Trust and Technology: How to Foster Collaboration in the Construction Industry

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios, it’s time for Women In Motion. Brought to you by WBEC-West. Join forces. Succeed together. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Women In Motion and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, WBEC-West. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Women In Motion, we have Valerie Crafton with VALC Consultants. Welcome.

Valerie Crafton: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

Lee Kantor: I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about VALC Consultants.

Valerie Crafton: Well, VALC Consultants was really born out of my experience of navigating inefficiencies in large scale projects, and the frustration of seeing some mistakes repeated due to siloed data and a resistance to overall change. And when I saw this critical gap in the industry, it was really driven by a lack of real time visibility. People were bringing technology in, but they were trying to make the technology fit something. They didn’t fit the problem, rather than understanding their problem’s root causes and then finding a tailored solution to fit that.

Valerie Crafton: And there really was more of a reactive approach rather than a proactive approach in managing projects, so my goal was to really create a consultancy that not only solves those problems, but empowers businesses to adopt innovative methods and thrive in a rapidly evolving environment.

Lee Kantor: Now, at first, were you working for another firm and then you decided to go off on your own or were you always kind of on your own?

Valerie Crafton: Yes. So, I have spent about half of my career in the field building and working in construction. So, I bring that dirt to delivery experience, and I recruit and bring team members on with similar experience, because I really believe that that helps us fast forward our clients to their future state. But, yeah, we spent half of our time in the field on general contractor side, eventually ending up on the owner’s side, representing owners working directly for Google, Microsoft, Intel, for example, and really starting to see the picture from both sides of the fence. And that really helped me develop what I knew was going to be needed as an improved consultancy.

Lee Kantor: And then, your focus is in the construction industry?

Valerie Crafton: Yeah, all construction and high tech, representing owners, contractors in creating project controls, lean project controls – I should say – preparing them to get their data organized so they can take on AI as an integration to their business, and then ultimately providing project control resources as well like cost managers and risk managers.

Lee Kantor: Now, you mentioned some mistakes that folks make or maybe some challenges they have when they implement large tech solutions, I guess they’re they’re buying something that maybe they don’t really understand how to holistically integrate it into their organization and you help them in that area as well.

Valerie Crafton: So, I usually start off with doing a forensic study that allows me to understand their pain point at a deeper level. For example, I have a story about technology that was actually brought in, and they were claiming that through this technology they were able to get visibility to red flags, that their schedule was behind, and that they could give them enough time to recoup that schedule. Well, my question really is why were you behind on the schedule in the first place that got you into that situation? So, we’re not really thinking about our root causes, we’re thinking about just basically Band-Aids that fix broken bones and that isn’t going to support long term adoption of technology.

Lee Kantor: Now, is that pretty common that people are just kind of putting out fires or triaging whatever is the thing that’s happening right at the moment, rather than kind of going a few layers deep to see what is causing these things to happen in the first place?

Valerie Crafton: Shockingly, I mean, really, it shocks me sometimes because I’m always surrounded by some of the smartest people in the world. But for some reason, you’ll have an entire team who doesn’t really see the root cause to the problem. It’s right there in front of their faces. They’ll even have identified it in, like, risk logs and so forth, but they don’t see it as a risk as an actual root cause to their pain points.

Valerie Crafton: So, what happens is, is they get to an end and then they find, they’re like, “Oh. The schedule is the problem.” I’m like, “No. The schedule is the — to your problem. Let’s talk about what was the problem.” “Oh.” “Well, let’s go back to the beginning. Well, look here, you identified very early on that you had a contractor who had never built your type of project before, never worked in that market. And they were doing design build. They were supposed to have had, you know, so many percentage of procured contracts completed.” And that’s where it really began within those first few months. And the fact that the entire team couldn’t even see that, and there was no real risk program set up that allowed them to escalate risk in a way to get in front of it. You fast forward, they were two years late.

Valerie Crafton: So, it’s interesting that when we get to end of the projects, what I’ve observed is they they will sit there, they’ll document it in a lessons learned, but it will die on the desktop or it will die in that project share folder. But nothing gets cycled back to the beginning so that we can implement it. No, we just keep moving forward to the next emergency. We don’t actually stop and pause and think about what we’ve learned and how can we make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

Lee Kantor: It sounds like one domino falls that triggers, you know, a hundred other dominoes, and they’re just looking at the last domino, and they don’t want to understand what caused the the first one to fall.

Valerie Crafton: Sometimes a lot of – I don’t want to call them excuses but reasons, and people genuinely believe it’s because I’m resource constrained. I’m too busy. I have teams who are green and have skill gaps. And that’s what I do, is I come in and let’s talk about what you think your pain points are.

Valerie Crafton: And I don’t think and from my discovery, it’s not typically about the people. It ends up being more about the fact that there’s misalignment between the cross-functional teams, or they’ve grown so fast as a business that what worked when the teams were very small and everybody communicated and knew what to do, and then suddenly fast forward, 5, 10, 15, 20 years and you’ve grown so fast and no one really spent the time to actually document and say, “Okay. Here is our best in class standard operating procedures.” They forget governance along the way, and there’s no continuous improvement built into the fabric of the culture or those processes.

Lee Kantor: Now, if an organization lacks that kind of self-awareness to kind of go back and examine these things, what are the symptoms that they’re having that motivate them to contact you and your team? Because it seems like that what you’re doing is trying to get to the heart of the things, and they may not have the self-awareness to see it themselves, so what would inspire them to contact you?

Valerie Crafton: Likely you’re starting to see resource turnover. You’re starting to see a loss of market share. If you can’t stand there and say why, why I’m losing money, why I’m not meeting schedules, and really get to be able to identify a root cause to that, and you’re repeating the same mistakes over and over and over, those are a lot of the symptoms.

Lee Kantor: So, when the leadership team is hearing kind of the same excuses over and over, that’s a signal that, hey, maybe we we need some fresh eyes on this, and let’s call VALC Consultants.

Valerie Crafton: That’s right, call VALC. Because when I come in, I’m looking at more than just the pain point itself. I will look upstream and downstream end to end, because at the end of the day, it goes back to a connection of handshakes. I like to say that I no longer build projects. I build bridges between silos.

Valerie Crafton: And so, a lot of times it’s because we don’t have all of the right people a part of the conversation upstream. And the folks downstream are impacted, and so the folks downstream have these pain points of things that are that are happening. And, again, it’s just processes and goals that work against each other inside the corporation.

Valerie Crafton: Also, building a culture where it’s okay. Rather than beat your people up, but celebrate that you’re willing to share your lesson and and teach it to others. Because I’ve watched it a dozen times where, you know, people are afraid, they won’t even put their name next to the lessons learned because they’re afraid of the backlash. They don’t want to share that. But it’s not just lessons learned, but it’s opportunities to improve. It’s an opportunity to improve, but it’s not just negative things, it’s positive things. So, if you don’t even have the negative stuff tracked, what about the good things that are happening on one site or one project that could be easily shared?

Valerie Crafton: So, if you’re implementing the right thing and you’ve got the right handshake approach in, and it’s set up with a correct escalation, and it allows you to instantaneously share with other teams and other projects anywhere in the world, that is when you start seeing real difference. I mean, if you think about your portfolio and having something like this and put in place and we only impact less than one percent, I promise you that’s in the millions of dollars.

Valerie Crafton: And I’ve done this type of analysis before and actually hold a green belt record on cost savings where just impacting one percent of a major corporation save them $1.623 billion that year. So, I know it ended up being more, but it can be a huge to the bottom line, not to mention the fact that you are now recouping lost opportunity that you weren’t tracking before, and that could be market share.

Lee Kantor: Now, it seems when you say this handshake approach where we’re just two adults having a conversation, and I’m sharing and I’m being vulnerable, and, hey, this didn’t work out, and I want everybody to know it and we can all learn from it, that sounds good in a conversation. But when it’s human beings and it’s their jobs on the line, like you mentioned the word culture earlier, if you don’t have a culture of trust and that it’s okay to take risks and make mistakes and share and learn, you’re going to have a difficult time I would imagine implementing something like this, because this requires trust and vulnerability, and not everybody signs up for that.

Valerie Crafton: It really does require that it comes from the top down. Really driven by the leadership and pushing it all the way down to the bottom, because otherwise it doesn’t get adopted. It takes time to get it a part of the fabric. But I’ve found that when I brought all the teams in to make them a part of the conversation, I ensured the handshake approach is implemented not just between human to human project to project stage gate to stage gate, but also between human and technology and technology. The technology, you know those. That’s where, you know, most consultants will stop short of just looking at, okay, here’s a solution for you. But I’m like, no, I want a solution that will impact your entire business and bring them together as one unit, not something that just is a quick fix. And it feels good for today.

Lee Kantor: Now, when you’re talking to leaders, um, do they have that kind of long term view? I know a lot of them give lip service to it, but a lot of folks just want that quick fix and get it off my plate and and move on. Like, I know it’s hard to find those best fit clients, but I’m sure they’re out there. But it’s not everybody, is it?

Valerie Crafton: It’s not. I mean, people have to be prepared for this. They have to have a growth mindset. You have to be willing to forward think, um, change is hard. It’s hard for a lot of folks. But at the end of the day, what I’ve discovered is everybody wants to change, but you just got to bring them in to the conversation because everyone’s perspective actually does matter. Um, they’re going to be standing and and because the reason why you bring someone from the outside in is because if you try to do it inside, there’s a lot of unconscious bias that gets applied, right? You want your you want to make sure your department’s taken care of at the end of the day. And I don’t think it’s intentional. It’s unconscious. Um, you want someone who’s, like you said, it’s fresh eyes, someone who’s actually walked in their shoes, knows where they’ve been and knows where they want to go. Um, and so that way we can easily connect the dots. You don’t have to spend a lot of time explaining to me what your job is, because I’ve been there and done that. I have experienced these same pain points. Now let’s talk about how this pain point is working in your department. So it’s it’s hard to implement, but we’re really, really good about it. We get we create a lot of excitement. And at the end of the day everybody wants to change. And adoption is at levels. By the time we’re done with our forensic studies, usually everybody is bought in, I would say at least 95% of them.

Lee Kantor: And then, um, what trends are you seeing? Um, you know, we’re talking all the time about AI. Um, how has that impacted the construction industry and how do you help your clients kind of get ready for this chaotic future that is rapidly approaching, if not already here? In a lot of cases?

Valerie Crafton: Yeah, it is definitely already here, and it’s been here for 200 years, which is really interesting. But we’ve been it’s just become very popular. And the thing that most people are concerned about is it replacing their jobs. Well, one of our biggest risks in the, in the industry is the fact that we don’t have enough skilled labor and humans are not going to be eliminated. We actually need the combination of AI and human to actually make it all work. Um, and where where my consulting firm comes in and helps them get ready for that. It’s really about, um, organizing your data in a way so that when you feed the machine, which we call machine learning, when you’re feeding that machine and it’s learning from the data, it’s not learning the wrong stuff. Right. And what happens is, is then AI spits out the report that gives you a false sense of security. You want to make sure that your data is organized in a way that is actually going to give you actionable insights that it’s really allows you to have a foundational approach and end up enabling you to make smarter business decisions, right. That’s going to improve your project outcome. It’s going to allow you to create repeatability long term.

Valerie Crafton: And I is so great at taking a lot of data. And humans aren’t great at that, taking a lot of data and actually analyzing it and spitting out information where the human comes in. And that is we need people who are used to looking at that data to understand that, hey, there is an outlier in this data. We should probably remove that and make sure we categorize our data and clean it up so that only the quality data is ending up in the results. So whether you know the financial field and medical fields are way, way ahead of the curve on this and they are just light years ahead of us. But the construction field that it is such a great way to understand your data, understand where your what your um where to focus your resources when you are already thin on resources. It’s a great way to set up a continuous learning. When you have folks, you need to upskill very quickly, right? So it has so many opportunities that allow you to do more with less. It is not taking away your job because we still need the human element to it.

Lee Kantor: But it does require you to upskill in some areas, right? Like it’s difficult for you to just show up the way you are and then leverage this technology.

Yes. Yeah, you.

Valerie Crafton: Definitely do need. And that’s what’s nice about it is it does create jobs too, at the same time. Right. Just like when social media came on board, you suddenly had to have a social media manager. It’s kind of like that.

Lee Kantor: Right? So I’m not saying that this is it requires some earth shattering, you know, skill set, but it requires some new skills. Or maybe some people that weren’t doing this kind of work now are the perfect people to be doing this kind of work because their skills map to what’s needed.

Valerie Crafton: Absolutely. There’s a ton of transferable skill there. And like I said, it’s about the people who can who’s used to reviewing that data, being able to see you read between the lines. Right. And so we can’t we can’t just take it for face value. We need to make sure that the results that we’re looking at are real, actionable results. And and the folks who used to do all of this manually, we still need them to evaluate it to make sure it’s spitting out accurate information.

Right?

Lee Kantor: I think people get kind of mesmerized at the speed in which it can find patterns, or it can find anomalies and it can find things. But if you don’t have good data to begin with, all of that’s kind of meaningless.

Valerie Crafton: Absolutely meaningless. So that is where you get, um, oh, what do they call it? Uh, trying to think of the.

Oh, the the.

Lee Kantor: Hallucinations.

Right. Yeah.

Valerie Crafton: You get the hallucination Data where, um, what’s what’s really interesting is I was built on a lot of news reports. So when you ask it to, um, evaluate a news report, it does a really great job. But something more simple, like a recipe, it actually does a terrible job because there’s not very much data it was trained on to understand recipes. So it just goes back to how we code it, how we train it, and the information that we’re feeding it will. And the more it learns, the better it will get. But you don’t want to build that learning on bad data.

Lee Kantor: Right? That’s why you need somebody on your team that has experience in kind of giving it the data. It needs to be effective and to get you to where you want to go, not to where the machine wants to go.

That’s right, that’s right.

Valerie Crafton: So I was speaking with a client the other day and, and I, we were talking about how we can actually apply a quantifiable value to each of their risks and their cost and change management. Um, database didn’t wasn’t categorized, and nowhere in the system could I determine what was the common trend for changes or why cost overruns were happening. There was zero categorization to it or coding structure that helped me kind of understand where my trends were with changes and cost overruns. Um, and, and so that was just going back and saying, okay, well, how can we reconfigure this database to, to then maybe go back a year and start putting them into certain categories, feed that to the machine and see what the results are. Then you just you might have to make a couple of adjustments, but you you get it right when you first implement it. And, and the next thing you know, you start seeing trends that you that you can really turn things around and make those changes mitigate it before they happen.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. That’s where I mean, there’s so much possibilities. And to have somebody like you on the team helping. I mean, it could really accelerate growth in ways they can’t even imagine.

Valerie Crafton: Yes, it is really exciting times right now. And and and understanding the history and being able to even come in and train teams and given the history of AI and how it all works, is very exciting for me. I love doing it. Um, and, you know, having the, um, AI Business Integrator certification through MIT, it has just been a very useful learning that my team brings to corporations to help kind of understand where has it been, where is it going, what can it do? What can it not do, and how do you need to get ready for it and then supporting them on that readiness?

Lee Kantor: Now, why was it important for you to become part of the WebEx West community. What did you anticipate getting out of it and what have you gotten out of it?

Valerie Crafton: Oh my goodness. So the the Witbank West, you know, getting the women owned certification has just been huge. It aligned me with a lot of corporations who are looking to bring in diverse teams. And interesting enough, they did a study at MIT and they talked about how a more diverse team created a smarter overall group. And and so corporations are taking that very seriously right now. And they’re looking for those certifications. So it is it is amazing to have that certification and be recognized on that level, not to mention the ladies that I’m surrounded by who are like minded, who are going through some of the similar things I have or I’ve already gone through as a business owner, being able to share those experiences back and forth and introduce each other to opportunities and teaming it is not. And let me just add to the top of that is all of the free education I get through Webbank is this been top notch? Absolutely top notch. I mean, I knew I was going to be a great CEO, but Webbank took me to the next level on what that meant.

Lee Kantor: So what’s next for your firm?

Yeah. I mean, the incredibly exciting for us.

Valerie Crafton: We plan to expand our partnerships, embrace more AI driven tools, of course, and develop proprietary solutions that push the boundaries of what project controls can achieve. And this includes, you know, becoming partners with, you know, technology like Smartsheet, where I’m able to build data tracking tools specific to client’s needs. And as we grow and focus, it remains on delivering tailored, innovative solutions while deepening our impact in our community and outreach with Stem advocacy. So my vision for Vousi is not only to set industry benchmarks, but to go and inspire a new generation to see the possibilities of construction tech and beyond to drive impacts globally.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what’s the website? What’s the best way to connect?

Yes. Um, you.

Valerie Crafton: Can reach out to. My website is WW dot Val consultants. Val consultants.com. Or you can reach me at val c at val consultants.

Lee Kantor: Well Valerie, thank you so much for sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Valerie Crafton: Yes. Thank you. I appreciate you too. Thank you so much.

All right.

Lee Kantor: This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Women in Motion.

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