A year ago, I was walking around the office with our Head of Technology (Let’s call him Shirley) when he nodded his head towards three team members and uttered the words ‘you can replace them with an algorithm’. Shirley was in-the-midst of his MIT Sloan course, reading ‘Artificial Intelligence’ at the time, and the three people that he motioned towards were delay analysts.
The first thing to know about delay analysts is that good ones are hard to find, and the second thing, is that when you find them, they will be priced, just like a rare gem. It was a constant struggle of the business to find the right skills at the right price, and training a newbie takes a long time.
It dawned on me that there was a degree of truth in what Shirley had observed. Many of the tasks performed by delay analysts involved the ‘sorting and ordering’ of data.
Over the last year, we have embarked on a journey – not to replace the delay analyst, but to develop a tool that will cut delay analysis timeframes and provide the non-delay analyst with a reliable indication of delay and the project’s critical / as-built critical path.
The fruits of this labour ‘LOGIC+’ will hit the market in April of this year.