This is week 2 of Inside The Capital Project Content Series (ITCPS), where each week I share a challenge that comes up on complex capital projects, along with some of the thinking and research behind it.
This week I wanted to get into historical data, and how much of what a team needs is usually already sitting somewhere in the organization.
Timesheets, as-builts, labor rates, vendor information, closeout records, it's all there, it's just not always easy to grab. The part that stuck with me is that benchmarking isn't really about finding a past project that exactly matches the one you're bidding, since many project conditions like weather and labor are never exactly the same twice. It's more about checking the numbers against the range of real performance to help guide the next estimate.
Another part I keep coming back to is closeout. Organizations generate a lot of actuals and that data very often never makes it back to the people building the next estimate. The full article talks more about that connection.
Question for the Community: Do your actuals make it back to your estimators in any structured way, or does that knowledge mostly stay with the people who were on the job?
