Hackathons can harness the full potential of data to bring forward ground-breaking ideas for the construction industry, says Gareth Parkes, head of data and analytics at Sir Robert McAlpine
Four years ago, the UK government’s Construction Sector Deal set out its ambition for project delivery to become 50% faster. This was an ambitious target at the time – and still, unfortunately, is. As highlighted in a White Paper from the Project Data Analytics Taskforce, the chance of a major project delivering on time, on budget and realising the benefits specified at the outset is 0.5%.
Clearly, productivity is a challenge for our sector, sitting alongside the ongoing skills shortages and supply chain struggles, and the amount of adaptation required to adapt to sustainable practice. Yet with 95% of data generated onsite being discarded, it is hard to feel the industry is meeting these challenges with the best of its resources. We need a radical overhaul of our attitude to data to begin to harness it to its full potential and, happily, hackathons look set to do just that.
Hackathons: The what and the why
In their most simple terms, hackathons are events structured around the use of open data to design innovative solutions to pertinent problems. Often, they take the form of competitions where teams compete to be awarded with the best idea, such as at our Project:Hack events.
Construction was not the first industry to make use of hackathons. The first such event took place in Canada in 1999 with the goal of producing a new computer programme for export controls. However, following 2017’s Project Data Analytics monthly meetups, where a 250-strong community considered how best to deliver large infrastructure projects, we identified the need for an additional space to not only talk about data analytics, but put learning and ideas into practice.
We have now just seen our 13th Project:Hack event, with our 14th coming up this April, and have explored myriad data situations over the years. In one of our first hackathons, teams sought to establish whether data could show if daily diaries for construction activities demonstrate the likely success of the project.
The most recent event saw attendees evaluate how we interpret risk and how it applies geographically for Transport for London, and other teams designed apps to manage contractors’ health and safety indicators for National Highways.
These partnerships providing the chance to work with real data are essential to the value of hackathons as they ensure that the ideas developed over the course of the event can then be applied to project delivery across the UK. This also has the added benefit of showing that the productivity gains of data are quantifiable. For example, one past hackathon developed an AI tool to identify images of re-barred windows to 92% accuracy.
The time savings from manpower no longer needed in the back-office functions like image labelling is a powerful testament to what we can do when we apply good data management and analytics to our industry, and frees up additional manpower to be reinvested elsewhere on a site.
The wider vision
Hackathons are not only important for their practical technical learning and the tools their attendees create. These events are key to engendering the attitudinal change we need to see to truly harness our sector’s data past the isolated siloes in which individual firms traditionally operate.
When attendees come together at a hackathon, they learn to build the trust and openness that grows from collaborating with others in different ways. We hope the shared understanding built by these relationships will work to bridge the gulf that traditionally lies between firms and reduce the number of mistakes or wasteful choices that fall between effective data communication.
The events also help to improve standardisation. When any new practice emerges, a large proportion of the struggle will be finding standard language to ensure the scaling up of data handling is working with comparable terms.
Independent oversight, such as from government would be useful, however this is currently still in evolution. Executive agencies within government are becoming more involved with better data use, like the cross-government working group established to look at the room for development in project data analytics, but until this fully matures, independent events like Project:Hack seek to get the ball rolling.
The goal
Lying within the 95% of discarded site data is the answer to construction’s most important questions, many of which we likely haven’t even thought to ask yet. Hackathons seek to provide a space to explore this data, with learning opportunities and incentives, so we can bring our industry’s use of data up to speed.
Other industries are already leaps and bounds ahead, like aviation, mandated by the code of authorities worldwide to share their data with one another. Both aviation and construction are high risk industries but fatal incidents in aviation decreased by 89% between 1972 and 2019, where HSE statistics over the last six years have shown us that construction’s number of casualties rarely deviate each year. Imagine what could be done if we harness health and safety data at a granular level.
Progress is being made in other areas. For example, the idea for materials passport would harness historic data to help us address both safety standards and the carbon footprint of the materials we use. However, construction still has a long way to go before we fully realise the potential of data for our industry. We’ll get there, even if it is one hackathon at a time.
Gareth Parkes
Head of data and analytics
Sir Robert McAlpine
Tel: +44 (0)333 566 3444
Twitter: @WeAreMcAlpine
LinkedIn: Sir Robert McAlipne
Instagram:Â @wearemcalpine
