Civic Engineers Gains Strategic Visibility and Scalable Control Through Connected Project Management

Civic Engineers uses Milient's Project Flow, previously known as Rapport3.

Civic Engineers is an award-winning civil, structural, and transport engineering practice delivering projects across the UK that create lasting social, environmental and economic value. In 2020, the team decided to migrate to Project Flow after encountering limitations with their previous system.

They needed greater visibility across both live and speculative projects, particularly during a period of uncertainty and growth. Their existing software made it difficult to plan effectively, and directors were spending excessive time reviewing and validating data rather than using it to guide decisions.

To address this, Civic Engineers adopted Project Flow’s core Project Costing module, QA functionality, and integrations with Newforma and Sage.

Reflecting on the scale of growth since implementation, James Bruce, Director, explains:  “Civic Engineers have an established reputation in delivering great sustainable work and have won huge projects over the last two years. This increased demand required us to grow and bring in people who can help us deliver these projects. We now have double the number of licenses since starting with Project Flow.”

Choosing Milient

Scalability was a key factor in Civic Engineers’ decision to adopt Project Flow.

James continues: “We were conscious that we needed a system that would support the business and that was scalable. Project Flow seamlessly supported our increased demand and growth. When we took on Project Flow, we invested fully, switching how we monitor our projects and deliverables. There is no top end to Project Flow, it is scalable over time.”

Their previous approach relied heavily on spreadsheets and disconnected finance tools, which limited access and collaboration.

“Before Project Flow, we used Sage Core Time as a finance tool to input data, relying on spreadsheets, which were prone to crashing, making the internal project process drawn out and time-consuming. Directors would manage and control these to try to avoid multiple access, but this would limit access to the project team."

Benefits of Milient

With Project Flow in place, project leaders gained greater control and visibility over their own data.

“Project Flow and its integration with Sage allows individual project leaders to manage their projects at the project level with control of their respective data. Now we are in control of project performance with greater visibility, helping to inform our wider strategic vision and bigger picture.”

The move away from spreadsheets has also transformed how data is shared and analysed across teams.

“Project Flow allows our data to be used across project management teams, with reporting tools like Power BI helping them to analyse data and inform strategy. Project Flow is the best place to input all data for projects for our teams, having Power BI represent our information in such graphic and intuitive reporting is really informative and valuable to us."

Change Management and Adoption

Introducing Project Flow represented a significant change in how Civic Engineers operated, so careful change management was essential.

James explains: “Project Flow was a big change for a lot of people who are now using it. Previously, people only had to fill in their timesheets; they weren’t able to easily access the data for projects. It was a big change in how we ran projects in the business. We did a lot of upfront work before we went live with training, so people understood what we were doing and the impact that this would have on what they had to do to support that.”

Labour planning and resource visibility were also key improvements:

“In the past, our spreadsheets across teams didn’t work together, making it hard to assign specific people to specific roles on projects. Project Flow has enabled us to see labour planning and our resource workload in one place. Project Flow has facilitated us to work across teams and studios more efficiently."

To support adoption, implementation was phased:

“We made sure our billing plans and timesheets were perfect and then adopted labour planning, which helped manage the onboarding of the software from a people perspective to introduce the software over time. The key to our success is incrementally implementing different aspects of Project Flow and explaining how it will benefit the team, so they understand the value to their projects and teams.”

The Solution 

Project Flow has also supported recruitment and long-term workforce planning.

“With Project Flow, we can break our overall teams into different disciplines that might be working across projects, enabling us to see what’s coming in future workloads. This helps us determine what is required on specific projects, meaning we avoid overloading certain teams. This also gives better foresight for whom to recruit in the future and has helped with sharing resources across teams and different studios.”

Feedback from across the practice has been overwhelmingly positive.

“Feedback from our team using Project Flow at Civic Engineers has been overwhelmingly positive. It has improved the way that we work and helped us ensure we are using our time effectively.”

From a leadership perspective, the benefits are clear:

“From a director’s view, our teams are working more efficiently with Project Flow, allowing them more time to work on the engineering side and less on inputting data. Project Flow is great as our team don’t have to make new project folders and add new people as it’s all coming through from Project Flow.”

James also reflects on the contrast with their previous system:

“Our previous system was quite basic, clunky and difficult to manoeuvre; it wasn’t accurate enough to make the decisions that we needed to make, making it hard to communicate internally. By giving the project managers control over the data, our information has become more accurate, helping to inform our strategic decision-making.”

When asked to share advice for new users, James concludes:

“Our secret to success with using Project Flow was explaining the ‘why’ to people, and what the benefit would be to them, and the team, of having Project Flow. Explaining what Project Flow will enable them to do with WIP, labour planning, etc., before going live, was crucial to our success with Project Flow."