There are five categories of tools we need to think about for estimating: - Take-off software - Estimating software - Document management - CRM and bid tracking - AI tools Some platforms do all of them, some only do one small, specific thing. Do I think you need five expensive construction-specific platforms? No. A smaller contractor could cover most of this with a purpose-built take-off tool, Excel, SharePoint or Google Drive, a simple CRM, and Claude or ChatGPT. As your team grows, dedicated estimating software or an all-in-one platform might make more sense. The important thing is choosing tools that suit your process and let you export your data. I broke down the different options in this video: https://youtu.be/AyL3tXCtz18 What does your current estimating stack look like? Which tools would you recommend?

Here's mine: A construction programme is your methodology expressed through time. The Gantt chart is only the output. The actual work is deciding how the team will deliver the project: - Break the scope into activities with clear owners. - Sequence the work from the required milestones. - Calculate durations using quantities and realistic production rates. - Identify the critical path and low-float activities. - Optimise the work that can actually change the completion date. Crashing critical-path work usually costs more. Fast-tracking it introduces more risk. Doing either to non-critical work will not bring the completion date forward. Do I think a planner should build the programme alone and hand it to the site team? No. The people delivering the project need to help build the methodology and commit to it. This is my attempt to explain it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QahPnqB4UHo

The biggest trap I see with AI in estimating is overusing it. And that's from someone who genuinely loves Claude. You've probably heard the line that using an AI model is like having a room full of brilliant graduates. It's not quite right. These graduates have no common sense, they have amnesia, and they don't learn anything unless you explicitly tell them to. I ran into this on a battery project. I had a detailed commissioning estimate and asked Claude to check nothing was missing. It came back with 50 recommendations — most of them already covered in my construction cost or built into my overheads. Any estimator who understood the project would have known that instantly. So the way I use it now is simple. Narrowly define the task. Give it the background it needs. Define the process. Specify the output. AI does the heavy lifting, you do the steering. Which means you still have to understand the estimating process yourself. Here's the full workflow I run on real projects: https://youtu.be/VrSs8mGI8ss Let me know if you have any questions.

I’ll go first. I’m building a system to have AI dig through years of my old supplier and labour invoices and back-calculate what my work actually costs — real unit rates pulled from jobs I’ve already done, not gut feel and a sharp pencil. Tested it on a few invoices so far and it works. Pulled the labour hours, tied them to the right cost codes, spit out a rate. Now the job is scaling it across the whole pile. The thing is, every contractor already has this data. It’s just buried in years of PDFs nobody ever opens again. Mining it turns estimating from guessing into pricing off your own history. Early days, but even those first few invoices had me realizing how much I’ve been leaving on the table. What are you building? Doesn’t have to be finished — what’s the project that’s got you going “if I can pull this off…”?

The biggest waste I see on projects is hundreds of hours poured into a plan that gets abandoned the moment work starts. We love sitting in the office building, the perfect schedule, and the perfect methodology. Then the job kicks off, the phone rings a hundred times a day, and every bit of attention goes to fighting fires. By the end of week one, the original plan is already wrong — and nobody ever goes back to it. Once the plan stops matching reality, it loses its utility. You can't use it to plan or coordinate. You can't keep your client informed. And every cost, schedule and forecast built on it becomes meaningless. Project controls is the feedback loop that connects the plan back to what's actually happening on site. This week, I’m going to walk through the basics of project controls - what it is, why it matters and the simple system that works. Start with one question Project controls exists to answer one question, over and over: where are we versus where should we be — and if we're off, how off, and what do we do about it? Think of it like a GPS. The plan is the destination and the route you set at the start. Controls are what keep that live — it sees the traffic ahead, tells you when you've taken a wrong turn, and reroutes you to still hit your finish. Nothing fancy. It's just measuring what happened and updating the plan. But it's the part that actually gets you there on time and on budget. Your baselines are the ruler When you sign a lump-sum contract, you lock in four baselines: cost, time, scope and quality. You can't change them now (short of a variation) — so the whole game becomes doing everything in your power to hit them. That's what makes baselines powerful: they're the ruler you measure against. Done 60% of the budget? That's only good news if you've done 60% of the work. Without a baseline, you've got no way to know whether you're winning or losing until it's too late to do anything about it. Build the loop The system is simpler than people make it. Set your baselines, then run one loop: