Mott MacDonald

Hi everyone. Thanks to everyone who’s already joined us. Really looking forward to today’s session with Samuel and Mariano from Mott MacDonald, who are going to be talking us through information delivery planning and how they’ve been using Morta for that.

So looking forward to this showcase. Hi everyone again, thanks for everyone who’s joined us so far. This is Mo, I’m one of the co-founders of the company and as many of you know the point of these showcases and the community sessions is for us to share knowledge within the community. We think a lot of people are working on really really cool things and we can all learn from each other. We’ve certainly learned from the people that we bring on board to these sessions. And they’ve usually opened our eyes to something. And that’s why we bring them on to share their knowledge with all of you. And that’s really the goal of these sessions. It’s for us to be sharing knowledge with each other.

What we’ll do today is I’ll quickly start with a bit of a recap around what we’re trying to achieve and just contextualize the session. And then handing over to Samuel and Mariano, who will be talking through their learnings and the work that they’ve done. So thanks for joining, let’s get started.

So just to recap quickly, our goal is to help you increase your productivity by replacing spreadsheets with connected information hubs. The way we see it is the future of the industry looks really exciting. On the ground, what’s happening is we have many projects that rely on hundreds of disconnected solutions for planning and tracking. These could be point solutions, but right in the middle, we predominantly have Excel and Word. And that’s the case regardless of who I am in the context of a project. If I’m a design manager, if I’m a BIM manager, if I’m a sustainability manager, or if I’m a commercial manager, or a quality control manager. And that causes all kinds of challenges, which is exactly why we’ve created Morta.

The way we see it is we provide hubs that allow you to connect information, point solutions and teams together so that everyone is working with the same data and they’re reusing data and they’re collaborating and we’re breaking silos and we’re just ensuring higher data quality. And what happens is we provide a tool that has the familiarity and the flexibility of spreadsheets with the power of a database. And what that means is I can define column types, I can define what columns I’m expecting, I can define that I want text within these columns, I can define that I want dates, I can define that I want drop down lists from other data sets and so on and so forth. And that helps us improve the data quality of the data that’s going into these tables.

Then one of the key things is there is a lot of data that’s already available in other systems. And we see that many people currently spend a lot of time manually collecting this data from one system and putting it into Morta. And we want to make that as easy as possible through one click integration so that you can all reuse the data day to day. And we’re starting to introduce some new beta features that will enable you to make your information accessible with things like AI and with visual reporting so that questions are answered very quickly. And so that we help you increase your productivity.

As mentioned, my name is Sam. I’m joined with my colleague Mariano today to share our experience of how we’ve used Morta to manage our information delivery plan on one of the largest infrastructure projects within Morta at the moment. So before we get into the fun stuff, some background on who we are. As I said, my name is Sam. I’m a digital consultant within Mott McDonald and I’m the CDE technical lead for my division. I’ve been in the industry for more than six years now, where I’ve worked on lots of major infrastructure projects, such as HS2, where I’ve led the information management activities, configured CDE systems, and overall just ensuring compliance with ISO 19650.

Hi, everyone. I’m Mariano, a digital consultant within McDonald’s information management team. And I’ve been in the industry for over 4 years now, mostly involved in the digital delivery of major infrastructure project, for example, High Speed 2, just like Sam. And my focus has been on BI development and the optimization of CDE systems. And I’m looking forward to take you through our journey with Morta and the impact it’s had on our work.

As mentioned, we’ll be talking a lot about information delivery plans today. The information delivery plan is an ISO-19650 artifact. It’s essentially a list of deliverables that needs to be completed during a project. It’s used by production teams to plan their work and also by the PMs and client teams to monitor progress and plan for the receipt of information. Basically it’s identifying what information will be produced, by who, for how long, and when they will be delivered.

In line with ISO 9650, we typically have different task information delivery plans, or TIDPs, for the different task teams or the different discipline teams. And they all get amalgamated into a single master information delivery plan, otherwise known as an MIDP.

So here in McDonald, we see the MIDP as one of the key cogs in our overarching systems architecture, where we use this to monitor delivery progress by connecting it to all the different data sources. We have the MIDP where each row is a deliverable with its key information. Historically, we’ve been using Excel typically for MIDPs, and Mariano will explain later how we’ve moved from Excel in our case study. We’ve connected the MIDP to the program or schedule via the program ID, and this then gives us the expected delivery dates for the deliverables. We’ve also connected our MIDPs to common data environment systems like ProjectWise, ACC.

We use the document number as the key identifier between those two systems. We use this to track the progress of the deliverables using the suitability codes, i.e. whether the document is ready for approval. And as long as we have achieved common coding across all the different systems, we are then able to connect all the dots to form Power BI dashboards that show the bigger cohesive picture, which the project team can then use to plan their work.

So taking what we’ve learned about our use of master information delivery plans, we turn to our case study set within a subway extension project. So during the early design phases, Excel was our ally in task management, keeping our workflows organized and on point. But as we moved into new design phases, deliverables were expected to skyrocket. So think about it, over 10,000 tasks to track with Excel. We needed a solution scalable enough for what lay ahead without losing our grip on the project’s complexity. So the answer was to evolve with our much expanding project demands. And that’s where Morta steps in.

With Morta, we found our solution. So this tool wasn’t just another option. It was a clear path forward to manage our project’s growing needs. It’s simple to integrate yet powerful enough to handle the complexity of thousands of tasks. And it’s about making our day-to-day work smoother and preparing us for the scale of work yet to come.

The next step was making the actual switch to Morta. So despite agreeing with our project teams on the need for change, moving from the familiarity of Excel to a new system was a real shift for everyone. So it’s one thing to get everyone on the same page and receive support in theory. And it’s another to get a wide range of design teams to change their daily habits. At the beginning, we noticed teams were still leaning on Excel and sending us files to input into Morta. Our goal was to have them input directly into the new system.

Working with Morta’s team helped us meet this challenge head on. They were quick to respond, integrating the features our teams identified as game changers. And honestly, it was as if they were there right with us, tuning Morta to fit our project needs and rhythm. During our weekly sessions with our project teams, we not only discussed the updates and features, but also provided hands-on guidance to make everyone comfortable with the new processes.

For tracking progress, we went beyond seeing who was registering and logging into Morta. We actually carefully looked at how Morta was being used, focusing on the practical impact of the tool on our daily work. And this insight was really vital as it helped us understand the effectiveness of the adoption and ensured that the move on to Morta was translating into real tangible benefits for the team.

This is our TIDP change tracker dashboard. So we’ve been able to create it thanks to Morta’s capability to collect usage metrics data, which we’ve been able to leverage by also using Morta’s ability to integrate with reporting tools like Power BI. This dashboard has been crucial, not only for managing Morta activity broadly, but specifically for tracking user adoption. So as we introduced new features and continued our training, we could clearly see the user engagement rising, giving us a direct insight into the effectiveness of our initiatives and the collaboration with Morta’s support team.

Our approach is straightforward: work package managers, discipline leads and IM coordinators populate deliverables in Morta. Next we have IM coordinators and other responsibles for deliverables reviewing them either directly in Morta or through our CREP dashboard. Following this review, selected deliverables are manually exported and sent to document control for document preservation in Aconex system. While this is currently a manual step, integration between Aconex and Morta then automates the update back into Morta, showing us the reservation status next to each deliverable that is populated in Morta.

This is the information delivery plans table view in Morta. This is where our project members have been populating their deliverables. What’s particularly useful here is the Aconex status column you see next to each deliverable. It automatically updates to indicate whether a deliverable has been reserved within the Aconex system. And as you can see, there’s also a column for SharePoint status, which shows the working file for a deliverable is currently in SharePoint, which is also very useful.

The document number is automatically generated as users populate their columns. For example, originator, document type, discipline, work package. That’s what composes our document numbers. So once a document number is generated, these columns here start telling you if it’s in SharePoint, if it’s in Aconex. Then for those which are not in Aconex, it means they have to be sent to document control for reservation in the system.

In the next few slides, we’ll see how Morta’s versatility has been a game changer for us. So thanks to its interoperability with other key systems in our project. So we’ve successfully integrated Morta with SharePoint, which has been crucial for tracking our working files. And additionally, we’ve brought Power BI into the mix, which has been key for TIDP reporting and gaining clearer insights into our project’s progress. And for integration with Aconex, this has streamlined our document management processes. So Morta really has been an effective hub, allowing us to strengthen our project infrastructure and making our workflow more cohesive and efficient.

The first example of integration with other systems is our TIDP dashboard in Power BI. This is embedded right within Morta. This means our design teams can access these insights without ever having to leave Morta. The dashboard is pulling data from our information delivery plans in Morta to provide key insights. And it’s become a daily go-to resource for 500+ viewers and across more than 30 design disciplines, helping them review progress and the status of deliverables at different stages.

To connect SharePoint with Morta, we’ve set up a Power Automate flow that sifts through the SharePoint design library, capturing metadata of each file including the document numbers, and then populates these into a table in Morta. The SharePoint table is then linked to our information delivery plans table. And as a result, we’ve created a column that indicates us whether the deliverable is present in SharePoint or not, using the document number as a key for this cross-referencing. So this really enhances our visibility over project deliverables.

For the Aconex integration, we didn’t need to set up any flows like we did with SharePoint. Morta has a built-in feature for integration with Aconex. We simply logged into our Aconex account from the integration section in Morta. And just like that, we started putting Aconex data into Morta tables. This data gets refreshed daily automatically, ensuring we always have the latest updates. Once it’s in Morta, we link it to our information delivery plans table, just like we did with our SharePoint one. And this gives us a column showing us not only if a deliverable is in Aconex, but also the current status that it holds in that system.

With all the good work that Mariano has done on this project, what are the next steps into rolling this out on other projects? We’ve discussed this with the Morta team, and what they’ve recommended is to now that we have got this foundation that Mariano has done, we can easily duplicate this workspace for all the other projects. And what we will do here is to further refine the solution on all of these other projects, ironing out any inefficiencies, and tweaking it to fit all the different projects. And once we have a clear idea of how this whole MIDP solution should look like, we can then produce a template, which we can then easily roll out across the entire division, the company, ensuring that we have a consistent high quality approach to managing the MIDP within the company.

So essentially, what used to have taken months to develop in the past with regards to setting up an MIDP, what Mariano has done here, we were able to set that up within weeks. And in the future, we believe that we can do this within days. So really powerful stuff right here.

In summary, our experience with Morta have been very positive. It’s quick and easy to deploy on projects. We are able to easily extract data from Morta to gain insights on the usage analytics. But having said that, while it is a simple and powerful tool, it is still a new tool, not necessarily for people who are very much used to Excel solutions already. So our advice for anyone deploying Morta is to always bring the people, speak to them, understand their concerns and always respond to their feedback as you roll out Morta on your projects. So in essence, don’t just set the tool up and hope for the best because while Morta can provide the technology and set up a process, that people bit is still important to remember.

We think that Morta is a good compromise between Excel and a custom-built database solution. It’s a good database solution, but it’s also easily configurable for many projects.