Balfour Beatty transforms construction to meet tomorrow’s challenges with Power Apps

A transformational approach

Like many construction firms, Balfour Beatty has a strictly defined gated business lifecycle process around new business, bid management and project delivery. The process used to involve more than 70 different documents and multiple approval stages. The existing manual system created a significant administrative burden. At the same time, there was little oversight and significant opportunities to improve information management. 

“We wanted greater granularity and needed more accountability,” explains Lia Nowodworska.

Mick Higgins, programme manager ITPMO at Balfour Beatty, adds, “In our previous ‘digital briefcase’ system, the business was required to complete documents and upload them to SharePoint. The business was sick and tired of the duplication in those documents – every one started with ‘what’s your project name?’. It was clunky and repetitive.”

For all these reasons, the gated business lifecycle was a key target for digitalisation.

Choosing Microsoft Power Apps

The Balfour Beatty IT team understood that to digitalise such a complex and bespoke process would require in-house development. To reduce the burden on the IT team, a low-code development platform would be ideal. 

“We looked at a number of solutions, but many were too complex or too expensive. This led us to choose Microsoft Power Platform. It also has the advantage of a good level of integration with the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem that we use on a daily basis within our organisation,” says Lia Nowodworska. “Plus, our team had foundational expertise in Microsoft technologies and were keen to develop that.”

Chris Daly, application architect at Balfour Beatty, explains, “We started with Microsoft 365 – building canvas apps with a SharePoint backend. From that, we could see the potential. Because it is low-code, no-code, it is quicker than using pro-code and we needed fewer people with programming skills. We were able to evidence that and move on to the enterprise solution: Microsoft Power Apps with a Microsoft Dataverse backend.”

The business committed to Microsoft Power Apps in July 2021 and began to explore its potential immediately.

Developing in-demand skills for the future

The online learning resources provided by Microsoft have helped the team to develop the necessary skills, explains Lia Nowodworska: “Our small team drew on the freely available resources that Microsoft provides. This was really useful, especially for our apprentices. They are keen to learn Power Platform skills because it is becoming an industry standard – it boosts their employability and skills.”

“The amount of material that is available for free on Microsoft Learn that people can work through at their own pace is really good,” agrees Chris Daly. “Other vendors are not as good as Microsoft at giving you that free, self-paced material; it’s the best I’ve seen.”

“The other benefit is that it’s just-in-time learning. So if the team hits a problem, they can easily find the solution,” adds Lia Nowodworska.

Nurturing local talent

Balfour Beatty is committed to the World Skills UK agenda, prioritising equity, diversity and inclusion. As well as offering foundation and graduate apprenticeships, the firm runs a schools outreach programme to inspire young people, whatever their background, to choose high-quality apprenticeships and technical education as a prestigious career route. 

“Our graduates are bright, young, and adaptable and they are already tech-savvy, so they pick things up really quickly. They have energy and enthusiasm and that is infectious,” says Lia Nowodworska. “It’s a ‘can do’ team. So it is a win-win situation.”

After four years, apprentices come out with a software engineering university degree with honours. 

“Balfour Beatty is great because you can go to university at the same time as earning a wage. I enjoy that,” says apprentice solution analyst, Euan Murray. He was delighted to work with the Power Platform and worked on building some of the data tables for the gated business lifecycle app.

He says, “There’s a high demand for Power Platform skills, so having these skills is essential. Because it is low-code it is easy to pick up, even for other people in the team without my technical background. And I really enjoy it.”

Work began to improve the gated business lifecycle

The gated business lifecycle enables corporate level governance for the business. The first four stages of the gated business lifecycle relate to the detailed bid phase of a project and the final four stages cover the build stages. It is the backbone of each of the construction projects undertaken by Balfour Beatty. Through it, the firm ensures that it does not introduce risk into a project. 

“It is a complex process, with lots of different owners and approval points,” admits Mick Higgins, “but it is vital to the business for strict governance.”

Despite its importance to the business, the process presented key opportunities to improve oversight and information management. Mick Higgins cites the example of the approval process required before submitting a tender document. 

He says, “The business would create a nice PowerPoint to present to the leadership for approval. The leadership would not directly review the paperwork in the digital briefcase. It was recognised that working like this risked a disconnect between the documents that have been uploaded and what’s being presented.”

Addressing potential disconnect in the gated business lifecycle

In order to digitalise the gated business lifecycle using Microsoft Power Apps, the team began with a thorough process analysis. 

They began by validating the relevance of each of the 70 documents used through the lifecycle. They then unpicked each of the documents; going back to the document owners and communities to validate each of the questions in them. The project team then looked for duplication across the documents to ensure that where the same data was pulled in, it came from the right source system.

“Because we’ve now created digital forms, we have much improved granularity of information management,” says Chris Daly, “We can make individual fields mandatory. Plus, the reporting we now have means that any issues can be called out much earlier in the lifecycle. For users, it’s much quicker to get to the information they need.” 

In particular, being able to see immediately who has been responsible for each approval stage is an exciting benefit for the leadership team. Plus, the new Power App has also enabled the business to address the concerns highlighted across the business.

“Now, we’ve addressed the potential disconnect,” explains Mick Higgins, “Responses that are presented to the leadership are drawn from the questions we ask in the gated business lifecycle Power App. We can now go for approval with data that’s been populated throughout the lifecycle.”

Furthermore, Chris Daly adds, “We have enabled data-driven decision making throughout the entire gated business lifecycle.”

Using Power Apps to empower business users

At the same time as the development of the Power App for the critical gated business lifecycle, Balfour Beatty is leveraging its Power Apps investment to empower business users.

“While we think we are being very digital, the projects are drowning in paperwork,” explains Mick Higgins, “So we’ve unlocked that door to the business and we’re starting to flush out what’s important.”

Each area of the business is encouraged to identify opportunities for digitalisation. The team already has delivered six Power Apps now in production. Twenty more are in development. There are twenty in the pipeline and the pipeline is growing rapidly. 

“Obviously you don’t want different business units creating the same app and then trying to push them all out to users, so putting good governance in place is important,” advises Chris Daly. “If the app use-case could be relevant across the business, it needs to go through a committee and an approval process.” if approved the app will be reused across business units, sometimes with slight modifications to meet their specific needs.

Establishing a centre of excellence and ensuring good governance

Balfour Beatty drew on the resources provided by Microsoft to create the centre of excellence and the approach for rolling out the citizen development. Chris Daly characterises these resources as “thorough” and “straightforward to implement”.

If business users are interested, they can join the monthly calls run by members of the solutions architecture team. The calls are an opportunity for the IT team to talk about the apps that they are developing, as well as for business users to present information about the apps they are developing. 

“We support the community,” explains Lia Nowodworska. “We help them through the lifecycle and provide the governance: making sure the user interface is right; making sure they use the right tables; making sure they do thorough user acceptance testing.”

Some apps will be built by IT, some by citizen developers, some in partnership. 

“The appetite for digital transformation is almost insatiable,” says Chris Daly. “So where our pipeline is full and we’ve no resource, another advantage of Power Apps is that we can reach out to partners in the Microsoft ecosystem to help us deliver solutions.”

Citizen-powered development already in production

One of the first citizen-incubated Power Apps was for the procurement team. The procurement schedule used to rely on individual Excel spreadsheets. This created several problems: it relied heavily on cut and paste which increased the potential for data error; it couldn’t easily inform reporting.

Because the team works in an agile way, the pace of development was dictated by the availability of resources both in IT and in the business teams. Development began in January 2022 and the app was delivered in June 2022. This included work on data migration to pull in data from the source spreadsheets so, when users opened the app for the first time, relevant data was prepopulated.

“We’re getting positive feedback even at this early stage” reports Mick Higgins. “The Power App is driving improvement across procurement schedules within business units. The data now all resides in Microsoft Dataverse and is available for real-time reporting. We now plan on developing it further by connecting it with other systems.”

Huge potential across the business – and to share knowledge through the industry

Another early Power App was developed by a citizen developer in the health and safety team. They developed a fire safety app that has already gone live. It uses single sign-on with multi-factor authentication. It is now on available on My Apps as a mobile app that can be used by all fire marshals.

This is particularly exciting because of its wider application. Balfour Beatty works in collaboration with other sector partners on a number of key infrastructure projects, including HS2, SB3 and CPS. HS2 recently requested to use the fire safety mobile app. 

“Because Power Platform is industry standard, we can apply this code to our joint ventures,” says Lia Nowodworska. “We are working to share our solutions and this makes it much more economical. And it means that we can standardise and add governance to these areas as well.”

The IT team is now working with the health and safety team to create an additional fire risk assessment app.

Vast potential to improve productivity

“The majority of processes we’re digitalising were paper-based,” states Lia Nowodworska. “But we also expect to displace a number of other apps that are being used around the business, so there are cost benefits to this work as well as productivity benefits.” 

Furthermore, having all these apps on Power Platform, with their data in the Dataverse, has major advantages in terms of ease of administration and governance. 

“It’s easier in terms of security, traceability, reporting, auditing – and, perhaps most importantly, look and feel,” says Lia Nowodworska. “All of a sudden, when we showed our Dynamics users the gated business lifecycle app, they recognised the user interface. That’s a big bonus for us. And the users will see that more and more.”

“Usability is a big advantage,” agrees Chris Daly. “Common navigation elements and so forth reduce the need for training for developers and users.” 

Drawing on the security credentials of Microsoft

The security options available when using Microsoft Power Apps is another huge boon for the IT team. They make use of the Power Platform administration tool, global administration within Microsoft 365 and native Azure security to secure solutions.

“Because the Power Platform resides on the Azure cloud, we benefit from, and inherit all of the platform's security including the specifics we have implemented to ensure a secure workforce, explains Chris Daly. “We have that threat protection, the assurances of its certifications. Plus, within the Power Platform itself, we have a strong user identity and the monitoring to ensure every authentication is legitimate and verified. All of this is controlled at an environment level, so we have security groups and security roles. We also leverage additional controls to further protect privileged access. All these different levels of security can be used to secure the solution both internally and externally and allow us to closely monitor and if necessary, limit suspicious activity” 

Creating the right data platform with Microsoft Dataverse

Using Microsoft Dataverse as the data platform has given the team the reliability and scalability it needs to roll out apps across the enterprise. Balfour Beatty can easily manage and protect data usage with built-in full audit logs and data loss prevention policies and efficiently control all aspects—users, apps, usage, and settings—in a single admin experience.

“Having it all on the same platform means we don’t need to go through necessary ingestion processes,” adds Lia Nowodworska. “Now we can seamlessly grasp opportunities. It’s all in the same ecosystem and we can track it and report against it through Power BI.”

The team plan to push data from Microsoft Dataverse into the firm’s risk management system. It will also integrate data with the firm’s new Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM system. Data is also shared with Balfour Beatty’s data lake. Chris Daly enthuses, “We can pull in data that has been mastered in other platforms to Dataverse, so that we have a single source of the truth.” 

“It’s transformational,” agrees Lia Nowodworska. “It’s ‘input once and used many times’. If it does change, we’ll be able to see when it changed, who changed it and who approved that change. People will no longer need to go hunting for information. I can’t stress how transformational it is.”

Opportunities are wide open

“We have the option to build web or mobile apps within the Power Platform, or model-driven apps that are responsive across devices and screens,” states Chris Daly. 

Power Apps also offers an opportunity to capture data so that it can be pushed into other applications across the business. Rather than spend intensive IT resources developing a pro-code app, the team can quickly add functionality through a Power Apps mobile app which then pushes the captured information into the pro-code solution. 

“We’re able to work in a fusion way,” says Chris Daly. “Sometimes, the team is going to think why do we need to build all that code when it’s going to require much more development and testing and it’s going to be more prone to bugs. Let’s just do the low-code. The business is just looking to capture the data – they don’t mind how we do it.”

Nevertheless, Chris Daly has a warning for would-be Power Apps users. While the technology can make the development process simpler, he says, users still need to follow best practice including Application Lifecycle Management.

“Yes, you can build an app in a day – but you can’t skimp on the strategic thinking,” warns Chris Daly. “It’s really important to do the thinking around the app first. You still need to look at the processes to make sure they are optimised. You still need to think about how to deliver the value.”

Building an exciting future

“It’s a gamechanger for us: the overall look and feel; the common usability; the granular levels of information that the business now has access to that it’s never been able to achieve before,” says Lia Nowodworska. “And we’ll be able to use that information in numerous ways. Reporting will be enlightening. It has taken a little bit of time to get the foundations in place and to raise awareness with key people about what the platform can do. Now that has been established, we are seeing the adoption and acceptance by the business rapidly increase.”

“We’re going to have so much more data and we can drive consistency in the data,” agrees Chris Daly. “We can do alerting through the process. And we can start to run analysis on the data. It opens up the possibility of layering Azure Cognitive Services over the data to apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to structured and unstructured data.”

“It’s enabling us to capture the data the business needs to enable data-driven decision making. We can store the data, we can create workflows through the data, we can visualise the data in Power BI and now we can start to intelligently analyse the data,” continues Chris Daly. “As well as Azure Cognitive Services, we also have artificial intelligence capability in Dynamics CRM, Sales Insights and Microsoft 365, so we are really beginning to understand the value of AI within the data-driven decision making across the enterprise.”

“It becomes a virtuous circle: the more data people have the more ideas about how to use it people have,” enthuses Chris Daly, “and we’re just at the beginning of it. As the technologies continue to accelerate, more opportunities open up to us. Microsoft continues to integrate new technologies and Power Apps is continuously evolving. Those advances are now on our roadmap too.”

The Balfour Beatty team will continue to lean into the support from Microsoft; their account team has helped and supported them throughout their journey so far. “We see it very much as a partnership,” agrees Lia Nowodworska, “so, as we innovate, we will feed things back to Microsoft too.”