Designing an Engagement Strategy to Improve Collaboration in the Construction Industry

Abstract

The building construction industry is generally known as a procedural project with linear workflow and a traditional mindset. When a disruptive technology arises, the clients and partners face the challenge to understand the technology. In addition, their willingness to change is low. PHYSEE, a technology company that offers smart engineering solutions for the global energy transition, wants to create an impact on the energy problem in the industry. As a technology-based scale-up company, PHYSEE has less power to influence the stakeholders in the market because they are in the development phase of their business.This master thesis aims to create an engagement with the stakeholders to embrace the new technology. The project is to investigate “What is the impact to the construction industry workflow (in this case facade industry)? How does the technology benefit their business?” Because of that, the main question for this graduation project is: "How could Physee communicate their strategy, value, and structure to the stakeholders and engage them in the process?"
The project process is very iterative using the Design Method by adapting the Double Diamond Service Design (British Design Council). Within the research phase of this research project, a literature review and qualitative research were carried out. Then, the analysis is conducted using some tools and co-creation is conducted to gather ideas.
Two problems are identified: information presentation and managing stakeholders’ expectations. A design goal was created to solve these issues where Physee will design a service to inform the updated knowledge to stakeholders in a customized and collaborative way. The solution is called Physee Insight. The overarching strategy is divided into three main focuses: 1.) Enabling the knowledge source; 2.) Adaptive & modular knowledge; 3.) Showing competencies to larger audiences. Within the solution, there are 6 different ideas to achieve Physee’s goal. The goal is to connect Physee and the world. The proposed strategy enables PHYSEE to speed up the process of engaging stakeholders, scaling up the information update in an easier way, and providing user-centric information.