A recent study conducted by Oxford’s business school found that approximately 90% of megaprojects with a budget of $1 billion or more have cost and schedule overruns. An additional study published by McKinsey found that 98% of megaprojects face delays of up to 20 months.
Delays in megaprojects are a problem and they cause both cost overruns and diminished benefits. But it doesn't need to be this way. Teams can leverage their existing schedule data to make smarter decisions and see improved project outcomes with AI-driven technology.
In this article, we’ll explore how project teams can use AI-driven insights to reduce scheduling risks and build large infrastructure projects faster.
Why are schedule overruns so common among megaprojects?
Planning for megaprojects is hard. The schedule (also called a program) is the single most useful document of record in a megaproject — typically compiled in Oracle Primavera P6 or Microsoft Project software.
However, that schedule data often becomes a technical black box that ends up at the periphery of a project. So that Primavera file becomes “dark data”, or data that is produced but not used, and teams lose visibility of what’s inside of it.
How does AI help teams build faster?
Primavera P6 and MS-project have been the default systems available to help teams execute megaprojects. But it’s clear megaproject teams need something more. They need a system of intelligence that can work with these softwares to analyze project data, draw out important insights, and coordinate action.
Foresight brings your P6 or MS Project files into our AI Engine to put the schedule at the heart of project delivery. We open up that black box and enable it to be seen by the whole delivery team. It helps you bridge the gaps between planning and execution so that your team can collectively work out what’s going on inside the program.
Specifically, the Foresight AI Engine helps teams build faster by providing the following advantages:
1. Increased Visibility
Foresight is cloud-based and purpose-built to support multiple end-users. Users can assign, share, comment, tag, and track progress across all teams. External parties can be invited to the platform with role-based access control to focus on specific work.
Foresight also provides teams with the highest level of insight into their schedule data. Unlike existing softwares, Foresight goes beyond answering simple questions like, “What happened?” to reveal what will happen in the future and what teams should do about it.
2. Better Scheduling and Prioritization
Foresight is the only AI scheduling engine with a prioritization algorithm. It sorts thousands of activities into focused priorities of what each team needs to be working on in the coming week, month, and quarter to achieve speedy results.
With Foresight’s automated reporting, teams reduce hours spent on manual reporting by up to 90%. Users can configure customized dashboards displaying the insights they need most, so they can spend more time completing high-value activities.
3. Predictive Analytics
Foresight draws on proprietary industry data as well as teams’ past project files to predict future outcomes. Users can see their entire portfolio on one screen — risks and bottlenecks included. Lessons learned across the portfolio become recommendations and alerts for in-flight projects.
In the Foresight platform, each activity automatically becomes a battlecard containing all the information one needs to get it done. When a risk is detected, Foresight uses AI to suggest relevant risk mitigation strategies that can be deployed with the click of a button.
Build Faster With AI-based Narratives
Building projects faster starts with reducing the risk of delays. The Foresight AI Engine helps project teams avoid delays by uncovering hidden schedule risks with predictive analytics and reference class forecasting. Then, it helps teams accelerate delivery by highlighting opportunities for schedule compression and efficiency.
Build faster with Foresight AI Engine, the only AI scheduling platform that unlocks the full value of your schedule data. Book a demo today to discover how Foresight can help you.
