Last year, the team at Bridgit was excited to introduce a new module to help plan people for preconstruction tasks and deliverables. Since its release, we’ve been thrilled with the response it’s received from precon and ops managers alike. The module helps to provide better capacity planning and simple, flexible task management for preconstruction planning.

As thrilled as we are with the response, that doesn’t mean our work is done. Our philosophy has always been to get the tool into the hands of the people who need it, listen to feedback, and implement meaningful changes.

With that, let’s get into your preconstruction enhancements.

2024 Preconstruction enhancements

Duplicate preconstruction roles

Sometimes, meaningful changes can be as simple as speeding up your workflows, for example, when planning your precon tasks and teams. Now, when creating roles on preconstruction tasks, you’ll have the option to include a quantity. Need three estimators for your Schematic Design task? No problem; add a quantity of three when setting up the role, and you’re good to go.

What if the role already exists? Like on the operations tab, you can duplicate any existing precon role on your project. Go to your role options, select “Duplicate role,” choose how many times you want it duplicated, and hit enter.

Precon data in your Spend Reports

A few of our customers asked to have precon planning data included in the project-level Spend Report and the Workforce Spend Summary in the Forecasting Dashboard. Ask, and you shall receive. By default, both Spend Reports will now use all project roles (including precon) to calculate your planned spend.

The Project Spend Report

On the project-level report, you’ll notice a Role Type dropdown in the report filters (top left), so you can quickly focus the report on your different project operations. You can even drill the report down further to specific roles by filtering on the role name (top right).

A couple of things to keep in mind with precon being added to the Project Spend Report:

• The report will organize the roles accordingly if multiple role types are selected. For example, if Precon and Salaried roles are selected, you’ll see the report broken into sections for each type.
• Any role added to a preconstruction task will appear in the Precon section of the report, which means you might have some roles that appear in both the Salaried and Precon sections.
• The Precon data in the Project Spend Report will not be reflected in your Budget vs. Planned Cost.

The Workforce Spend Summary

In the Forecasting Dashboard, your Workforce Spend Summary will now include all roles, including preconstruction. The report functions the same way it always has, but when using the quick filters at the top of the page, you’ll see that when displaying salaried roles and team members, you can narrow in on your preconstruction workforce using a second quick filter.

This helps to focus your spend reporting to get specific insights into your project, field, or preconstruction operations.

Precon Roles Column

Previously, preconstruction and project operations roles were consolidated into the same Roles Column in your project list, making it harder to discern, at a glance, which team had unfilled roles. You always needed to dig a little deeper to find out.

Well, you can dig a little less. We’ve split your precon roles into their own column now for better planning clarity

Precon data included in Project and People List exports

We understand how important collaborative planning is for our customers, so we’ve added your precon data to multiple reports available in Bridgit Bench.

Project List

Whether you’re exporting a .csv or PDF report from your Project List, you’ll notice your precon assignments have been added along with your operations and their assignments. Select “include allocations” when exporting your report to get the full breakdown.

People List

When exporting a PDF report from your People List, we’ve added any precon assignments and task information under the Role column. This means you can provide accurate overviews of each team member’s workload to anyone who needs it.

New Dashboard filtering

We’ve made a couple of small tweaks to the Dashboard in Bench. Previously, when applying a project filter for specific roles, Bench would display all projects containing the filtered role in the Project Breakdown and Unfilled Roles insights.

When applying a role filter now, Bench will instead filter the insights mentioned above to display the selected role name, helping Precon and Ops teams get accurate role counts for their respective teams.

For more information about Resource Planning for Preconstruction or step-by-step walkthroughs of all the latest functionality, visit the Bridgit Help Desk.

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