McConnell Dowell 2020 Annual Review

16 McConnell Dowell Group ‘We didn’t need ground-breaking innovations to survive and thrive during the pandemic. We needed simple innovations that we couldmobilise quickly to keep the business moving forward. The Virtual SiteWalk is a great example of that.’ Heinrich Kukkuk Group Information Technology Manager Technology in a pandemic As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world, working from home quickly became the ‘new normal’ for many organisations, including the McConnell Dowell Group. Fortunately, having already embraced proven technologies and platforms like video conferencing and Microsoft Teams, it took less than a week for the majority of our workforce to make a seamless shift to this new working environment. But of course, projects are the lifeblood of our company and you can’t deliver a project from home. So while our project teams remained on site, our executive teams were cloistered at home, unable to provide that all-important visible leadership and strong governance. The answer? The Virtual Site Walk. By bringing together Microsoft Teams, mobile gimbals and wireless headsets our site teams have taken our executives and other internal stakeholders on many virtual, and often self-guided, tours of our sites in real time. That means we’ve retained that all importance visible leadership on site and provided our executive teams with the ongoing opportunity to both witness and initiate safety and productivity improvements on our projects. The new normal