Ryan Posnikoff-From the Field to the Future: Bridging Labor and Tech in Megaprojects

Ryan Posnikoff-From the Field to the Future: Bridging Labor and Tech in MegaprojectsKirk: Hello and welcome to Talk the TAUC podcast, where we explore the people, partnerships, and projects shaping the future of union construction and industrial innovation. Our guest today brings a rare, dual perspective rooted in the trades and leading at the cutting edge of construction technology. He began his career as a union member at the UA Local 488 in Edmonton, following in the footsteps of his father. But after completing his apprenticeship in Alberta’s oil and gas sector, he went on to oversee some of Canada’s largest energy and infrastructure megaprojects. But Ryan didn’t stop there. Over the past 15 years, he’s evolved from boots on the ground to brains behind the tech, helping companies manage billions in capital growth through strategic data insights and purpose-built software. Now as Vice-President of Product Management at Contruent, he works across industries and continents to help project teams deliver on time, on budget, and with confidence. From field work to future work, he’s here to talk about what construction tech gets right and what it still gets wrong. Please welcome Ryan Posnikoff. Ryan, thank you so much for coming on Talk the TAUC and agreeing to talk to us today a little bit. Ryan: My name’s Ryan Posnikoff. I’m Vice-President of Product Management at a company called Contruent. We build software that is for cost controls, project controls in large capital projects. A little bit about me. I always say I tripped and stumbled into the software space. I actually grew up in a household. My parents owned a construction contracting business. I helped do plumbing and geothermal piping systems growing up. I went and did the university thing. Then right after university, I actually went and got a trade ticket. My dad has a pipe fitting, steam fitting trade ticket. I followed him in his footsteps and did something very similar. I went out and worked in the oil and gas sector for a bit over a decade, about 12 years. Got an apprenticeship as a steam fitter, pipe fitter, worked on some very large greenfield capital projects, a lot of shutdowns, turnarounds, a lot of sustaining capital projects. And then found myself working in planning. Planning on a lot of these projects after I got my journeyman ticket. Anyway, I saw some opportunities for some improvements in how we planned projects, how we worked with different technologies or lack of technologies at the time. That exposed me to some different network that eventually pulled me into a software company about 9–10 years ago. Came in as a consultant, working as a subject matter expert on the actual execution of projects, and augmenting that with technology. Kirk: That’s awesome. Before I dig into those hard-hitting questions, I always like to ask something a little ridiculous. What is the last song you got stuck in your head? Ryan: It’s the theme song for a television show. My daughter has a show on Disney Plus called Jessie that she has on repeat. I don’t know the name of the song. It’s just the theme song for Jesse. Kirk: It’s hysterical. We’ve been doing this for a few years and we’ve done nearly 100 of these episodes. The number of people that are big, burly construction guys that have a remarkably Mickey Mouse Clubhouse theme song, because of the exact same answer. Or Baby Shark was a very popular one for a while. Ryan: Oh yeah. Kirk: That song that gets stuck in your head because you have children. It stops being Zeppelin and Skynyrd and starts being Baby Shark. Ryan: Every morning at 7:00 AM, it’s the first thing I start hearing. I’m usually working by then and I know when she’s awake. Kirk: So you went through your apprenticeship after college. A lot of people go into an apprenticeship instead of college. You went through all of university, then went and did an apprenticeship and got all the way up to journeyman. Talk to me a little bit about just that portion of the journey. Ryan: I actually always had in back of my mind I was going to do both. When I started university, I studied economics and politics. But I always knew I liked building. There’s a level of satisfaction at the end of the day when you complete something. I actually had spent, like I said, in high school, time working on weekends and summers with my parents’ business. A couple of years into university, I ended up working up north. I ended up not starting an apprenticeship, but just working as a laborer and then surveyor’s assistant for a while, while I figured out what I wanted to do (I guess) if it made sense. Then I tried the nine-to-five for a little while, and realized that really wasn’t for me. I really wanted to get back into building things. So I packed up my bags. I was living in British Columbia. I’m based in Canada. I was living in BC at the time and still am now, but I drove my car to Alberta. There’s a lot going on in the oil and gas sector at the time, and that’s where my dad was working as well, my mom as well, and just started running with it. Got in working with the United Association Local 488 out of Edmonton. I did my thing there with the apprenticeship and did that over the years, attending school in Calgary. It was (I think) in the back of my mind a bit of the plan, was to do a bit of both. It’s a bit of a risk management strategy, a bit of you always got your ticket in the back pocket. Kirk: How did you go find, you wanted to move from field operations into tech and strategy? Ryan: That was, like I said, I stumbled and tripped and fell into it. Long story short, I took a week off of work during a project, went down to the union hall, and took a course on workplace planning. It was there that I saw some real opportunity for my career. A lot brought together my love of building and construction with finding systems and processes in place to be able to make things better, make them run smoother. At the end of the day, what construction has for the biggest challenge is it’s an information challenge. Everything’s about information. It doesn’t matter what the information is. It may be blueprints, PDFs, contract documents, progress information, time sheets. At the end of the day, it’s all about information, and we have a ton of it in projects. I found that it is an interesting space. I got into the planning space, got involved with some industry organizations, helping out with some industry research. That’s how I met a few different people that were working in the tech space, that also had come from the industry. They were looking for somebody who’d been working in the industry who had that same forward-thinking mindset about how to bring these two worlds together. That’s how I fell into the prior company that I was working at as a consultant. Then I ended up doing training, doing planning, training for both software and also best practices training. So how do we plan properly? What are the principles and practices around planning these large projects? And then we’d bring the technology into it as the final component to it. Got to do that for a few years, traveled all over the world. I got to help work out and advise on projects in the Gulf Coast. Been over to the UAE a few times for projects and throughout Europe. Then I found myself with an opportunity to get into product management. To be honest, I had no idea what product management was. I first got into the tech space, but in short, it was really around defining business problems, in this case, construction industry problems, and helping define a technology solution that will solve those problems or make them better, and translating the issues that we see in the field and construction companies, to how a software engineer can go build that to make a valuable solution for field users. Kirk: So you’ve really seen these mega projects. You’ve seen them from both sides. You’ve both turned wrenches and done schematics. Talk to me a little bit about that, about the difference of being the labor versus the product manager. Ryan: I’m always thinking in my mind my current role. I am always thinking about where I came from. That’s always the biggest thing. And there were challenges. Construction’s hard. That’s the easiest way to put it. It’s hard work. I worked on, like I said, a lot of greenfield projects, but a lot of sustaining capital projects on oil and gas sites. Some of the biggest challenges I found there were just finding the right information. I even have the correct P&ID. That was often a challenge working on sites that are 20, 30, 40 years old in some cases. I don’t even know if I have the right information. I’m going down and flagging off a valve of something to be shut down for some maintenance work. Then I start thinking too about when I first got into supervision in the field. That’s, I would say, the hardest job in a construction project from my experience, was being a foreman by far because you’re getting it from up top, you’re getting it from the crew, and you’re having to run around. You’re the last to get information. You’re the last to find out. But you’re the most important person when it comes to making sure your time sheets are in. You’re the most important person to make sure when progress is in. When I look at those kinds of challenges, I’ve always been thinking about their objective. Those users, if I look at it from my software hat, their objective isn’t to be in a solution hours a day. They’re not hired to be working on a computer. They’re not hired to be spending all day in an office. The objective from a technology solution for them, it’s something that’s super quick and intuitive to work with. It can get in and out in a matter of minutes. It should be augmenting their day, it should be adding simplicity to their day, not adding complexity to their day. That’s always been a guiding principle for me. I try to just keep that in the back of my mind. It’s very easy to overcomplicate things if you want. Kirk: So talk to me a little bit more about that. We have 14 different trades. We have a lot of people at different varying levels. Talk to me like you’d answer your 10-year-old. I couldn’t agree more, by the way, but I’m a communications guy, so information and communications is important to me as well. This information to the workers on the ground, to the foreman, how does this tech and this information better support the craft people on the ground? Ryan: Communication is always two-way in capital projects no matter which way you look at it. When we’re at the execution stage of a project—we’re getting down to actually boots on the ground, we’re building the project itself—the crews in the field, the supervisors in the field, superintendents need to know what they’re working on. They need to know what the immediate future looks like for them, so they can coordinate with other crews, they can coordinate with other trades, because that’s a big, big challenge. I used to always get frustrated with the electricians. Being a pipe fitter, it was, run the cables around our pipe. I don’t care. Kirk: It seems like a popular thing to be frustrated with the electricians. Ryan: Then they’d come back with specific requirements for some other cable transmit. Okay, great, now we got to figure this out. All those kinds of scenarios often always came from a miscommunication or a breakdown in communication somewhere along the planning line. I view the construction world as those that are in the head office, those that are in the site trailer, and then those that are out and about actually building. The ones that actually build. That breakdown in communication often happens between the site trailer and those out in the field. When we’re lucky talking about multiple trades, we’re talking about multiple craft, contractors, it’s about having both the forethought in the project to be able to break down those communication barriers, which can be from leveraging technologies and tools to having set coordination meetings. It’s also about making sure that earlier on in the project, so when engineering hands over to construction, you’ve got all the information laid out in the appropriate fashion. You have it laid out correctly. You have it laid out as it aligns to the contract structure. You have all that so that those that are planning the project, scheduling the project, and ultimately ensuring that those that are executing or have the right information are all aligned. They’re all speaking the same language, if you will. Kirk: So at Contruent, is that what you guys are working on? That free flow of information, is that how you guys are supporting that? Ryan: Yeah. Our big spot, our primary area focus is (of course) cost management and project controls. We’re less in the boots-on-the-ground field level, though we do bring in progress from the field and we are able to facilitate that. We’re more around actually taking that middle layer of data, if you will, in the project. Where the project controllers, the cost engineers that are often on site offices, that are both consuming information and communicating back with (say) the head office, but they are completely and 100% reliant on high quality data coming in from the field. That high quality data coming in from the field helps drive the cost forecast for the project, the percent completes, time phasing of the cost so they can manage the appropriate expenses and ensure that they’ve got enough money in the account every month to be able to maintain the project going forward. Kirk: Now let’s talk about that data. Everyone’s pushing for these smart job sites. It’s a buzzword of, let’s get smart job sites. What does actionable data, meaningful data really look like? If I had that piece of information that would really help, what does that look like? Ryan: It depends on who you are (I think) is probably the best answer. If you are a cost controller or a project manager in that space, actionable data is, I’ll take an example. Some accounts of ours have tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of progress and control accounts. If you just look at that in the aggregate, you can’t do anything with that. The human brain can’t comprehend and find any themes in hundreds of thousands of records. Turning that into actionable data will be turning it into usable dashboards, usable reports, to give you just the view that you require. You only want to see, for example as a project manager, what is our current progress and what is our expected completion of all piping in a particular part of the facility? And you want to be able to know, are we going to meet the schedule? Are we going to meet the budget? If not, what’s my plus/minus? What am I looking at? That becomes actionable information, actionable data. Otherwise they’re just looking at a giant table of data/information. If you look at a user, like a foreman in the field, they don’t care about what’s coming down the pipeline in 3, 4, or 5 months. They care about what’s coming down the pipeline in 3, 4, 5 hours, 3, 4, 5 days. They care about knowing which crews I am going to be working with tomorrow. I’m a piping foreman. I need to make sure I coordinate with my scaffolding crew. I need to coordinate with my electricians. Before they put the cable trains in the spot where they shouldn’t, I care about what’s happening in the more immediate future. It’s the difference between what I would call tactical work versus strategic planning work. That’s where I would define it. The data that they care about the foreman is going to be, what are my time sheets? Where are my time sheets? Who’s got overtime? Who’s got time off coming up? Which crews am I working with tomorrow? Do I have the appropriate craft training on my team? Do I need a specialty welder this week? Are we going to go work on some exotic metals? Do I need to bring in a specialty ticket for that? That’s the data and information they’re going to care about. Kirk: Often, we hear with tech companies. I’m in the Army Reserve and I work in innovation in the Army Reserve. We deal with this all the time. Tech companies will build this awesome product that has little to no bearing on what the soldiers really need. As a tech company, how does Contruent bridge that gap of making sure that what you are building is what they’re needing? Ryan: One of the biggest things that we have to do in product management—I did this at the last place I was at too—is you meet with your users. Specifically for us, because we’re focusing on a space that’s on the cost management project control space, a large amount of our user base around the globe, we meet with regularly. We will meet with them on team calls, Zoom calls. We go meet with them in person. I was in London a few weeks ago meeting with some of our users who were building some of the largest projects in the world. They sat down with us and they told us what’s working, what’s not working, what would be beneficial for them. Then we dig in a little bit deeper. If they’re saying a particular feature works really well, but… we want to know what that but is. We want to know. Walk me through. We had an example where they were talking about reporting and dashboards, and they wanted to have some enhancements. We had to walk through, when are you using these specific reports and dashboards? They said, well, we’re doing this with our stakeholder meetings. That changes everything for us because if you’re just doing a regular report that you’re emailing to people, you have different needs, than when you’re doing a stakeholder meeting where you’ve got the CEO of a company or you’ve got all the construction managers from all the different GCs that are on site meeting together. They have different specific needs. In products that I’ve worked in where we’re working directly with field level, it’s quite literally, well, a couple of times I’ve been down on project sites. I still have my steel toe boots. I go down to the site, we go and observe, we ask questions, and go work with the daily users. That’s the biggest thing is you want to have those daily users that are in the product every day, should be finding benefit and value, understanding what makes them tick, and what the challenges they have. Do they have strong internet? If they don’t, that’s a problem. That's actually a regular problem. Kirk: That is a really common one we hear a lot actually. There’s no job site connectivity. It doesn’t matter how cool your widget is that’s cloud-based. Ryan: Exactly. Just because something looks exciting, and it’s what I would call “sexy” to (say) project managers, project directors, and those in more executive roles, they don’t necessarily mean much to the day-to-day guys in the field building. You can put a really cool headset on your face and I can go and visualize and walk my entire plant and experience it. But on a day-to-day basis, what’s the use case for your average organ out in the field? You got to ask that question. Are they going to find benefit from that? Number one, HSE is going to be probably breathing down their neck if they’re putting a headset on their head, on their face. But always ask those questions. What value do you need? What are the biggest things that are pain points for you? It sounds cliché to say pain point, but it’s the reality. Nobody gets into building and construction in the trades because they want to shuffle paperwork. Because they want to play on a computer all day. They get into it because they want to go and build. Anything that they’re working with has to support that endeavor ultimately. Kirk: To that end, what does your prototyping beta process look like? Before going way too far down the wrong rabbit hole, how do you roll things out in a meaningful way? Ryan: That’s actually a really fun process. It really can often start with a very rudimentary sketch. Let’s use an example of development of a mobile app to do progress capture. You could start up with a list of specific requirements that you think are going to be necessary, that would be coming from validating with meetings with different users as users of that solution. Basically taking that list and coming up with a lo-fi sketch of it, saying this is what I’m looking towards. I’ll have to take that. Then we take that over to someone in our user experience group, so that somebody who really thinks these things through deeply. Not just the user interface, the look and feel, but the interaction. How many clicks do I need to do? A good example was worked on a mobile app a couple of years back and everybody thought, oh, it’s great. Let’s put dark mode on the mobile app. Dark mode doesn’t work really well out in the field under a bright sun. It’s one of those things, we found that out by walking into the field with a Hi-Fi mockup, testing it out with somebody who’s out there, and they go, I can’t use this. I can’t use dark mode. That makes sense. It’s these little nuances that you’re like, oh, you pick those up, but you really pick those up by coming up with concepts, coming up with something that’s just usable enough, then testing it with somebody who’s going to be, the term I always use is using it in anger. They’re using it in anger. There is like, just work. Here’s the button. Work. And you want to test that experience. You want to see is it intuitive? Because what’s intuitive to us sometimes, because we’re in it all day, you want the user to pick it up and just figure it out immediately. Kirk: That reminds me, I was working at Army Research Laboratory a few years ago. We were on a project and we had it all sketched out as perfectly as you possibly could intellectualize something. Someone finally said, can we just hurry up and get it out there and let the soldiers break it, please? We’ve got to let the soldiers break this. The theory is over. Please let the soldiers break it so we know what’s wrong with it. Ryan: Exactly. We get to that point when we’ve tested that out and we’ve validated those ideas, then we start going into development. But the big thing at that point is this is always the challenge for us in product. We get to a state of MVP (minimum viable product). Something that’s usable. It achieves what we said it was going to achieve, but immediately you’re getting feedback going, well, this is missing, that is missing, that is missing. We go, well we know, however, we need to test this idea. We’ll have to often work with some of those users and say, of these five ideas, stack rank which ones you would prefer, what would you prioritize? What are your top three? And out of those top three, which would you do first? What would you do second? And what would you do third? That helps us define it with more of a data-driven view around what’s really important to people. Kirk: So in your view, what makes a product the most successful? Counterpoint to that, the other companies out there building these products, what are they doing wrong? What are the mistakes being made in the tech industry? Ryan: It’s interesting. There are a lot of really cool companies in the construction tech space right now. A lot of really cool startups. There are a lot of large incumbents that have been around as well. There are a couple of things that have been going wrong. There’s this concept that loves to be getting thrown around at conferences and whatnot, that construction is technology-adverse. There’s this idea that because technology hasn’t been adopted as rapidly in the construction industry as other industries, that that industry is scared of technology and doesn’t want to use it. We don’t use computers in our industry. That is not even my opinion. I just fully believe that is abjectly false. People want technology. The new generation coming in have grown up with technology. I look at everybody on a project site. Everybody has a smartphone now. Everybody knows how to use an email. Everybody knows how to text message. That’s the big thing. That’s like that overarching view that the world’s getting wrong around construction. Construction is all about technology. Arguably in my mind, it’s one of the more forward-thinking industries out there because all we’re doing is building from nothing. Everything’s being built from nothing. What a concept. You think about it, you start with a greenfield project with a field, literally, and in three years time you’ve got a whole facility, whether it be a building, railway, oil and gas plant. It’s there, it’s built. There are all these problems that get solved along the way to get there. Whether it be problems around which crane we’re going to use, what equipment we are going to use or tools. We use specialty tools, we use specialty welders. All that stuff comes with creativity and being forward-thinking of technology. I would say construction technology, software firms, specifically in software, they got that mentality in the head that people are scared of tech. But the other thing is we’re trying to boil an ocean. There are a lot of tools out there that are super broad-based platforms that do a little bit of everything. They don’t do anything really well or super deep, focusing on the depth of what they’re trying to solve. It’s a super easy thing to get caught up in, is to become this broad-based platform that doesn’t really tick the boxes for everything. Then the other big thing too is there’s been a lack of focus on what I would call the actual doers and the builders, the tradespeople, the crews, the leaders of the crews. A lot of the focus has been on the planner scheduler, the project manager, the site engineer, which is all very useful to have, it’s good, but usability for those out in the field. When you look at the way software is often sold, especially in engineering. Engineering software is often sold in how many hours, how many minutes the user will be on the product on a day-to-day basis. They want the product being open on the computer eight hours a day. That’s just the way it should be. That paradigm shifts on its head when you get down to the field users. You don’t want your field users in the product eight hours a day. If you have a product that requires your craftsperson or your foreman to be in the product all day long, you miss the mark. They should be in there for eight minutes. That should be their objective. They get in, they get out. They provide the information they need, they get the information they need, and then they go and do what we’re really paying them to do, which is running a crew, building a project. Kirk: It’s amazing. A few years ago, I was in a product demo about batteries, just drill batteries. It was talking about how this battery held 8–15 more minutes than this battery and charged 10%–15% faster. They did this breakout of taking a crew with a dozen people working this many hours, in a year that is this many hours of productivity and this many millions of dollars. We’re talking about eight minutes. We’re talking about this has 10 minutes more charge. Changing a battery actually doesn’t take two seconds because they have to come down the ladder, go over to the tool box, and switch it out. The loss of productivity that an extra 10 minutes, it’s 2 less battery changes per hour. It was this whole thing that—I remember I was fairly new to the construction side of the industry—blew my mind that we were talking about an eight minute difference. To your point, we don’t want our people on the ground in their phone for eight, ten, fifteen minutes. We, we need them building. Ryan: Absolutely. I was on a project years ago where we actually spent a nontrivial amount of time determining the right location for the wash cars, because where they were originally located, it actually added an extra five minutes each direction for someone to get to. You think, well that’s not that far. Visually it doesn’t look bad, but when you start going, well, we’ve got 10,000 people working on this project. Kirk: That adds up fast. Ryan: It adds up fast, right. Kirk: And at 10 minutes per 2–3 trips a day, that’s 30 minutes a day. That adds up in real money very quickly. Ryan: Absolutely. It’s the same concept with any tool. I just see software as a tool. It’s just another tool to be used and it has to not get in the way of you doing. Kirk: Talk to me a little bit about digital trust and how that all fits into this context. Ryan: Digital trust is really around trusting the data that you’re looking at. When we look at (particularly) our industry, I’d say it’s complex in a variety of ways. Particularly, I always hone in on the complexity of our contract structures. When we decided an owner-operator is assigned to build a facility, they’ll issue that out to often an EPC is going to start doing a bunch of the design. They might subcontract some of that out, but they generally keep all that data in-house. They keep all that information in-house with all their in-house systems. It gets really ugly when it gets handed over to the execution stage of a project. Even with EPCs who all share the same email address, they’re technically different business units all together. When they go from engineering to the procurement to the construction phase, they are different people, different departments, different offices, sometimes different countries altogether. It’s that handover of information where it starts to become convoluted and challenging. With the concept of digital trust, it really comes down to we want to take all the data that we’re generating on our projects, in the context that I care about—if I’m a project controller, I care about the project controls data, the schedule data, the cost data, all that—and be able to aggregate and augment all that information coming from a variety of sources. Know that those sources are correct, know that they’re coming from a strong, robust database, and be able to leverage that data and that information for the information that I need, which is going to be those dashboards, those reports that we were talking about earlier. The biggest challenge (I think) with trust and data is, unless you’re working with some form of database-driven robust system, you’re often working with spreadsheets, and spreadsheets as flexible as they are, which is great for a lot of people to build up a table and their own system, that flexibility comes at the risk of trust, comes at the risk of being able to trust that that data and that certain cell hasn’t been changed. It comes in trusting that something as simple as a document number or a progress account number hasn’t been accidentally modified. I was on a project years ago where everything is a spreadsheet, of course. We didn’t have any systems or junior field engineers who were actually on a summer job from university, made the error (inadvertently) of using a zero instead of an O on isometric drawings. The isometric drawings were for (I think) an oxygen line or something like that. They typed in a zero. That completely screwed up all of our progress tracking and planning activities because the cell doesn’t know the difference. It knows there’s a distinct difference between the two. We don’t even see it. And we were dealing with thousands and thousands of data points. So we had to comb through and figure out where the problem was. Kirk: Oh my gosh, that’d be awful. I don’t even want to think about that because if you’re really looking for it and you know what you’re looking for, you can tell the difference between an O and a zero. But if you’re just scanning, looking for a mistake that could be hard to miss. Easy to miss. Hard to find. Ryan: Absolutely. Or a space put in there. You don’t see it. When it comes to digital trust, (I think) at the core of it all, it’s going to be things like robust databases, data lakes. That’s a really big thing in the industry now is amalgamating a variety of sources of data from databases into an enterprise-level data lake where they can generate their reports and whatnot. Kirk: I think we just touched on it, but what does it take to get the buy-in from the skilled labor and the field supervisors? How do we get that digital trust? What do you do to win that? Ryan: Going back a few years, when I first got into this space, my job was primarily actually doing onsite consulting and training. That onsite consulting and training was less on the software side and more on the buy-in side working with those on the projects. The key takeaway for me at that time has always been, you don’t want to force a tool onto people. You don’t want to force that idea of him having to use a tool. You want them to understand, this is what we’re trying to solve as a company. Let’s use an example. I want to make progress capture an easier experience. A simple thing. It’s just one workflow that actually has broad-based implications to the entirety of the organization. And getting those particular users, those who are in the field, to explain what are their challenges, what are the issues that they see on a day-to-day basis, why do they have a challenge getting progress in, why do they have a challenge getting their forms in on time, what’s preventing them from doing that and getting them to voice their concerns. I think getting that level of being able to voice your concerns, it lets people know their voice is being heard. So as a tool is being selected and a process is being selected, that’s a big part of the whole thing. Their voice is getting brought along for that. They might not get all their wishlist items and nobody should ever expect to get all their wishlist items, but knowing that they were a part of that decision-making process is a huge part of it right now. I know that’s hard, especially in our industry. It’s very difficult to do because a lot of our projects will have thousands of workers. You can’t bring everybody into a lunch and learn session and say, well, what would you be looking for for a tool? But you need to have those field leaders that will be working with all of those individuals on a day-to-day basis being a part of that process. I’ve been fortunate to be a party to many of those kinds of workshops, where we go through the technology options that are available for different challenges out in the field, and put that tool in the hands of (say) a supervisor, a general foreman, superintendent or foreman, and them to be able to start walking through, this is how I would work in the 3D model, this is how I would be doing my progress capture. Then saying, yeah, this works. This works really well. I like it. I can do this. But this all comes back down to, is it going to take all day for them to learn how to use, and is it going to take a significant amount of time to actually do the work? They don’t want it if it’s going to be taking them hours every day to work with that tool. Kirk: At the end of the day, do you think construction is ahead or behind when it comes to this digital transformation? Are we leading the charge or are we the old guys that are rejecting it? Ryan: It goes back to my statement earlier about the industry actually being very forward thinking with technology. I think in some respects we’re a little behind. If you look at investment compared to other industries like manufacturing, agriculture and others, at that base-level metric, looking at just investment in technology in the last 20 years, we’ve been behind. When you look at our growth and adoption of technology in (I would say) the last five years, in particular, we are leading the charge. We are very much at the forefront. You see that now with, just from the software startup space, the amount of entrants that are coming into the market, the amount of interest by investors, the amount of engineering EPC and construction firms that are hosting their own technology workshop weekends. There are a bunch of companies I know in Canada here that every year they host a hackathon. They bring in different technology vendors or even just students. They’re working at a startup and they’ll bring them into the offices. They will have them listen to some of the challenges that they as a business want to solve. Then they go, walk away, and do a hackathon trying to figure it out. That’s being funded by our industry. It’s being funded by construction companies. Certainly, I’d say we’re coming to the forefront now of adopting technology and significant investment in it. Companies are now seeing it as a, not a nice to have, but a, we need this for the viability of our organization. Kirk: Absolutely. What do you see as the biggest opportunity for the unions, the trades, and the labor leadership? What is the biggest opportunity right now for shaping the future of construction and construction technology in the trades? Ryan: It’s no secret right now that we’ve got a challenge with just backfilling hiring in our industry. We don’t have enough youth coming into the trades to backfill both retirements as well as just the sheer demand. We have massive demand for the trades right now. That’s a huge challenge. I actually think technology can be a big part of that. There is still this perception. I think you see this among youth, you see this still when you’re reading the business newspapers and whatnot, that the industry is adverse to technology. A lot of youth are going, well hold up. I got all these computer classes I have to take in high school. I’ve got all these tools that I work with on a daily basis. I want to have something, I want to work with some technology. That’s where it really becomes an opportunity for both technology vendors as well as the constructors, the engineering firms, and the trade unions to show what’s possible now in the trades. There are so many avenues available for kids to join in the trades now, inclusive of technology. They’re going to be leveraging 3D modeling tools. The big thing now is obviously the augmented reality and the virtual reality that you often see. Those are exciting, but there are also just the simple day-to-day tools that when we show them what’s available, it can excite these youth coming into the industry. You see some of the robotic technology that’s out there. Not just software, but the robotic technology that’s now being used to generate site walk downs and generating 3D models out of the images that it’s capturing. That stuff. I heard of these different events regionally for me, where there are trade union groups that are going and, and showing students all this technology that’s available because they want to excite people. I think that’s really a big opportunity for us. We need people. We need workers in the field. We need people to go build. We need to excite them to come and work with us. Kirk: What do we say to them? What do you tell that high school student looking at his future or that young apprentice is already in the trades? What do you say to those who are curious about construction tech or whether they’re going to use all those coding classes on a construction site? Ryan: I’ll say from my own perspective, and this is tainted with my own personal view. Never has an industry provided more opportunity. I would say outside of the technology side that I got to work with, I was always presented opportunities to get exposed to new technologies, just how projects are being built. Some of my mentors who were construction managers, the things that they were able to teach me around how they built projects 20–30 years ago, and how they’ve seen the change in how we build our projects today. There’s a lot of knowledge to be extracted. A lot of youth getting into the industry, (I think) often we don’t give them enough credit and we think, well, here’s just a trade ticket you’re going to get. They think, well, that’s what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. Well, there’s quality control to get involved with. There’s HSE to get involved with. Supervision, of course, is a big thing. Business ownership, becoming your owner-operator of a construction firm. Knowing that there are a lot of avenues available. In my case, somehow like I said, tripped, stumbled, and fell into construction technology. Unexpected, unplanned. I thought I was on the project management track. That’s where I was going, managing projects. So just knowing that there’s a phenomenal amount of opportunity. Then when it comes to the tools that they’re going to use, it is at the stone age. It’s not all clipboards and paper. Well, those still exist. It is things like mobile apps. It is things like getting to work with 3D models on a computer. It is things like getting to go into a virtual reality environment to talk about a constructability review. Those things are all presented to trace people. Kirk: Absolutely. I want to be sensitive to your time and thank you for coming, but I do have one last question. What does success look like to you? With what you’re building and all the things you’ve been working on, what does it working look like? Ryan: For us, the biggest objective is, we want our tool to be one of the tools in the toolbox that our users, our accounts use, to have their projects get delivered on time and on budget. Everybody should care about projects being delivered on time and budget. We want that because that means that we’ve delivered what we said we would deliver. When we look at some of the large, capital projects that are being built in the world, they have significant fundamental benefits to society. The railways that are being built, they’re benefiting society. We want them to be on budget and on time. The workers in the field want projects to be on budget and on time, because that means that there’s the next project to go. There’s the next phase, there’s the next gig to go to. Success, in my mind, where I’m at right now is ensuring that our solutions are able to help in that endeavor. To be able to help in that endeavor of knowing where we’re going in our projects, knowing with certainty the health of our project delivery, and knowing with certainty where we are in the budget, where we are in the schedule. To be able to give that information feedback to the different stakeholders, whether it be those that are out in the field that are working on a day-to-day basis or at the board and investor level that are wondering what the overall health of the project is. Kirk: Well, Ryan, thank you so much. Not just for bridging these worlds of labor and tech, but for showing how union values and cutting-edge innovation can build truly the smarter, stronger industry together. You’ve been great. Thank you so much. Ryan: I appreciate your time. It was great. Great to meet you, Kirk. Kirk: Awesome. You as well.