BAM joins forces with nPlan to roll out new approach to portfolio risk management powered by AI and past project data

Thursday 27th July 2023 - London, UK: BAM is the launch partner for nPlan Portfolio, making it the first contractor anywhere in the world to use nPlan’s AI and big data to quantify and manage schedule risk across a portfolio of projects. BAM will employ nPlan’s newest product to oversee an initial portfolio of 50 projects, while also working closely with nPlan to guide the future roadmap for the product. nPlan’s advanced technology means that BAM will be able to analyse a whole portfolio through an AI lens for the first time, providing unbiased insight into potential risks to schedule and cost, and enabling prompt preventive action.

Applying nPlan’s machine learning capability at a portfolio level will help BAM focus high-level attention on the right areas, to identify the efficiencies and opportunities that can be realised through portfolio schedule optimisation. Ultimately this will enable more affordable outcomes for clients during a time of increasing cost pressures and funding constraints.

nPlan and the true value of forecasting well

Since its founding in 2017, nPlan’s core contention has always been that big construction projects can only be effectively forecast and de-risked by studying large volumes of past project data - a task for which a machine is best suited. nPlan set about assembling the world’s largest dataset of as-planned and as-built schedules from past projects (which currently includes over 740,000 programmes and counting) and used this data to train an AI to model project performance - with a degree of accuracy unattainable by human operators. When one of nPlan’s customers uploads a project schedule to nPlan Insights (nPlan’s SaaS platform for forecasting and de-risking individual projects), nPlan’s AI uses its model to generate a probabilistic forecast for every activity in the schedule, and the software then turns this into a whole-project forecast and surfaces the activities most likely to drive delay. 

nPlan has long argued that the value of its innovative patented process is in enabling contractors and owner-operators to proactively manage risk to get the project outcome they want (rather than in passively adjusting contingencies or producing reports). This argument has already won over project teams at the likes of Network Rail, Shell, HS2, Transpennine Route Upgrade, Kier, SCS and beyond, and these same principles (and technologies) are the foundation of nPlan Portfolio, the SaaS product nPlan is unveiling today.

nPlan Portfolio and the importance of tackling bias in portfolio risk management

Until today, accurately quantifying portfolio delay risk–let alone deriving actionable insights from such an analysis–was challenging. The human biases which can undermine the accuracy of individual project schedules has an exponential impact on the accuracy of a portfolio-level analysis. nPlan Portfolio uses the same AI and big data-powered forecasting engine as nPlan Insights, nullifying the impact of bias at the project level and–thereby–in the rolled up data presented to Portfolio users. This means that portfolio managers can now accurately quantify portfolio delay risk for the first time, and it also means they have unbiased data that shows them which projects truly require their time and attention. In other words, nPlan Portfolio nullifies the human biases which hamper the quantification of portfolio risk and cause portfolio managers to focus on the wrong projects.

‍Figure 1: nPlan Portfolio - a view of the home screen

nPlan Portfolio has a rich feature set, starting with a summary showing a portfolio’s overall health score, number of delayed projects and a breakdown of the health of projects within the portfolio. Users are also able to see–at a glance–the overall portfolio workload by month (both when work is planned and when nPlan’s AI believes it will take place), making it easy to spot bottlenecks which otherwise would have taken a portfolio manager by surprise. Users are able to customise their own tags, and group and filter projects with ease; they can also view metrics for the groups they create. Widgets displaying project by project delays and overall progress are also included in the standard nPlan Portfolio dashboard. Crucially, the new platform also displays the risk groups or themes which are driving delay across the portfolio - these are an excellent indicator of systemic issues and represent opportunities for PMO professionals to make extremely valuable interventions and drive organisational improvement. Finally, each project uploaded to nPlan Portfolio is given a dedicated page displaying the health of the project, a widget showing how the health of the project has trended over time, a project workload forecast, and the key risk areas of the project requiring attention. 

Overall, nPlan believes that nPlan Portfolio represents a quantum leap forward for monitoring and managing portfolio risk, especially as most portfolio professionals currently attempt to use disparate, backwards-looking Excel spreadsheets to solve the problems which nPlan Portfolio was built to address.

Comments from David Bunn, Portfolio Director at BAM and Dev Amratia, CEO of nPlan

David Bunn, Portfolio Director at BAM, commented: “As our Clients are increasingly moving towards outcome-focused capital programmes we are seeing a shift in our leadership focus to the risks to delivery of those outcomes rather than just the risks to project delivery. Applying nPlan’s AI capability at a portfolio oversight level allows us to quickly target our leadership interventions to the right areas across a large portfolio of projects, to mitigate risks to outcomes being delivered when they are needed. In this initial deployment we are assessing the capability in parallel with our existing approach to offer an additional view of schedule risk without the influence of typical human biases. We expect this to enable greater optimisation of integrated portfolio schedules, which will ultimately benefit our clients.”

Dev Amratia, CEO of nPlan, commented: “Accurately forecasting and effectively de-risking a single large-scale project is extremely challenging - doing the same for a whole portfolio of projects is an order of magnitude more difficult. It is also arguably an order of magnitude more important, because unrecognised portfolio risk has led to the demise of many contractors–and the loss of the jobs they provided–over the years. nPlan made its name solving the forecasting and risk identification problem for single projects - and we’re incredibly excited that we now also have a system which can enable portfolio managers to solve the portfolio risk problem on behalf of their organisations. This was a problem which many people said was a fact of life within the construction industry, but we’ve shown it can be addressed - and we’ll continue to work on the really thorny problems limiting growth and development, because ultimately that’s what gets us out of bed in the morning.” 

The launch of nPlan Portfolio and the announcement of nPlan’s agreement with BAM comes hot on the heels of a number of high-profile moves made by the company in recent weeks. In early June the company also made waves with the roll-out of Barry, its project controls chatbot capable of discussing and working with complex project data, and last week nPlan was also honoured as a finalist at the Royal Academy of Engineering’s prestigious MacRobert Award ceremony.