, visit www.buildingstrategy.co.uk
By Sue Hine, Client Account Director for Local Government at Jacobs
Sue Hine argues that industrialised construction will not scale through technology alone. Unless the sector reshapes skills, culture and education around manufacturing-led delivery, digital capability and system thinking, she says productivity gains will remain stuck in pilots rather than embedded in practice.
Industrialised construction is often sold as a technical challenge, with platforms, factories and digital tools presented as the answer. Technology matters, but the U.K.'s biggest constraints are human: productivity, capability and confidence.
Between 1997 and 2019, construction's gross value added rose 12%, against 53% for the wider economy. That gap doesn't just sit on a spreadsheet. The result is slower delivery of schools, hospitals and homes, and less room for public spending when budgets tighten. When the sector fails to improve, the public pays in delays, disruption and missed opportunities.
Then there's the issue of waste. The Construction Innovation Hub's Value of Platforms work suggests up to 20% of project costs are tied up in defects and rework — £23bn a year. CITB's "Right First Time" summary puts avoidable errors at 21% of project value. If quality isn't right first time, hesitation over new delivery models shouldn't surprise us.
Capacity is another constraint. Hub analysis estimated 2022 labour shortages cost £2.6bn in lost output. Around 30% of the workforce is over 50, and CITB says the industry needs 251,500 more workers by 2028. Add in fragmented supply chains and siloed approaches, and the scale of the challenge is clear. Policy is nudging public clients towards platform approaches and modern methods of construction, including the Construction Playbook's MMC guidance and the NHS New Hospital Programme's "Hospital 2.0" approach.
However, without people fluent in digital design, manufacturing logic and system-based delivery, industrialised construction will remain stuck in pilots and good intentions.
Industrialised construction isn't a product you buy; it's an ecosystem you build
Industrialised construction and MMC are too often treated as the same thing. They're not. Industrialised construction is the wider system; MMC is one method within it. Focus only on the method and you miss the real work: planning, procurement, data, skills, education and collaboration.
MMC rises or falls on the strength of the ecosystem around it. In water projects, the barriers are usually behavioural, not technical — think early alignment and programme-wide collaboration. On projects like Black Potts Weir, offsite manufacture reduced site time and carbon, but only because client, designer and fabricator worked as one. That requires training, trust and earlier decisions. This is where strategy and delivery connect or come apart.
The future workforce must blend site craft with manufacturing logic at scale
If industrialised construction is to scale, it has to move into the mainstream.
Training must blend trade skills with manufacturing-led thinking: Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA), lean ways of working, configuration control, quality assurance and data literacy. The aim is to make repeatability and continuous improvement routine, so quality rises because the system improves.
McKinsey finds modular construction can cut schedules by 20–50% at scale. But that only happens when teams work across DfMA, not when work is handed between silos with gaps in information, accountability and culture. Industrialised delivery needs earlier decisions, tighter tolerances, and a culture that prizes prevention over rework. That demands joined-up teams and independent roles, including DfMA and MMC advisers, who embed those principles from the start.
Our industry needs to take a lead on education
This demands a change in curriculum and mindset. We still train too many people as though construction is mainly site-based craft, with digital skills treated as optional. Colleges and training providers must make digital design-to-production, manufacturing awareness and continuous improvement core.
But it's not all the educators' responsibility. Industry must match that with live projects, kit, factory placements and mentors. We should also bring in expertise from advanced manufacturing, where configuration management and systems thinking are mature.
We should create an industry people can enter and progress within. It'll enable more agile careers and shared innovation. For example, the aerospace sector can share innovations in reinforced steel and using better methods to reinforce concrete through laser-cut processes instead of relying on rebar.
We need more programmes to build capability and test interoperability
One of the industry's biggest risks is mistaking proprietary platforms for industrialisation. That's not an ecosystem; it is fragmentation dressed up as innovation. If industrialised delivery is to work for councils and smaller clients, we need a shared rulebook: open interfaces, common digital foundations and standards that prevent lock-in.
Liverpool City Region offers a practical example. It has been selected as the first pilot region for the Industrialising and Digitising Construction Challenge, a UK-wide initiative aimed at tackling familiar problems including low productivity, limited capacity and inconsistent quality. Funded through the Research and Development Missions Accelerator Programme and working with the High Value Manufacturing Catapult as the delivery partner, the programme brings together industry, manufacturers and public-sector clients to develop the operating models, digital tools and partnerships needed for long-term change.
Make construction a career of choice again by changing where and how work happens
Industrialised construction's biggest promise may be cultural: safer, steadier work, clearer career paths and broader appeal. More work in controlled settings can reduce safety risks, attract digital and manufacturing talent, and create more predictable routines. It's also a resilience strategy as extreme weather shrinks safe time on site. But offsite does not automatically mean better jobs. If factories simply reproduce the same low-margin, high-pressure culture, nothing improves. Industrialisation must bring fair pay, progression and psychological safety.
What comes next
My argument is straightforward: we need to design the workforce as deliberately as we design systems. That means backing programmes that create continuity, setting shared rules that allow interoperability, and modernising education around digital and manufacturing-led thinking.
Sue Hine, Client Account Director for Local Government at Jacobs joins the speaker line-up at the Industrialised Construction Conference on 21-22 April 2026 at the RCP, London. Drawing on her work across local government and the Regional Pilot of the Industrialising and Digitalising Construction Programme, she will bring practical insight into public-sector delivery, innovation and implementation.
Book your tickets today and hear from the leaders shaping industrialised construction at scale – BOOK HERE
By Katie Rudin, Housing & Innovation Director at Akerlof
Akerlof's Katie Rudin has spent a lot of time talking to the people building, funding and living in homes. Here's what she's learned: industrialised construction can be genuinely brilliant, but only if we stop pretending it's a magic fix for everything.
Rory Sutherland makes the point that "the opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea." I've been thinking about that a lot lately, because Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) is a pretty good case in point.
At Akerlof, Industrialised Construction (IC) is something we work on most days. Used in the right context, industrialised approaches can be genuinely transformative, and we've been part of projects where they have delivered real benefits and created meaningful results beyond adopting a manufacturing approach on an isolated project, but we also know that when applied indiscriminately, it can tie up capital, introduce complexity, and increase, rather than reduce, risk. The promised benefits don't always materialise, and when they don't, it really hits market and client confidence.
So, as the industry pivots from MMC to IC, it's worth pausing and asking: have we actually addressed the concerns that made MMC so contentious? Because right now, a lot of the same questions remain unanswered. If we carry those unresolved tensions into the new framing, we're just polishing the branding rather than proactively understanding where industrialisation can truly make a difference.
Tension 1: Policy wants a lever; delivery needs a judgement
Government enthusiasm has been a big part of the story, with the "presumption in favour" of MMC rolled out across multiple capital programmes. The appeal is understandable: housing is a crisis, construction productivity is a crisis and we are struggling to attract skilled labour. Of course, policymakers want something they can point to or, even better, stand in front of with a hard hat on.
But this is where Professor Stuart Green's critique is worth considering: the tendency to treat something as an absolute truth and stop questioning it. MMC, and now IC, has repeatedly been framed as a single cure for very different problems: productivity, quality, skills, affordability, carbon, programme risk. But it misses a crucial point: those problems don't all have the same root causes and therefore don't respond to the same interventions. They're linked in ways that are genuinely messy and complex.
This is something the New Hospitals Programme is helping to explore, where the focus isn't just delivery, but also understanding where IC can – or can't – make a difference in speed, cost and quality. By working at a programme level, it can help the industry move beyond just the delivery method and help us to consider the complexities and interlinked problems so we can unpick these and create answers that truly solve these problems.
As well as NHP, we have the recently announced Industrialising and Digitalising Construction Challenge. The pilot in Liverpool City Region will help by applying IC to real projects to help feed findings into the wider programme to finalise a standard delivery model for adoption nationally. Both of these programmes are bridging the gap between research, policy and practice and will help to test the theory and work through the complexities of IC before we apply its principles at a national scale.
Tension 2: Industrialisation changes who benefits, and where the risk sits
One of the most important critiques of industrialised construction isn't really about panels versus bricks. It's about jobs, skills, investment, and who ends up holding the risk. The skills gap in the UK housebuilding industry means much of the workforce on sites is transient, with employees having to travel long distances and live in hotels to access the labour markets, where the skills shortage is most acute.
The skills and place paradox
When value-adding activity moves from site to factory, local employment can thin out. Communities that most need opportunity may find themselves watching components arrive from elsewhere, while workforce development happens somewhere else entirely. Construction's social value story has long relied on being a route into skilled work for local people. It is important that we acknowledge this, but also communicate that the workforce on site often isn't local either.
Concentrated vulnerability is real
Factory employment also carries a different, more concentrated risk profile when compared to more traditional methods. When a factory fails, the impact is sudden, local and severe – rather than dispersed across multiple sites and firms. Recent UK MMC Category 1 examples make the point: Ilke Homes (c. 1,150 jobs lost in Knaresborough, North Yorkshire) and Legal & General Modular (c. 450 jobs in Sherburn-in-Elmet). These aren't abstract statistics. These are communities and people's livelihoods.
So, the real question isn't "should we industrialise?" It is "how do we industrialise without creating a new geography of winners and losers?"
Tension 3: Claims are bold, but evidence is thin
Even where IC genuinely improves delivery, the industry often over-claims on outcomes it can't control.
Efficiency is not affordability
Building homes more efficiently doesn't automatically make housing more affordable. Prices are driven by the second-hand market, land values, planning constraints, financing conditions, and the structure of demand, not by marginal shifts in production cost. Conflating the two sets everyone up for disappointment.
Carbon needs evidence, not a bold sales pitch
IC is often positioned as greener: less waste, tighter tolerances and better quality control – and we know it can achieve these things on individual projects. But Richard O'Hegarty and colleagues' research on MMC and embodied carbon tells a more complicated story. The evidence isn't clear-cut, and outcomes are highly context and system dependent. We need robust evidence, not optimistic projections, to demonstrate these impacts at a programme level.
The evidence gap is the strategic problem
The construction sector hasn't built a disciplined habit of measurement or sharing data. We set objectives, but we don't always publish the results. We advocate, but we don't always iterate and learn. Without that, the debate stays ideological, and IC risks becoming yet another cycle of enthusiasm followed by disillusionment and disappointment. We are all passionate, and it would be far better to have strong evidence alongside that passion.
One way the sector can start to close this evidence gap is through structured knowledge-sharing between those actually delivering projects. That's why initiatives like the Building Better Community of Practice (BB:CoP) matter so much, creating spaces where housing providers, local authorities, manufacturers and delivery partners can share what's worked, what hasn't, and where risks genuinely sit. This is how we build a more honest, more useful evidence base for IC.
From MMC to industrialised construction: same risks, new branding?
"Industrialised Construction" does capture something real: the application of manufacturing principles, process control, quality assurance, supply chain integration, continuous improvement, and construction delivery. It's less about where things are made and more about how production is organised, which makes it a genuinely important shift in thinking.
But if we push it too hard, ignore context, and make the same overblown claims that characterised MMC, we'll hit the same wall of resistance. The industry will just find new ways to push back.
What would a mature conversation look like?
There are three key things, from my perspective:
- First, honesty about limitations. Industrialised approaches work brilliantly in some contexts and poorly in others. Large-scale programmes or portfolios with real opportunity to reduce variability are a great fit, but one-off projects often aren't. We need to be as clear about where these methods don't work as where they do.
- Second, engagement with distributional concerns. If manufacturing concentrates, so do the skills and employment benefits. That needs to be acknowledged and properly addressed, not with PR, but within an industrial strategy, regional capacity planning, supply chain development, and procurement that treats social value as something you build in from day one, not something you "claim".
- Third, outcomes, not ideology. If the argument is that industrialised approaches deliver better outcomes (cost certainty, programme reliability, quality, whole-life performance) then we must measure them, publish them, iterate and learn from them. If we can't demonstrate outcomes, we'll keep losing credibility, regardless of what we call the approach.
I genuinely believe industrialised construction can help us build better homes, more efficiently, for more people. But only if we're honest about where it works, who it works for, and what we still need to figure out.
Hear Katie Rudin and other industry leaders take these questions further at the Industrialised Construction Conference on 21-22 April.
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By Dr Robert Illes, Director at Opal Flame Consultancy.
(Image credit: Sophie Harbinson/Open Doors)
Headlines on construction industry skills problems are not going away any time soon.
Dr Robert Illes, Director at Opal Flame Consultancy examines how construction's long-running skills challenges can be viewed as an ecosystem with many moving parts.
The drivers are well-rehearsed. Each year the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) – the industry training body – publishes regional and national lists of in-demand roles. The sector continues to struggle to attract and retain people. Mental health and culture are rightly higher on the agenda, and Grenfell forced a sharper focus on competence. Alongside this sits a separate question – what capabilities the future industry will require.
CITB, FIR and Offsite Ready show the skills ecosystem in action
Construction's people and skills challenges operate as an ecosystem. In practice, this means no single initiative, organisation or person will solve it all. For example, the sector might have a strong initiative on culture – such as CITB's Fairness Inclusion and Respect programme – but without enough college tutors passionate about digital or modern methods, the pipeline of future-enabled trades will not be sustained. Training content can be developed for offsite and MMC – for example, Offsite Ready, an online training and awareness programme for offsite construction – but without integration into apprenticeship standards and pathways, it risks being forgotten.
CLC People and Skills Network – good work that still needs a route to scale
However, this work is already under way across the sector and there are well-established initiatives, free training and networks to draw on. A recurring weakness is coordination – linking people and organisations to specific initiatives, and linking initiatives into something that scales into standards, training provision and mainstream practice.
The Construction Leadership Council's (CLC) People and Skills Network has existed for a number of years as a cross-sector forum focused on workforce and capability. A diverse voluntary group, it comprises about 50 individuals from industry, education and the public sector. After its first sector-wide skills plan in 2021, the network formed into a number of subgroups looking at culture, routes into industry, competence and skills for the future.
I contribute to the 'skills for a modernised industry' subgroup, which published competencies for domestic retrofit (2024) and digital (2025). The aim was practical content that can be incorporated into standards and training now. In 2026, we aim to publish equivalent competencies for modern methods and industrialised construction.
People in other coordinated subgroups are likewise giving their time to generate useful templates and content that can hit the ground now. The competence subgroup and super sector programme are producing a wide set of competence frameworks across five super sectors – broad parts of the construction economy with distinct role and competence requirements.
These examples illustrate the range of elements that must align if the sector is to address its people challenges. It is not just down to the CLC. I would also mention the great work of Constructing Excellence, the Supply Chain School and many others.
Turning innovation into competence with Innovate UK
On future capability, Innovate UK established the Workforce Foresighting Hub following Gatsby's 2019 publication 'Manufacturing the Workforce'. Foresighting is a process where stakeholders are convened to examine an emerging innovation and identify the organisational competencies needed to deliver it effectively. In other words, it is a way of translating innovation into capability requirements that can then feed training, standards and workforce planning.
There are many other examples across the sector. All point to the same reality: outcomes depend on coordination across a construction people ecosystem. It is unrealistic to expect a single body to coordinate this alone. The sector needs shared visibility of initiatives, outputs and pathways – and a habit of re-use.
There is a risk, however, that a great piece of work, while receiving accolades at the time, gets forgotten about, or simply does not get widely adopted by the industry, or into the places it needs to go in terms of the education system. Inevitably, there needs to be some prioritisation, exercised with care, to ensure that whole sections of the ecosystem do not get deprioritised – particularly future skills.
£600m, Skills England and the risk of funding 'more of the same'
In March 2025 the UK government announced £600 million to be made available for construction skills. A major policy driver is the 1.5 million homes the current government are committed to. A review of Skills England publications – including its assessment of priority skills to 2030 – suggests limited detail on skills for a modernised, industrialised industry. The emphasis appears to remain on traditional trades, with less visibility for MMC, digital and manufacturing-led delivery. That gap strengthens the case for explicitly funding next-generation delivery capability and the appetite to adopt it. But investment decisions should be made in the context of the wider construction people ecosystem – not as isolated interventions.
Dr Robert Illes is Director at Opal Flame Consultancy, advising the engineering and construction sectors on skills, competence and modern methods of construction. With a background across education, research and technical leadership, he brings a practical view of how capability must evolve if industrialised construction is to scale.
Hear him speak at the Industrialised Construction Conference on 21-22 April 2026 at the Royal College of Physicians, London. Book now – www.industrialisedconstruction.co.uk/industrialised-construction-conference
Explore more from Dr Robert Illes and Opal Flame Consultancy – www.opal-flame.com
Image credit: Skanska
Innovation is sold as a quick win in digital construction – but the real cost sits in testing, training and sustained support, long before a tool goes live, and long after the rollout email lands. Donatella Fiorella, Digital Construction Manager at Skanska, explains.
Innovation is one of the most praised ideas in digital construction. Tools and new workflows are routinely positioned as the route to better project delivery. But there is a gap between the excitement and the reality on site and in project teams. The uncomfortable truth is simple: innovation does not begin when a tool is deployed. It begins months earlier, during the work of testing, planning, and preparing people for change.
When organisations underestimate that investment, the outcome is predictable. Adoption slows. Users become frustrated. Confidence in the tools intended to drive progress erodes. If the sector wants digital change that sticks, it needs to get honest about what innovation really costs.
The enthusiasm-reality gap
The industry broadly agrees that digital innovation matters for efficiency, productivity, and long-term competitiveness. Yet many teams still treat innovation as a quick fix: buy a licence, add a tool, and assume processes will improve. In practice, every new tool introduces friction before it delivers value.
A rollout can disrupt routines, take time for teams to learn new behaviours, create a temporary drop in productivity, and increase support demand, while carrying the risk that the tool may not meet expectations. Too often, organisations focus on the upside but overlook the short and medium term costs of adoption. Those costs determine whether a tool becomes embedded or quietly abandoned.
The testing phase: innovation’s first hidden cost
A robust innovation process starts with structured testing. It is the first real investment, and it is frequently underestimated.
Testing can span six months and typically requires dedicated testers, engagement with external consultants where needed, experimentation with workflows and integrations, assessment of configuration needs, and documentation of findings. That is real time and resource before a single project benefits from the tool.
There is also a possibility that is not discussed enough: testing may reveal the tool does not deliver the expected value. Reaching that conclusion still has a cost, and it is rarely budgeted for. This is why testing matters: it is an investment in making an informed decision based on evidence, not hype.
Implementation: where many rollouts fail
Once a tool is approved by senior management, the real work begins. Successful rollout is not about switching on access. It requires a strategy that matches the scale of the project, the user types involved, and the reality of delivery environments.
Core components include a structured training programme, clear user guides, a communication and onboarding plan, trained champions on each project, responsive technical support, and accountability for maintaining adoption momentum.
Many organisations fall short. They deploy quickly and assume teams will “pick it up as they go”. If users feel confused, unsupported, or forced into a tool without preparation, the tool becomes associated with friction, and rebuilding confidence is hard.
The human factor: the largest hidden expense
Most digital adoption challenges are not technological. They are behavioural. People need support to change routines and build competence. When training is inconsistent or delivered too late, users struggle. When support is insufficient, frustration grows.
These impacts carry cost, particularly in the first six to nine months after deployment, when mistakes, slow adoption, and recurring support needs are most likely. It is a predictable learning curve, and one that too many organisations fail to plan for.
Innovation succeeds only when people are supported through that learning curve. If the rollout strategy is built around technology rather than users, the organisation pays twice: once for the tool, and again in lost time, rework, and damaged trust.
Case study: deploying Autodesk Construction Cloud across 30 projects in 12 months
A practical example shows what this looks like at scale. Drawing on a large rollout I worked on before joining Skanska, Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) was deployed across 30 projects over a 12-month period at major UK contractor ISG, reaching around 850 users including subcontractors.
The internal digital implementation team consisted of two dedicated people. There were nine digital specialists working across the 30 projects. Project champions were not trained before rollout. Training materials were developed reactively rather than proactively.
Users highlighted insufficient knowledge of the software, limited guidance before being expected to use it, and inadequate support for the volume of users. In some cases, frustration led users to stop using the tool entirely.
Actions taken to improve user feedback scores by 20% focused on fundamentals: producing more user manuals, offering drop-in training sessions every two weeks, increasing dedicated technical support, and capturing lessons learnt and best practices for future implementations.
The message is not that digital platforms “don’t work”. The message is that the adoption environment determines the outcome. Without investment in preparation, training, and sustained support, deployment turns into disruption, and users conclude the tool is the problem.
What “full-cost” innovation looks like
For organisations serious about digital progress, the takeaway is practical. Success requires thorough testing that includes end users, rollout strategies aligned to project scale and user types, accessible training, champions in place before rollout, and responsive technical support.
Technology alone does not create improvement. The investment in people, process, and support determines whether innovation delivers value or becomes an obstacle.
Find out more at www.skanska.co.uk
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