Forget the Boardroom — The Best Ideas Still Start on Site

On major infrastructure projects, there are usually systems and teams in place to keep this under control. But most small and medium-sized projects don’t have that luxury. The platforms that do exist? They were built by boardrooms. User interfaces that look like they were frozen in 1997, designed with the assumption that you’ll have a training budget and a full-time document controller. Most small practices don’t. Most builders don’t. In fact, most smaller teams barely have processes in place for contract administration, let alone digital document management. And yet, they’re expected to deliver projects with the same contractual rigour as the majors.

There’s something faintly absurd about the people who create the drawings not being responsible for keeping an up-to-date source of information. Poorly controlled information doesn’t just cause frustration — it wastes time and burns money. Builders lose hours checking and re-checking details. Consultants end up frustrated. Clients wonder why a simple project becomes a saga.

At MAKE, our building company, we lived this reality. We were also conscious that construction has one of the highest proportions of neurodiverse workers of any industry, yet almost no design information or software is created with them in mind. Clear, uncluttered information and interfaces aren’t just nice to have. They’re essential.

So when we set out to build Capsa, we started with design. We stripped away the noise and created an interface that anyone could pick up and use, without manuals or onboarding.

It helped that MAKE had always taken a different approach to technology. I’d worked for a national contractor where IT was treated as an afterthought. At MAKE, we flipped that on its head, giving the team the IT tools they needed and the licence to try new things. That culture of experimentation is what led us to Capsa.

We could have kept it in-house, guarded it as a competitive advantage. But that would have missed the point. We wanted to help shift the wider industry. The bulk of construction is made up of smaller jobs and smaller teams. They’re the ones with the least support. Clients assume their teams have everything under control, but too often the basics — document control, contract management, version tracking — are missing.

We didn’t build Capsa because we wanted to be a software company. We built it because we were tired of losing time and money to problems that shouldn’t exist. If the industry won’t change, then we will. And if we can make construction projects just a little less messy, for builders and architects alike, then maybe we’ve done something worthwhile.

Mike Teeling – Capsa Founder