Dee Davis (00:00)
Good morning and welcome to Management Under Construction podcast. I'm Dee Davis.
Brady Wyant (00:05)
And I'm Brad Wyant and this morning we're going to talk about schedule delays and we're going to get into what is really responsible for schedule delays. Anyone who's been doing this business for any length of time knows that almost every project experiences schedule delays. There's rarely a single reason on a project for a delay, but according to a study done by touch plan,
They've identified the top five reasons for schedule delays according to data they've gathered presumably from their users. We've discussed the number four reason design changes in previous episodes. We have gone deep into how not having a design that's ready to be built can really hurt you when it comes to construction. But today we're going to talk about number one. Before we get into that, do you what
has been the longest scheduled delay you've ever seen, and what was the root cause of it?
Dee Davis (00:56)
I've had two projects that had very long schedule delays, about 18 months. One of them was because of a job site fatality. And we've talked about that in previous episodes where we've talked about safety. if you have a big episode like that on a project, it changes the entire tone of the project. So that was the...
main cause, I would not say it was the only cause, but it was the main cause on that particular job. The second job that I had that had an 18 month delay was for a number of reasons that we're going to talk about. Because like you said, there's almost never one reason. It was inexperienced contractors.
Equipment that was taking longer than planned. an inappropriate schedule to begin with an incomplete design. Rush design, you know there was a lot of contributing factors.
Brady Wyant (01:47)
Wow, yeah, that's classic. Like I said earlier, it's never just one thing. It's always, well, this thing, but then this thing and this really just it's a snowball effect. There's always a chain of causes that lead to the big problem. The longest one I have to talk about is either indefinite based on it never getting built or one month because things ended up taking longer than we thought they would. And there was
added scope that we had to show we deserved more time for, which wasn't really interesting, but the the adage I want to bring up here that has kept me going emotionally, which is a funny thing to say is this is business. It's not, but it's it's emotional to it can be was a great superintendent who was kind enough to mentor me and to bring me up in the industry said, look, Brad,
I've never been on a job where the project didn't get built except for one where the company went bust and nothing you can do about that. They just stopped paying the bills and we left and that was all that there was to it. The project always gets built was a mentality that I had to carry forward to be like, all right, well, this is going to be fine eventually, but I need to make it fine too. So for those of you who are maybe
despairing coming back to work on a Monday morning because my god, it's all gonna be Horrible. Nothing's going right. It's gonna be delayed the world's gonna end the project will always get built That was my big takeaway from a mentor of mine's Advice that even though it seems like it's in the world right now Once the project is built the way that it exists for the next 25 50 years
Is more important than the day that you might have lost making it as good as it could be. Back to touch plan back to the study they did what is causing schedule delays according to the software company that puts out touch plan the number one reason for variance delayed activities is handoffs by far. Number one is a hundred and sixty thousand handoffs number two is staffing and crew and manpower sixty five thousand so a factor of.
almost one third as many as the number one. So it falls off precipitously. And what do they mean by handoffs? So I'm going to quote their study to explain what they're talking about. Poorly executed handoffs between disciplines are the leading cause of severely impacting the master schedule in commercial construction projects. For GCs, this means extended deadlines, increased costs, and disrupted timelines.
One of the cited variances that went into handoff variances was predecessor not ready, which is a good example of waiting on a trade ahead to finish their work. This screams handoff. It's the transition point where one trade partner completes their work and another begins. When these transitions aren't managed well, it leads to delays. Along with delays, when handoffs are not executed properly or not planned well, they often lead to work congestion and rework, which hampers overall productivity.
So what he's talking about there is if you get a bunch of trades in the same room, it's likely that one group is going to damage the other's work. So there's going to have to be repairs. Miss handoffs equal re-planning and re-planning creates more time spent in planning meetings. You have to work through challenges that are created as a result of missed handoffs. So basically they're saying any time that the predecessor activity was not ready, that's a handoff bucket.
item for them and that means OK that a chain of events where something went wrong to cause all of them to be delayed all fit into this bucket. So I would love to have the opportunity to talk to anybody from touch plan who put this data together to see if there were a way to pull out. Instances where one delay caused the same delay in a chain of events because that doesn't really make sense for the sake of what they're trying to do here in terms of data, but the point of.
handoffs between disciplines not being handled well is still a valid. well trod path of problems on a job site where we didn't estimate the duration properly where we didn't do a good job handing a room off from one trade to another all of these kinds of handoff issues can still provide us with a lot to talk about today so. way of saying schedule activity was not completed on time.
is big bucket but what causes a bad or late handoff. Well, one of the root causes that we're all familiar with is a wrong duration by the scheduler. The scheduler might have overestimated the efficiency with which some task might be completed. They might have underestimated the complexity of the work involved or they might have made some other basic estimating error where they thought the room was eight feet tall but it's really 12 feet tall and there's a lot more work of framing a 12 foot wall.
there is an eight foot wall. So Dee have you ever seen any big estimating errors that were just done in a back office by somebody trying to put together numbers on a big, big job and then the subcontract comes along and says, what are you talking about? There's no way we can do it in that time.
Dee Davis (06:52)
This happens a lot, a lot, a lot on jobs because what happens is as a GC, you are asked to put together a schedule before you even have subs on board. So you are looking at the plans, you're looking at everything and you're just trying to estimate how long you think it's gonna take for all these things to do without having the input of the people that actually are doing the work. And you have to...
generate these. I just asked a GC to do this a few weeks ago. They were giving us a final estimate on an IFP set and I have to have a schedule with it. Well, they have been working with subs on estimates, but they haven't selected a sub yet. They can get some input or they can use their own expertise, but is it going to be exactly what you're going to end up with in the final schedule? Probably not. There may be complexities that you don't
see at a high level at a GC level. Maybe you didn't have enough time to put it together or the person that was estimating those times doesn't have the right experience to estimate that. It happens all the time. And I've also heard and seen this happen even as an installing contractor. I've heard the field complain about project managers or project engineers telling the client, we can finish that in five days.
And then the field's like, hey, I can't do that in five days. I need eight days, We need to make sure that when we are putting together these time estimates that we have the right people doing it. I know that you use the term, you know, the schedulers putting in the wrong duration. Sometimes the scheduler's not necessarily the person that's doing the data input.
They're getting that information from a lot of other people. And we got to make sure those people are the right people to give that information. Sometimes it is somebody with just inappropriate experience in a back office somewhere.
Brady Wyant (08:43)
let's talk about the economics of situation often like you said you're going to bid before you have subcontractor expert input and economics of the low bid environment are such that if you overestimate if you're conservative you won't win the work and a general contracting firm that. Is cautious will more likely than not when less work than one that is aggressive. So.
over promising and under delivering ends up being a business model that by the economic incentives of the low bid award system comes to the forefront. Now, the best general contractors have great relationships with big trade partners like mechanical, electrical, framing, subcontractors whose work involves the greatest risk and the longest durations and they get snap.
estimates of time during the pre-bid phase, but regardless what happens for every general contractor is they submit a bid schedule, they sign a contract on it if it becomes the contract schedule, and then they force subcontractors to sign on to that contract schedule. And much like with the general contractor, people signing that contract are people that sit in offices all day.
They're also bidding in a low bid award system. So by the time this information gets to the people that actually do the work for a living, it's been filtered through two if not more, misaligned incentive opportunities. And that's what's going to cause a lot of these scheduling misalignments.
How do we solve that? How do we get reality into these things? We're going to have to find some computer solutions. We're going to have to find ways to take the expertise and the data that the people who work in the field bring and make it so that they can still do the job that makes them profitable while taking their experience and putting into a better database than what we have now. Because as anybody knows, the quote unquote book on
Any given set of work is so drastically impacted by the difference between it being eight feet off the ground and 12 feet off the ground difference between hanging every five feet and every 15 feet the difference between having those pocket ceilings where it's every two feet there's a little rib and a big wide open concrete. Flat area i mean there's so many minor one off things that change the efficiency of installation that.
A person who does it for a living could tell you in a minute, oh, well, that's going to take me twice as long, but somebody who doesn't would not catch. So. I we've beaten that dead horse on wrong durations by schedulers and how important good quality data is, let's talk about another aspect of this issue. Another cause that makes schedule activities not get completed on time. Inefficiency. One of the big things that we all hate to see, but.
It happens in our world all the time. If we don't prepare to do work efficiently, then we're not going to do efficiently. If we don't plan well, if we're rushing get started because the job that that foreman was on before us and some of those zip code, he came off of it in a bad way and had to spend a couple of extra days there. And he sent his lead guy out and his lead guys never set up a job before. If we're not prepared, we're going to be slow. We could also.
Just work slow because we're tired. our crews are beat up from the last job. Work happens slowly for all kinds of reasons. Insufficient manpower. This is one of the biggest issues that touch plan cited and it's a issue plaguing our industry.
the lack of trained hands to do this work continues to be a problem. We've talked about that before on the podcast. Rework can cause huge inefficiency problems. If you get somebody out there that doesn't know what they're doing, or if you get somebody out there who's damaging the other trades work and won't be held accountable for it, all of these cause us to be inefficient on the job site.
You and I both hate inefficiency, Dee Give us a good example of a time where something going on inefficiently just really ground your gears. was just like, ugh, I can't believe we're doing it this way.
Dee Davis (12:42)
I have so many examples, but the story that comes to mind is a project that we were both on that we ran crews long days like six, seven days a week for months and months and months.
there is the inefficiency curve that you get with running extended hours, and extended days per week. You start losing the effectiveness of added man hours very, very quickly. And your crews start getting very tired and cranky and inefficient.
It is unbelievable how quickly that happens. The manpower curves and the studies that have been done on that show that within about four weeks, the payback that you get for overtime starts reducing dramatically. And when you do it for a really long period of time, like months over months you start having the opposite effect.
where you're actually going backwards because people are tired. And as somebody who has worked out in the field long hours and long jobs like that, you get to a point where you don't care about the overtime pay anymore. You just want to go home and be with your family. You want to rest, you want to sleep. You don't even know what day it is anymore. You're just in a haze.
from a safety standpoint, it's a terrible place to be, it's massively inefficient for your project. And I've encountered more and more jobs as the years go by where it's hard to get people to understand that you're not going to finish faster with that kind of inefficiency.
It's just not, good business. Somebody's going to get hurt and you're going to spend far more money on your job. You're not only paying a premium for most of this time, but you're actually getting less productivity out of it.
Brady Wyant (14:36)
And that's the reality that nobody at the top on the client side never ever wants to hear. But if I just spend more money, I should get more value, right? I just want to spend more money to make it happen faster. That's overtime. Let's Explain that to somebody who has to tell somebody above them what they want to hear that we're doing everything we can to make it happen faster is.
bad answer. It's just a hard situation to be in. But I totally understand what you're saying. I think that anybody listening to this podcast gets what you're talking about. And as we're to get to later on, the solution is not to work the bad thing harder. It's not to prevent what's happening from happening. It's to curtail any further losses.
and to keep the project running as efficiently as it can, not to throw bad money after good, which is what overtime ends up being after a while.
Let's talk about communication, something that we have a lot more control of it.
When we are bringing a new trade onto the job sites and when we're handing off one area of work from one discipline to another, great communication can make or break that transition. But we are often so focused on our own things like the master schedule, our procurement for the entire job site that we fail to think of how what we do or don't do can change or impact others. The best example I can give of this is
the general contractor staff gets tunnel vision about the broad big picture and they only see each individual subcontractors work as some small part of that that requires its adequate amount of attention but for that subcontractor their whole job lives and dies with their part of it and you may have told them with as much detail as you thought they needed to hear
About some part of what they need to know but really listening is that the way they communicate how they plan. They may not think of the project in the way that you do you think of it as one small piece of a greater puzzle for them. Their entire puzzle is one piece so. Don't just tell them what you think they need to hear because it makes sense to you. Tell them in a way.
that makes sense for somebody whose whole life is within that one puzzle piece. Great example, don't make people who work for a living read if you can avoid it,
It sounds derogatory, but it's not. If you can visualize information that would otherwise take a paragraph to explain in text so that it can be captured in three seconds of looking at that picture, that is value you are adding to that subcontractor. That is them understanding what you want them to understand that much faster.
Dee Davis (17:17)
That's why we doodle on whiteboards in this industry, right? You start talking about something and somebody grabs a pen and starts drawing because we're visual communicators. We have to think in 3D. You know, how does this go together? How does this interact? What does that mean for your piece and my piece to come together?
Brady Wyant (17:36)
Very well put, Dee, very well put. We did not get into construction because we wanted to be writers. visualize information, simplify, and then simplify again. Learn how the people that you're working with, the trade foreman, the schedulers, the procurement people at each of your subcontractors work, and then give them data that plugs into their system more easily.
A example of this if I have a spreadsheet that has a ream of data about some procurement item, the schedule activity ID number, the predecessor activity, the. Code in my software for that activity, the. Submittal number and all this other stuff that is. Important to me to know because it fits into my system,
All the data that that person I'm trying to get them to order the material for all they need to know is the make and model. Don't send them an entire line from your spreadsheet. Just send them make model. hey, this is the job we're talking about. Get it out here by this day. I need it. It's going to be I'm going to be ready for you. Get me this thing. So many times we see,
Data entry mode. want to take my line of my spreadsheet, put it in the thing and move on. I don't want to think too hard, but the value that you add by making it easier for that person to do what you ask them to do is that they're more likely to do what you're asking them to do. there's a great comic where it's like what part of a bunch of like gobbledygook don't you understand makes perfect sense to you, but it may not make perfect sense to somebody else.
Dee Davis (19:00)
Yeah, another thing I think I would add to this piece of the conversation is the unclear, imprecise or failure of communication happens between trades a lot out in the field. So there's the, the GC kind of run around telling people what needs to happen, but trades have all this inner communication as well. Some of it's great. And I think happens without a lot of people even realizing it happens.
especially when you have contractors that work well together out in the field. But we get tunnel vision. As you're saying, when your piece of the puzzle is just one piece, we fail to think about how, if I'm the mechanical contractor, how what I'm doing or what I'm not doing or what I'm changing might impact electrical, framing, drywall.
Fire stopping, know, some other trade. We're going along doing things in a way that is best and easiest for us in the individual trade. We have to pause and think about the interactions of everyone else, especially if we decide to change something in any way, we're out there working on something, we realize, you know what?
I need another day and a half on this before I'm gonna be finished. The sooner you can tell the trade behind you that's gonna follow you, that that's gonna happen, it gives them more time to rearrange their plan, to meet your plan. Or maybe you guys can talk and work out something that will allow them to start on time without impacting what you're doing.
the kind of communication that we really, really need to work on out in the field to make sure that with these handoffs happen better.
Brady Wyant (20:44)
Which brings me perfectly to my next point about communication.
As gross as this is, people don't listen to people they don't like. They don't want to hear what you have to say if they don't get along with you. So building relationships based on trust and personability, as weird as that is, is an effective management technique. It's important that the people who you need to listen to you listen effectively if they don't want to hear what you have to say, it's going to be much harder to get your work done.
It's gross but it pays to be popular and fun to work around. A good example this, we had an electrical subcontractor on the job that I worked before Dee and I came together where they were really happy to have won the job and they didn't think they were going to win but it was their fun job. It was like, this is a prestige project for us. This is a big deal. We're getting in with this client. This is great. using that to our advantage with this subcontractor, the fact that they were in
courage to be on site. The fact that they wanted to be there and making it even more fun for them to be around us and to have this new opportunity to develop this relationship with them to win potential work in the future to learn from each other's expertises on each of our disciplines made it so that the job was about more than just have you ordered the thing? this is such a cool thing.
we'll have a party when it gets on site and toast with a few sodas and burgers or something. Let's get into it. The attitude that you bring to the work you do. Making it a fun thing to do, making it so that the work isn't. Frustrating isn't unnecessarily dull.
Dee Davis (22:17)
I have to interject my little saying. I know you've heard me say this on jobs before. If you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong. And what I mean by that is it doesn't have to suck. Right. I mean, sometimes it's going to suck. OK. And it's just going to.
Cause things are not going to go right and there's going to be challenges and you're going to have days where you just go home and pour whiskey over your ice cream. It's going to happen, but you have to come to work every day and say, I'm going to do the very best that I can today. Maybe it's not going to be the level that you want it to be really, but you're going to come to work every day and do the very best that you can.
and try to have a little fun with it. Try to develop some relationships. And like you said, let's celebrate. How about that? Let's celebrate when we get our last big piece of equipment delivered to site. Yay. Let's go do something. Let's go have a happy hour. Let's have a little barbecue or something when we meet a milestone. Pause to celebrate.
All the little victories that we have, all the time on jobs, we're so busy focused on what the next issue is and what the next challenge is. We forget to have fun.
Brady Wyant (23:30)
And if we're not having fun, if we're not building relationships, we're going to continue to be miserable. have a coworker right now who says, Brad, we can't both be Eeyore today. I love that saying because it's like if both of us are miserable, we're going to make each other more miserable. If at least one of us is happy to be here, then maybe we won't both be miserable in this work session we're doing. So.
Dee Davis (23:53)
Everybody needs a Christopher Robin. Right.
Brady Wyant (23:56)
build relationships based on trust and personality, make the job that your subcontractor has come on to work with you on their fun job for the day, their thing they look forward to. If you can be the person who's call they want to answer, that is in everyone's interest. It's in their interest because they will get more done with you and it's in your interest because they'll get more done for you.
let's talk about follow through. This is a big one in construction, I think. Being somebody who does what they say they will every time.
It is invaluable. It's hard to put into words the difference between somebody who everyone knows overestimates over promises. Even if they only did it once, whereas somebody who just cranks out exactly what they said they would when they said they would, even if they're not promising the moon, even if they're not delivering stellar results, it's like, yeah, but we know they know what they're doing. There are young people.
me included in construction and the industry who wants to try to squeeze five days worth of work into four days to make something work, to be the hero, to pull in the schedule. saying that you can do it in four days when it really is going to take you five because you want it to be true does not achieve the outcome for anybody. In fact, it makes you look like a jerk and it makes you untrustworthy. Do you ever had an instance where
There somebody on your team or somebody on somebody else's team that you notice was doing that was like, OK, I know that because there's been this delay ahead of me. The answer everybody wants me to give is that I can do it in less time than I said I would, and so I'm going to say that I'm going to be the hero in this moment. I'm going to save the day, but then they end up not be able to do that. Have you seen that before?
Dee Davis (25:35)
absolutely. I had a GC superintendent on a job one time. I was the owner's rep. They were my general contractor. Nice guy. Really nice guy. I liked him. But he was completely unreliable. Every single time I'd say, when are you going to be able to complete this activity?
because we're already behind schedule, where are we going to be with this? Oh, Dee, I'll have that done for you by Friday. He would know better than I would. He's in charge of the work. Come to the end of the day Friday, it's nowhere near done. And I'd go back to him and he would say, oh, I'm so sorry. I tried, but this happened and that happened.
And this was a continual thing. This was every single time. And I finally sat him down and I said, listen, here's what I need from you. I don't need you to tell me what you think I want to hear. I need you to tell me the real thing, the real story, the real date. It doesn't matter what it is anymore. I just need to know when it's actually going to be done.
I'm not trying to beat you up. And it got to the point where I had to go to his supervisor because even after a couple of talks like this, kept happening. And I had to go to his supervisor and I said, listen, I don't know what to do anymore because I can't trust him. And if I can't trust my superintendent, what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to go talk
to my client and tell them what's going on and when are we going to be done when I can't get a straight answer. And this person is a nice person, they're a good person. I think it's just a coachable issue. They need to be coached and taught how to properly estimate or maybe not be such a pleaser, I don't know.
Brady Wyant (27:20)
It's that people pleasing nature that dreamer mentality that. People run on. It's hard to police somebody's personality to a certain extent, you don't want them to change the core of who they are if what they come to work for to do every day is to try to go above and beyond and achieve things that they don't they didn't think were achievable. You don't want to you know pour water on their fire but.
Like you're saying, you can't have somebody who's unreliable giving you information that is wrong time and time again. And we all know the people who have done this in this industry and they end up being people who don't advance the people who can take that desire to squeeze five days into four and put it aside and promise what they know they can commit to and then still try to find solutions and try to surprise people later.
the people with that personality type at least end up being successful. can't be somebody who gives people the answer they want to hear and then doesn't make that happen. It's not a workable solution. It's not reality. It's the people and it's the gruff superintendents of the world who end up being the general superintendents because they're like, my problem that you were late. I'm doing it my way. We all know that that guy and that guy.
is higher on the totem pole than the young and plucky. We can totally do it in four days, guys. That's how that works. That's the reason that is that way. more often than not, the gruff guy who's up here, not my problem, I'm doing the time I said it would take me. He used to be this guy.
Dee Davis (28:46)
Well, it's the Scotty mentality, right? So really, if you want to be the hero, you say it's going to take five when it's only going to take four, right? It's the Star Trek Scotty mentality. when Captain Kirk said, I need it in, two days, Scotty would say, sorry, Captain, I can only do it in four days.
and he would deliver it in three. now you're the hero because not only did you do what you say, you beat the deadline. You're not going to be able to do that every time, people either come at it because they either want to be a people pleaser. They want to tell you what they think you want to hear. They want to sound like a hero right now, even though they're going to look not like a hero later because they don't hit the deadline or
They are fearing conflict, which we've talked about before. I don't want conflict now. So I'm going to tell you what I think you want to hear. you'll go away. And of course there will be conflict later because when you don't meet the deadline, now they're mad because they feel like you lied to them. Now there's really going to be conflict, especially if it's happening over and over.
You have to examine your own motivations for why you may be overly optimistic or underestimating on a regular basis. It's something to examine. What are your motivations? it a conflict avoidance? Is it a hero complex? Is it that you're just a cheerleader and, you know, we can do it. I find it happening a lot with foremen, by the way.
The foremen in my experience are terrible estimators because not only are they optimists, but they are estimating how long they think it will take them to do it. Not how long it'll take their crew that doesn't have 20 or 30 years of experience to do it. If I were doing the work, it would only take me three days. Yeah, but your crew is doing the work, which consists of
a couple of second year apprentices and some other people and you got this whole thing it might really be a five day job.
Brady Wyant (30:48)
And people only get promoted to their highest level of incompetence. A great lead plumber journeyman gets promoted to foreman, junior foreman. And then if they can't figure that out, they stay a junior foreman their entire career because they keep thinking that five of them could do this work faster than those five guys. Maybe it's almost like, okay, you have to tell that person.
Yeah, you five years ago couldn't do it that fast. You at your best. That's not those people. You got to put that out of your mind. They will be that good one day and they'll take your job. And if they can do the job you're doing better than you, they'll go above you. But you need to focus on the things you have, the assets, the people that you do have, not on what might be. I have seen this all time. We're formative kind of being
We should have gotten that done faster because they're thinking I could have done it faster, but that's not the job. The job is not how quickly could you have done it. The job is how quickly will this crew be able to do it?
Dee Davis (31:44)
Not how fast you wish you could do it.
Brady Wyant (31:46)
Right, right. a journeyman. who is at his best as fast as he's ever going to be been doing it for 15 years, crushing it. It's not a shame that he's faster than the apprentice. That's that's not how that works. You got to got to contextualize that for your people.
so the next thing I want to talk about is retaliation. This is the last big contributor to bad handoffs in my opinion. If you've got a room where the drywall framework was working and they leave it a mess, dust everywhere, electrical cords in disarray, lights turned odd directions that no one could see anything, and the electrician comes in to do their work.
They are not likely to leave that room better than they were left it by the drywall framer because crap flows downhill. Nobody wants to be the hero this isn't charity. We're not going to out of the goodness of our hearts just decide to make it that much better for the next person.
Finding a way to intervene as the general contractor in those moments and say hey I know that this was tough I know the last person didn't leave you this room the way that you would have liked it but I'm gonna give you a labor for four hours and you straighten this up because we got to turn the ship around we got to make it so that our handoffs go smoother we've got to. Keep people's attitudes more positive than being left crap and the room cleanliness example is just one but we've all seen examples where.
somebody was handed a pile of steaming caca that they didn't that didn't need to be so steaming and such a big pile. So when you're in the process of handing off a job, think about how bad begets worse. Stress begets more stress. It takes energy to de-stress a job site. It takes hand holding. It takes time, but it's the kind of thing. It's the kind of little change, that
turns job around if you get handed off a really clean room where everything is swept up and everything is neat and you can just come in and start your work. You're like. Oh my God, this is great. This is the way it always should be. I'm going to make it that way for the next person because it was that way for me unless somebody peed in your superintendents coffee that day and then there's just no helping that. Do you have you ever had an instance of trying to?
Intervene in those small instances, those small handoff moments to try to de-stress a job site.
Dee Davis (34:06)
I used to tell my crew, you need to go clean your room. I mean, there is nothing like a clean job site to bring everybody's stress level down. There's just something about it. we get messy, we're busy. I do it at home too. Like you can tell when I'm busy, cause my house is a mess.
Same thing at work in my office. ⁓ I'm glad you guys can't see what's going on behind me. I mean, my office is always a mess because I'm just I'm focusing on the work and I'm not focusing on those other things.
Cleaning up your lay down area, cleaning up your containers, cleaning up the rooms that you're working in, getting rid of the trash, just organizing. There's something about it as human beings it organizes our brains and de stresses our brains. When you clean things out, clean things up, make it more organized. So I've absolutely done that on jobs where I said, okay, everybody time to clean your room. And they knew that meant.
I just walk the job. It's a mess. Not only is it a safety issue, but we need to take the time. Everybody take a half a day and just clean your room. And I've been on jobs that have cleanup Fridays where they have dedicated people they'll take, one or two from each crew or however they've got it laid out, or they have separate people.
That on Fridays, that's what they do. They clean the job. They put things away. They have a 15 minute window at the end of the day. You roll up your cords. Everything's nice so that when you come in the next morning, everything's beautiful. We've definitely done that. Also, sitting down and talking to people, making the time. As a project manager, I would have
private sit downs with not just my labor leads, but everybody on the job site, especially if things were starting to get intense. I know this seems like the worst time to take time away to just sit and have a conversation, but it's actually the best time to do it. how's it going? How's life? How's the wife and kids?
Are you guys doing a vacation this year? Just talk to them on a human level and people will open up and they'll start telling you what's going on. Not only does it bring everybody down to we're both human beings just sitting and having a conversation, communicating. But when there's a problem out there, now those people can come and talk to you. They're going to talk to you there in that moment.
or they're going to approach you later. They see you walking through the job. Hey, you know what? Those porta pots are ridiculous. There's never any toilet paper in them. They're too dirty. Can you do something about that? You bet I can. We're going to take care of that. as a leader. You need to be approachable. It doesn't matter what your position is. If you're a project engineer, you're a project manager, you're a project executive. If you're not approachable,
Your people's stress level will be higher, 100%.
Brady Wyant (36:54)
Clean job site. One that's easier to work in one that doesn't make the people in it feel anxious is a productive job site. A job site where people. Aren't frustrated the toilets are gross is an efficient job site. It's a job site where people are going to treat each other with more kindness. Nobody likes to go to the bathroom in a. Dirty, nasty, smelly place nobody. we'll tolerate it because we're all being paid to be here, but.
doesn't mean we're going to work as hard as we could, as well as we could.
So even though something like Clean Up Fridays might sound to someone like an unnecessary expense, like a bad use of money, like spending money on better, on more frequent cleanings for bathrooms, boy, if we can get away with spending less money, let's get away with spending less money. That's not what the money's about. It's about trying to create an environment where people are going to do their best work.
Like I've tried to talk about time and time again on this podcast, that is a harder business argument to make that spending more money on toilet paper is going to create productivity because there's no data in the book for that. Like we can say with certainty, if you have three dry drywalls on your crew versus four, you're get this much done. You're going to get that much done. But there's no book value for having the toilets clean versus the toilets dirty. There should be. I should I should find them.
Dee Davis (38:08)
The book value is making the executive who won't cough up the money go use the port-a-pot.
Brady Wyant (38:14)
There
Dee Davis (38:14)
100
% no, I mean it as a project manager. I always use the porta pots that my crews are using on site, whether I'm an owners rep or running a crew or whatever. I use the same porta pots that my crew uses because I want to know what they're like. It sounds like a stupid thing, but it is absolutely. Showing respect.
for your people, if you're like, hey, that's disgusting. I would never use a porta pot. Well, what are you doing on a job site? Would be my first question. Is it everyone's preference? Of course not. Would I rather use a regular plumbed in? Of course I would. But I have gone, even when I have the option of using separate bathrooms for the office people, I'll still go in the porta pots at least some of the time. And it's so funny because when I've done that,
The crew watches me go in and they're like, why is she doing that? Well, I'm doing that because I want to see what you're experiencing. Because if it's not good enough for me, why would I think it's good enough for you? That's not acceptable.
Brady Wyant (39:14)
And that's how you get the division between field and office that poisons a job site where, they think they're better than us. We don't have to listen to what they say. this is true of American politics. is true of any human interaction. Whenever somebody gets the whiff that somebody thinks they're better than them, it's like the biggest turnoff in the world. That is the quickest way you can poison a relationship with somebody is if you make them think that you're better than them. So to wrap that
concept up of retaliation, not willing bad become worse on a job site. I want to talk about a schedule delay that I experienced on a project early in my career. It was a job that we knew was going to be for a federal client effectively, it was going to last a long time. It was not a five year office refit. It was something that was going to be built and was going to have to work for a very long time. And a schedule delay came up.
It just happened and it was a little bit unforeseeable. was a little bit bad planning, but it was just a big delay and. There was nothing we could do about it. There was no solving it. There was no paying the expedite. There was no manpower shuffling that we're going to able to do. So the question for me was so what? Everyone hates us now. This is going to be slow. We're not going to meet the schedule deadline. We said we would.
We can present all the information in the world we want to to explain that and we can make the cost argument that this should not be ours to bear, but everyone's upset. But this job, the thing we're building is going to be here for the next 25 years. Everyone's mad now, but when it's built and when it's working and when it looks the way they wanted it to and when it serves the purpose that it was meant to serve. They're going to forget to a certain extent about this delay.
So let's buckle down and make this really, good. Make this as quality as put together as well as we can and think about how much happier they're going to be that it was right as opposed to that we were able to get done a day sooner because now this is crooked and that's a little bit janky. Killing quality to save schedule is.
the worst way to wound a relationship. It's the same, be a hero now only to pay a penalty later thing, except the hero now is temporary and the villain problem later, that lasts for as long as that owner is in possession of that piece of real estate of that. you built, don't make a trade off now.
to save one day out of a 10 day schedule delay only to have the quality suffer because the quality is going to be what they remember you by. It's going to be the thing that gets you the next job. If you were reasonable to deal with about the schedule delay and you still produce great quality, is going to be, schedule delays happen. Everybody knows they happen during construction. If you can produce good quality despite schedule delays, you're God. If you can just produce great quality,
Even though you were impacted by a schedule and it came slower, you're as good or better than most people in the industry. That's my two cents.
Dee Davis (42:13)
Yeah, and there's another way to look at that unavoidable one month schedule delay. What can you do with that month? Okay, here we are. We've looked at it every which way. We can't avoid it. Like you said, you can't buy your way out of it. You can't do any of those things. Here it is. It's gonna be one month late. What can we do in that one month to make this project better?
You can't fix the schedule. What else can we do here to make this a better deliverable and go out like you're saying on as high of a note as you possibly can? Because how you leave a project is how people remember you every single time. Even if you're late, even if you're over budget, you have all these things where like you're saying, ⁓ the sky is falling. This is all terrible. Well,
If you man down too soon, you don't come back and finish things. You have a really long punch list. I just had this happen on a job that we just wrapped up a couple of months ago
I can't explain why the GC made the choices that they made. it was in revised budget. It was late, very late. And the GC started sending people home months too early. They cut their staff in half way sooner than they should have. So now they've got
scope changing hands where they had maybe six project engineers, well now they have three. So the three that left had to pass their work to the other three who have no idea what's going on with those scopes. All of a sudden now we can't get drywallers to come and fix damage work. have the punch list with thousands and thousands and thousands of items.
There was no reason in the world for this to happen. If they would have kept the manpower higher, longer, they could have got out of there sooner. Instead of dragging it out and really looking very, very bad in the owner's eyes at the end.
Brady Wyant (44:10)
That's what I've seen before too. There was a subcontractor who realized that they were not going to make money on a particular project I was on. And they decided to staff it with their least experienced foreman with half as many people as they should have had and let it be as bad as it could possibly be. It's like, know what? It's bad. Just let it go. We got to get the good guys to the good projects. We'll let this suck. But it could always be worse.
What could possibly go wrong? Well, ask anybody who's been in this business, what could possibly go wrong? And you're going to get a novel. So don't get in the attitude of, well, because one thing has gone wrong, now it's fine to let other things go wrong. No, that's a terrible way to look at things because it could be a lot worse.
Dee Davis (44:53)
Yeah, and you could go from making no money on a job to losing your keester I've had one job in my entire career that lost money. I inherited the job from somebody else unfortunately I was handed just a complete booger of a job. It was estimated wrong.
It was bought out wrong. there was so many things that were wrong from the get-go. It was a losing battle. Of course, this project manager that started it, wasn't his fault necessarily either. Although I think he probably made some mistakes that contributed to it, but it was kind of a loser from the beginning. He was more than happy to give like, whoo, here you go. See you later.
And I sat down and I crunched the numbers and I looked at the scope and that was the first message. I went back to my boss and I said, do you realize this job is gonna lose money? And he said, no, no, no, that's not what the financial reports say. I said, well, I don't know what financial reports you've been given, but here's where this job's gonna land and it is going to be in the red. And my mission from that moment on was
to make it as least bad as possible. I was never gonna save it, ever. But the absolute wrong call would have been to do what you described, Brad, which is just, let's cut the crew, let's put less experienced, cheaper people on it, it's a loser now. Can you imagine how much worse of a loser it would have been had we not kept the people that we had on the job? I had a good crew.
We busted our tails that entire job to make it as good as we possibly could. It still lost money.
But it would have been far worse had we taken a different tack.
So you can't always fix everything, no matter how good you are. I still carry that with me I think there's a lot of people that have had more jobs than one in their career that did not have a good ending. But I did the very best I could. And that is all that anyone can ever ask of you.
I didn't have anybody patting me on the back and thanking me. Don't get me wrong. Nobody was throwing a party for me. My loser job.
Brady Wyant (46:55)
And we've all heard of these situations where somebody busts their butt to make a loser into a not as big of a loser and nobody pats them on the back. If you're somebody who's running a construction company on this podcast, if you're somebody who's a project executive, pat those people on the back. And for those of you who will one day be that project executive, be somebody who runs a construction company, look out to pat those people on the back because they're doing what would otherwise be if you don't thankless work.
It's thankless to make a bad job, not as bad as it could have been. It shouldn't be. Find a way to thank those people, find a way to reward them.
for putting forth great work despite a negative situation because it being negative, it being a loser makes it that much harder to make it less of a loser. Making a great job a winner, easy. Would that we all could be so lucky. Love it, would do it any day and twice on Sunday. the people who can make a bad job less of a loser are the people that can make a great job as much of a winner as it could possibly be made. So keep them around.
keep them motivated, keep them rewarded.
Dee Davis (48:00)
if this is you, if you're the project manager, project engineer, superintendent, whatever that is in this situation right now listening to this podcast, even if nobody's patting you on the back, you take care of your crew. You take care of the people that are out there making it happen. All I could do for my guys was at the end of the job, I took them all to a nice dinner and paid for it out of my pocket. couldn't job cost it because of course I had no money.
But that was all I could do for them. And I thanked them. So even though I didn't get them an nice pat on the back from my management, I tried to do what I thought should have been done and thank those guys for busting their tail for a year and a half to make that job as good as it could have been. And it was not a fun job, by the way. Like, my gosh, it was not a fun year and a half.
you get through it and you move on and you go to the next job and it's just a different challenge.
Brady Wyant (48:55)
Absolutely it is. Shout out to Lauren Shoemaker who listens to this podcast and just got promoted to project manager at Saunders. Well, well deserved.
Dee Davis (49:03)
Congratulations, Lauren. I'm so happy for you.
Brady Wyant (49:06)
That's all for this episode, folks. Thanks for listening, and we will see you on the next one.
Dee Davis (49:11)
Thanks.
