JR COMPANY’S TOP TEN THINGS
THAT CAN GO WRONG
ON A CONSTRUCTION PROJECT
By Michael DiMercurio
NUMBER 9: FAILURE TO CONTROL THE FIELD - PART 1
The project manager risks the project if he doesn’t control the field. And little things give his philosophy away.
A recent project was going poorly, and a duplicate project was to be constructed. The project manager position on the second job was given to a tougher, meaner, more visionary PM than the first. The new guy immediately took action to let the craft, the contractors and vendors know that this time, the field was going to be controlled. That there was a new sheriff in town. How?
MEET THE NEW BOSS, DIFFERENT FROM THE OLD BOSS: The new PM took over a filthy jobsite trailer filled with unorganized papers that used yellowed drawings for window shades, where the engineers there were using cheap card tables. The first thing – furniture. Gleaming new desks, high backed leather “command chairs,” a shining conference table, a full time laborer to start cleaning from one end of the trailer, and when he finished, he’d start on the other end. A receptionist who could dress professionally for the field, but in a resplendent, alluring way. Two new high volume copy machines. A reproduction machine big enough to make copies of drawings. A drawing review table. A data management clerk who put the drawings on sticks, and in the fifty new file cabinets, kept the specs and vendor documents and thousands of pounds of paper organized and accessible. A new wood deck that linked the now beautiful double-wide with a NEW double-wide trailer, used exclusively for meetings, with one open room with a wrap around set of tables. And that trailer was kept sparkling as well. Now when subcontractor superintendents showed up at the construction trailer, they felt like they’d walked into the palace of a dictator. For the duration of the job, the craftsmen, the union officials and formerly smart-alecky subcontractors called every member of the project team “sir.” Note – of course management had heart attacks over this budget line item going over by 500%, but understand this: WHEN SENDING A SIGNAL TO THE CRAFT, SEND IT LOUD AND CLEAR.
MATERIAL CONTROL: Management derisively called it the “Taj Mahal,” but the material control area was paved concrete, warehouses with computers, dedicated material control foremen, every-man-jack toting a radio at all times, and the warehouse was either guarded or padlocked at all times. Never once did a crew go idle for lack of a nut, a bolt or a 1” valve. People in construction project management think that project success is about the “crane path.” It isn’t. It’s about the material. For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. For lack of that 1” globe valve, an eight man crew lost productivity. The complete control of the material sent the signal to the craft that this was a well-run project, and that not a single man-minute was to be wasted.
GATE LOG: They said it couldn’t be done. No one in this heavily union area thought that the craft would agree to use swipe-in and swipe-out card readers. They had no choice. The site was fenced in as tight as a prison camp with guards at the gates with portable swipe machines to get every car occupant logged in or out. A later dispute about the manhours of one of the craft was easily resolved using the gate log. The project team wrote the reimbursable contracts to say that when timesheets were bounced against the gate log, the gate log won any discrepancy unless the contractor had an exception report filed within hours.
SAFETY: A dedicated safety engineer. Every contractor forced to assign a dedicated full-time safety superintendent. Job shutdowns for safety briefings when unsafe acts were discovered. It sent the right message to the craft.
SUPERINTENDENT’S MEETING: The zero eight hundred superintendent’s meeting was conducted in the dedicated double-wide meeting trailer. Contractors’ plans were reviewed and interferences resolved on the spot.
LOGISTICAL CONTROL: Contractor’s trailers, toilet facilities, craft parking and dumpsters were planned on the jobsite plot plan and rigidly enforced. Unlike the first project, no trailer ever had to be relocated to allow a crane to pass.
There were more elements to the project execution strategy, but the point is, THE PROJECT TEAM SENT A CLEAR MESSAGE TO THE CONTRACTORS AND THE CRAFT THAT THIS JOB WAS BEING RUN DIFFERENTLY. While some of the above tactics gave senior management conniption fits for spending additional money, sometimes you can’t afford NOT to spend the money.
In part 2 we will discuss the main ways to fail to control the field.
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Contact Us:
JR Company
3401 Gates Court
Morris Plains, NJ 07950
917-861-6600 Mobile
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