Later this month, I will be presenting a webinar about why experience matters when it comes to selecting your Advanced Work Packaging software. You can sign up here. This blog will provide a little primer.

Firstly, let’s consider the software itself.

Anyone can cobble together a bunch of pretty pictures and turn them into a glitzy PowerPoint presentation. Throw in a number of hyperbolic statements (“We can revolutionize your project delivery”, or something like that), and all of a sudden you have the makings of a ‘product’.

But this is where you have to ask the difficult questions: Has anyone actually used it before? Where has it been deployed? How long has it been in production? Because if you are the first ones using it, or it is very early in it’s development, there are going to be a lot of hurdles to overcome.

At O3, we have the benefit of more than 550 projects to call on. And, as anyone who has worked in the capital project space knows, all projects are different. So we have seen every possible permutation of setup, data, personnel and requirements. And because our software is a single code branch, every project that we do takes the benefit of the lessons learned on those previous projects.

We have also had more than 20,000 users in our software, providing a huge array of feedback over the years. Every one of them started their use of O3 with certain ideas about what it should be able to do, and many have provided valuable insights into development and enhancement.

Don’t get me wrong: There are potential advantages to working with a new product. You can help to craft the design to your needs, and tailor the user experience to exactly how your teams want to work. But you have to consider the time and investment needed to get there. It takes huge effort just to get a working version, and then you will spend years refining it to the point where it works the way you want.

Secondly, let’s consider the implementation.

With AWP, it’s not just about executing 550 projects over the last seven years: it’s about implementing them. Every new project comes with a different set of data, new people to train, new tools to integrate with, new challenges.