Photo: Mats Kjesrud
Marius Sortland Myklebust has joined Hoylu AS as Chief Advisor of UX and Methodology after nearly nine years at Skanska Norway where he served first as a design manager, and later as Chief Advisor BIM & VDC in the BIM & VDC Department. Hoylu, a SaaS vendor based in Oslo, serves the construction industry via a feature-rich whiteboarding, planning, and task management solution used by numerous clients including Skanska, Veidekke, AFRY, Helse Bergen, AF Gruppen, Asplan Viak, COWI, and more.
“I had years of really amazing experience in Skanska. I had so much fun being part of some incredible projects, and I felt it was the right time to leverage that experience and bring it into Hoylu, and take that to the next level,” says Myklebust.
Uniting design, VDC, and UX
Myklebust’s career began as a telecommunciations engineer. After a decade in that field, he studied architecture in New Zealand and became a landscape architect. While studying, he held a job doing landscape design work with a small contractor, which he continued working for as an assistant project manager for about five years after completing his studies. He soon discovered a passion for design management, and started working for Skanska Norway in 2016 as a design manager tasked with many significant projects, including for government clients such as Statsbygg.
“Two and a half years into that journey, I heard about VDC, this sort of newfangled, interesting process that really caught my eye because I felt that I lacked a cohesive framework to work with in the design process. Something was missing. When I read about that theory, I was like, ‘This is it!’”
His interest in VDC connected him with Roar Fosse, Chief Advisor of Operational Excellence at Skanska, another early proponent of VDC and Lean practices. Myklebust was among the first batch of Skanska employees to be VDC-certified in 2018 through Skanska’s training program under Martin Fisher of Stanford’s University’s CIFE (Center for Integrated Facility Engineering). A year after certification, Myklebust joined Skanska’s central BIM and VDC department to lead their VDC efforts.
“I facilitated ICE sessions, I helped lots of projects with starting up, getting them up and running on correct ways of doing scheduling, the framework, applying VDC, how the meeting structure is designed, etc. And I quickly racked up experience working with many, many projects over the years. And then came COVID,” says Myklebust.
Myklebust made it through three days in lockdown before calling Hoylu for a license. “Three days after lockdown, I was on the phone with Truls Baklid [Hoylu’s CEO] asking, ‘Hey, can you give me some licenses? I have a project that’s starting tomorrow. I need them operating with a solution immediately!’” he recalls.
A strong collaboration
That was the beginning of a close collaboration between Myklebust and Hoylu’s Vice President of Product, Jakob Leitner. “I felt something was brewing that was interesting. They had a great starting point in their software. I thought, this company is going places, this can be good,” says Myklebust.
What stood out to Myklebust from the beginning was Hoylu’s attentiveness to his feedback. “Hoylu listened to me. They’re really taking my field advice and experience. Not many software companies do that to this extent. They’ll listen to their customers, the big ones send out some low-level devs if you’re lucky and they talk with you, but what you tell them or ask for is never applied,” Myklebust explains.
The collaboration continued for some years, and into Skanska’s year-long test of the majority of available scheduling software for the construction market. “Hoylu was one of the software tools that came up on top, especially for the design phase,” says Myklebust. As Myklebust became more involved in the IT side of Skanska’s operations through the project management of several internal development and integration projects, he reinforced his deep interest in UX. “I felt that this is something I really wanted to do, because it is such fun making great software and I really have passion for UX, especially reducing friction out in the field. It has been a driving force for me whenever I have worked with software suppliers, to convey how they can improve the end user experience of their tools. I have years of experience in the construction field from piloting and deploying software, so I know how little friction is needed for someone to strongly dislike something new and thus refuse to use it,” he says.
Alongside his growing involvement in the IT side of the industry, Myklebust started a podcast, “Kritisk Linje” (English: Critical Path), together with Roar Fosse. “The podcast is a passion project for both of us. It revolves around conversations with passionate industry colleagues who are also living and breathing methodology and scheduling principles. It is amazing to listen to skilled people talk about something they have deep knowledge about and share their experiences. This field of interest in Norway is rather small—a lot of the people know each other across different companies,” he says.
Meanwhile, Skanska’s VDC practice was delivering staggering results. “Some of the things Skanska has accomplished with proper VDC implementation are incredible. How well those projects are run, how thoughtful, well implemented and structured, and the quality of what is delivered to the customer is just amazing. Some projects even deliver three, four months ahead of time to a customer who’s not even ready to take on the building, because the efficiency gains and the collaborative skills of the people in the projects are so good,” Myklebust says.
Industry-wide gains
Success at one company in Norway soon spreads to others. Knowledge-sharing is common within Norway’s tight-knit construction industry, and transparency is valued. The free flow of knowledge has tangible business benefits as well.
“If all of us do projects roughly the same way, it is much easier for our consultants to move between the different companies. When we use the big consultancy houses, they all work for all of the major contractors in Norway. And the better they know the processes in each of these companies, the smoother the transition between them is, and the less friction you get in running the projects,” he explains. “So it is actually a net positive for all of us that we work roughly the same way, because our partners can work for all of these different companies and feel that this is familiar territory.”
Now, Myklebust’s focus is on his first pure technology role. “It is rare for someone to come out of the industry and into the technology space. I only know a few others,” he says. “The opportunity to start working in Hoylu full time doing UX work and methodology? I just grabbed that immediately.”
“Marius has already played a critical role in the development of Hoylu from the client side. We’re thrilled that he can now contribute directly to our further growth while keeping our focus on methodology and UX at the forefront,” says Truls Baklid, Hoylu’s CEO.
About Hoylu
The Hoylu platform offers you and your team the power of unified planning with an intuitive solution that combines feature-rich whiteboarding, planning, and task management. Plan, engage, and visualize your projects with best-in-class usability and integrations. Bring your best ideas together with your best data across disparate teams and solutions for unified, unlimited, unbeatable construction project management.