by Scott Nyborg
Have you ever felt like every job your business runs is an island? This is normal. Construction project teams are naturally isolated from the rest of the business. They focus on one job, and only that job, for months or even years to complete. During that time, they spend most of their time hiding in a jobsite trailer—organically and physically separated from the rest of your project team.
Most importantly, the people on your project team are independent, action-oriented thinkers. They are focused on solving problems at work and have little time to worry about whether an impromptu workflow will work (or not) on other teams.
For all of these reasons, it’s no surprise that each team’s processes are starting to diverge. But this natural dynamic is a huge risk for your business.
If the process is different, The information is also different
Part of the workflow definition is about how you store and organize the Information. So if each team has a slightly different process, the information they retain will also be different.
If the information is held differently for each team, it is nearly impossible to aggregate and report this information. If you’ve ever asked a project accountant or administrator to put together a report and wondered why it took three days to complete – here’s why. The PA has been on the phone with every project team on the first day, asking for help with information that they don’t have access to or understand on their own. They spent the second day trying to put all this information in one report – and when it didn’t quite work, they spent the third day making a second round of calls to sort out all the inconsistencies, gaps and confusion in the report. data.
The reports you get from all these efforts are not very trustworthy either. There are too many opportunities for translation errors because data is a very manual journey from the project team to your desk. And because all project teams have more important things to do (such as actually executing the project), you can bet they don’t respond uniformly to reporting requests. Therefore, you can also rely on delayed and missing data in the report.
BOTTOM LINE: The lack of a standard construction management process on the project team means your view of the state of the business is murky. It’s not an inconvenience – it’s an existential threat. Because if you don’t have a good idea of where the business is, you don’t know where the problem is. You don’t know what kind of risk you face. And you don’t know where to point your resources to stop a crisis.
With excellence as standard
If you’re going through a standardized effort to build management processes into your business, these are probably as good as possible. What does this operational excellence look like?
One A good process should yield great results. It has to distill best practices. Your team can leverage a process like this to deliver superior results for owners and profitable results for your business.
A good The process should be repeatable.
If even one of your teams can’t easily fit into the workflow and produce consistently exceptional results, then you can’t The team is reasonably expected to accept and remain loyal. Construction professionals simply don’t insist on processes that don’t serve the project. Instead, they create a one-time process deviation to make it work, and your efforts at standardization will be wasted on arrival.
A good process is scalable. Your business is growing – and more importantly, when you implement consistent , you can expect a major turning point in that growth. Whether you’re running 10 jobs or 50 jobs, your construction management process should stick; the contract is $2M or $2B.
A good process should present reliable, up-to-date information. It should be able to capture information and be organized by your team in a way that is transparent to all levels of the organization . And it should cause that information to be updated whenever the actual state of the job changes, so you can be confident that your data is telling you the real story.
When great teams are aligned on such a strong process, it means that the entire organization is aware of the business state of all active projects very clear. This is important because it allows you to see where you are at risk – and take real action in a timely manner. It allows you to direct your resources to the challenges and opportunities that are likely to have the greatest impact. This makes your project team stronger and your business more successful.
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Have you ever felt like every job your business runs is an island? This is normal. Construction project teams are naturally isolated from the rest of the business. They focus on one job, and only that job, for months or even years to complete. During that time, they spend most of their time hiding in a jobsite trailer—organically and physically separated from the rest of your project team.
Most importantly, the people on your project team are independent, action-oriented thinkers. They are focused on solving problems at work and have little time to worry about whether an impromptu workflow will work (or not) on other teams.
For all of these reasons, it’s no surprise that each team’s processes are starting to diverge. But this natural dynamic is a huge risk for your business.
If the process is different, The information is also different
Part of the workflow definition is about how you store and organize the Information. So if each team has a slightly different process, the information they retain will also be different.
If the information is held differently for each team, it is nearly impossible to aggregate and report this information. If you’ve ever asked a project accountant or administrator to put together a report and wondered why it took three days to complete – here’s why. The PA has been on the phone with every project team on the first day, asking for help with information that they don’t have access to or understand on their own. They spent the second day trying to put all this information in one report – and when it didn’t quite work, they spent the third day making a second round of calls to sort out all the inconsistencies, gaps and confusion in the report. data.
The reports you get from all these efforts are not very trustworthy either. There are too many opportunities for translation errors because data is a very manual journey from the project team to your desk. And because all project teams have more important things to do (such as actually executing the project), you can bet they don’t respond uniformly to reporting requests. Therefore, you can also rely on delayed and missing data in the report.
BOTTOM LINE: The lack of a standard construction management process on the project team means your view of the state of the business is murky. It’s not an inconvenience – it’s an existential threat. Because if you don’t have a good idea of where the business is, you don’t know where the problem is. You don’t know what kind of risk you face. And you don’t know where to point your resources to stop a crisis.
With excellence as standard
If you’re going through a standardized effort to build management processes into your business, these are probably as good as possible. What does this operational excellence look like?
One A good process should yield great results. It has to distill best practices. Your team can leverage a process like this to deliver superior results for owners and profitable results for your business.
A good The process should be repeatable.
If even one of your teams can’t easily fit into the workflow and produce consistently exceptional results, then you can’t The team is reasonably expected to accept and remain loyal. Construction professionals simply don’t insist on processes that don’t serve the project. Instead, they create a one-time process deviation to make it work, and your efforts at standardization will be wasted on arrival.
A good process is scalable. Your business is growing – and more importantly, when you implement consistent , you can expect a major turning point in that growth. Whether you’re running 10 jobs or 50 jobs, your construction management process should stick; the contract is $2M or $2B.
A good process should present reliable, up-to-date information. It should be able to capture information and be organized by your team in a way that is transparent to all levels of the organization . And it should cause that information to be updated whenever the actual state of the job changes, so you can be confident that your data is telling you the real story.
When great teams are aligned on such a strong process, it means that the entire organization is aware of the business state of all active projects very clear. This is important because it allows you to see where you are at risk – and take real action in a timely manner. It allows you to direct your resources to the challenges and opportunities that are likely to have the greatest impact. This makes your project team stronger and your business more successful.
