Last week I did my first bid in ages. I had taken some time off to build the software, so it was good to be back at doing actual estimating. It was an electrical project but the scope was unbelievably confusing. It instantly reminds me what I hate most about estimating. Spending hours going through the drawings, trying to make sense of the scope of works and put it all together. It feels like when bidding, you spend 90% of your time trying to work out what the client actually wants you to price. If you were going to spend $5m+ on a contract, surely you should spend a few hours trying to clearly articulate what you want them to price? But clients never seem to do it properly.... What do you hate most about estimating?

Something I've been really interested in is the role of big data in construction. So far all I see is hype. And the hype has been around for at least a decade. I went to a presentation where they spoke for an hour about how data is transforming construction. Construction companies need more data. Etc. etc. When the speaker got asked how they use data, he said they compare their planned and actual costs. Oh really? So does everybody else on earth through their accounting system. It must be one of the consistently most overhyped concepts. (This article from 10 years ago talks about how data is more important than money) https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2016/04/19/how-big-data-and-analytics-are-transforming-the-construction-industry/?utm_source=canva&utm_medium=iframely I am really interested to ask though, has anybody found genuinely useful applications of data to construction? Has anybody seen good applications? I do think with AI, there are two big changes: 1. Context/background information is increasingly important to get AI to do effective work 2. Unstructured data can now be useful

I'm keen to hear who everybody is, and what their goals are I assume you already know who I am. But if you don't I'm Tim. I worked for 8 years for big contractors on road, rail, renewable energy projects. I've always worked for head-contractors. I recently worked for some smaller contractors as a consultant when I left my job doing estimating and contract management. It was good, but I found it hard to see a path to scale (other than just starting a contracting business myself) So I instead decided to build software, and found that that's 100x harder than I thought and a very easy way to lose money

I think one of the hardest problems with tendering big projects is the amount of documentation clients provided. Big scopes of work, lots of specifications, drawings etc. Each of these documents has pricing information. ETc What are peopel's processes for managing bid requirements? The core feature I am trying to build Operum around is that in the bid documents, every requirement that impacts cost needs to fit in one of these four buckets: 1. Included in your direct costs (labour plant and materials) 2. Included in a subcontract scope of works 3. Included in your prelims/risk 4. Or explicitly excluded in your letter of offer Bsaically, you take the tender documents and transform it into a big checklist Keen to hear how others do it

Previously I used to use Candy. I loved it but it had a super steep learning curve. It took ages to get used to and I think I was probably only using it for 10% of what it could do. The project controls stuff was pretty impressive but I never got to apply it on a job properly