Let’s put Canada at the forefront of construction excellence!

This week I had the pleasure of speaking with Rosemary Sparks, Executive Director of BuildForce Canada.

I came across BuildForce Canada when a media release popped up in my Google alerts:

Campaign encourages construction industry to work together to improve productivity

This quote from the release got my attention:

“A changing global economy, rapidly aging workforce and slower growth, are forcing our industry to take a hard look at every stage of construction in order to stay competitive and attract new investment,” said Rosemary Sparks, Executive Director of BuildForce Canada. “We’re engaging industry in a national conversation about tackling many of its biggest challenges and that includes productivity.”  

It’s always great to come across organizations that have a similar mandate to your own. At Valency, our mandate is to help organizations implement best practices that dramatically improve performance in capital projects. All of the work we do is based on the Construction Industry Institute’s (CII) awesome research, methodologies and best practices that are fully aligned with PMI’s Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK).

If you’re not familiar with CII already, here’s their mission – which aligns very closely with what BuildForce is aiming to do here in Canada:

“The mission of CII is to inspire owners, contractors/suppliers, and academia to collaborate through research to produce best practices and implementation resources, creating innovative solutions that tangibly improve safety and capital efficiency.”

CII Registered Education Provider

As a research organization focused on improving capital project results, CII has built a huge body of knowledge through the collaboration of it’s members—and that body of knowledge is available to anyone!

Over the past four years Valency has had the opportunity to work with companies all around the world.  Our association with CII has opened many doors allowing us to meet incredibly talented and intelligent people all focused on improving project delivery.

In Canada, CII is not very well known…yet.

There’s a handful of CII members including Greater Toronto Airport Association, OPG, TransCanada, Enbridge, SNC Lavalin and a few others, but all too often, when I start conversations with Canadian project managers they are very interested in improving capital project delivery, but don’t know where to start. They’ve never heard of CII. It sometimes feels like Canada and Canadian companies are working in a vacuum, trying to re-invent the wheel.

The great news is, associations like BuildForce Canada are working to eliminate the silos, break the vacuum and get the great minds in Canada’s construction industry to collaborate and work together to improve productivity.

Speaking with Rosemary this week was very encouraging. If there’s one thing we see consistently, in Canada and abroad, project teams always want to succeed. It’s great to see organizations like BuildForce Canada and CII working to provide a collaborative forum to make that happen.

Let’s avoid the vacuum, work together to do things better, and take advantage of the great work that’s been done already.   Let’s put Canada at the forefront of construction excellence!