“Coordination is a computer problem, rather than a construction one.”
The full 31-minute talk from the 11th ICEC World Congress in Sydney, where the model behind MPC was taken one step past coordination, into forecasting. Subtitles in English and Croatian.
31:29 · recorded 18-20 November 2018, Sydney Subtitles CC English · Hrvatski, switch language in the player Ova stranica na hrvatskom →
The congress this was given to
The International Cost Engineering Council was founded in 1976 as a non-political, non-profit body promoting cooperation between the national cost engineering, quantity surveying and project management institutions of the world. Its member societies sit in more than 40 countries and, through them, ICEC reaches more than 300,000 cost engineers and project managers in over 120 nations.
It is not a trade fair. ICEC has held a World Congress every second year since 1972, and it is where the profession's national institutions meet to argue about method: how work is estimated, controlled, and accounted for. For a coordination model built in and for construction, this is the hardest audience there is, and the most relevant one.
Figures as published by ICEC (icoste.org).
Sydney, November 2018
This talk was given at the 11th ICEC World Congress, held jointly with the 22nd Annual PAQS Conference of the Pacific Association of Quantity Surveyors, in Sydney, 18-20 November 2018.
It was the second of three appearances at ICEC World Congresses for this line of research: Rio de Janeiro 2016, Sydney 2018, Rotterdam 2022. Sydney is the fullest of the three: it is where the four coordination dimensions behind MPC were set out on stage, and where the model was pushed past its own starting point.
What the talk argues
The paper behind it (“Coordination of Interleaved Corporate Schedules as Multiple Projects Cost Controls”) makes a deceptively simple observation: a thread of linked Requests for Action is itself a measurable schedule, with its own direction, durations and resources. Activity on site depends on those chained requests completing. So the everyday coordination data (the requests people are already exchanging) describes the real corporate schedule that intersects every project, and that no project plan contains.
Give each request an optimistic, most-likely and pessimistic duration, and you can compute, on the small per-period subset of live requests, the probability that a deadline will actually hold (PERT estimation with a Z-score). Coordination stops being a record of what happened and becomes a forecast of what is about to.
“Coordination is a computer problem, rather than a construction one.” From the podium, Sydney 2018
Status: research vision, not a shipped feature. Probabilistic deadline prediction is the “expand” half of the roadmap, peer-reviewed and presented four years before the product, and shown here so you can see where the model leads. The MPC product available today is the coordination layer: escalating alerts, an immutable audit trail, and one unified work wall. We flag this deliberately rather than blur the line between what ships and what is on the horizon.
Read the paper, or the slides
The 33-slide deck
The presentation as delivered in Sydney: the diagrams the talk walks through, in full resolution.
Download the deck (PDF)The peer-reviewed paper
Coordination of Interleaved Corporate Schedules as Multiple Projects Cost Controls: the full argument, with the PERT derivation.
Read the paper (PDF)The MPC Research Dossier
The model traced from its 2013 foundations through a 10-year field study to this 2018 extension: curated, in one PDF.
Get the dossierThe full publication list
Fourteen double-peer-reviewed papers, 2013-2022, with independent citations.
See Google ScholarBring us a coordination problem.
If the talk described your projects (work that slips through the gaps between parties, and is only priced weeks later), we would like to hear about it. No demo, no pitch: bring a real problem and we will work through it with you.
Book a working sessionor email early [at] mpcoord [dot] com