Customer story · Construction

Site meetings every day. Actions everywhere. And too little follow-up.

Bouygues Construction experience feedback: managing meetings and actions on a construction site

On a construction site, every meeting with architects, subcontractors or the client produces actions. At Bouygues Construction, each person handled them in their own way, and too often nothing came of them. Aurélien Mokrycki, head of works, explains how Perfony brought these action plans together in one place. Since then, the tool has been used on around twenty projects within the group.

Based on the testimony of Aurélien Mokrycki, head of works, Bouygues Construction, published in 2020

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Before, and with Perfony. Meetings each handled separately, versus a single action plan per site, sorted by theme. Illustration based on the testimony.

The problem

Bouygues Construction Privé is a general construction contractor working in particular on large office projects. Its job is to deliver high-quality buildings while ensuring client satisfaction, a good quality of working life for its teams, and remaining attractive to clients and talent alike.

Day to day, this means many meetings: with architects, subcontractors, teams, and also with clients. That is where actions are organised and where everyone's work takes on its meaning. It is also where things got lost. Aurélien Mokrycki's testimony describes four difficulties:

• meetings and actions handled individually, with minutes in different formats;
• incomplete action plans, hard to find and too often not followed up;
• a lot of time wasted, by everyone;
• in the end, teams losing motivation.

On a construction site, a forgotten action is not just a late line in a table: it can delay a work package or a whole chain of subcontractors.

The choice

Convinced that a dedicated tool was needed, the team first deployed an initial solution. It soon proved insufficient given the number of people involved, actions and themes to follow. A more robust solution was needed.

The requirements came down to two points: a collaborative tool that would really save employees time, and simple enough to be adopted straight away.

The solution

Perfony became the single place for the site's action plans. How it works, as described in the testimony:

1. Actions entered during the meetingActions are created directly during the meeting, and the minutes are produced automatically. Preparing the next meeting becomes very quick.
2. Themes to sort actionsEach action is filed under a theme: by subcontractor, by work package, by owner. Everyone finds what concerns them, and everything is shared.
3. Priorities that make you thinkThe priority system forces the team to step back and ask the right questions about what should come first.
4. A manager viewThe manager sees the progress of actions, the workload of team members and overdue actions, without having to ask.

The video testimony (2020, in French), hosted on YouTube and shown once you accept cookies. You can also watch it on YouTube.

The impact

What Aurélien Mokrycki takes away from Perfony for managing a site:

• "Actions are entered directly, minutes are automatic and preparing meetings is super fast. We save a huge amount of time!"
• "We gain relevance and time in our meetings."
• "The emails between us have finally gone down."
• "We gain fluidity: with themes, we can sort by subcontractor, by work package, by owner... Everything is shared."
• "As a manager, it finally gives me real visibility on actions and their progress, as well as on the team's workload and overdue actions."
• "Action plans are secure and in one place: no more actions lost in a mailbox or on a sticky note."

The proof

Since then, Perfony has been used on around twenty projects at Bouygues Construction. Not only construction sites: major projects too, and cross-functional processes, at the level of a business unit or of an international subsidiary in a given country.

This move from site to cross-functional use shows that the need is not specific to construction. Whenever a project brings many people together through many meetings, the question is the same: where do the actions live, and who checks that they move forward? That is the purpose of shared action plans, and what makes project management reliable.

The advice

For Aurélien Mokrycki, the mistake to avoid is wanting to find exactly what you did before in the new tool.

In other words: the tool is an opportunity to rethink how meetings are run and actions followed up, not just to digitise the old spreadsheets.