Sweat was turning Charlie’s T-shirt to salt, white lines marking perspiration flows down his back. A thick gray blanket of clouds kept the summer heat and humidity close to ground . . . and we were close to ground, actually below ground excavating an 8” gas pipe trench in 20ft of sand. Sean swung the X300 track hoe around and leaned out the door, “hey, troubles coming”. He pointed to a moving dark speck stumbling over the sand towards us, shrugging, Sean closed the cab door.
Short, broad, a bulldog of a man, Douglas the Irishman came storming over the dunes. Douglas was the owner’s construction manager, responsible for scheduling, among other things. But the funny thing was, he never seemed to have a schedule, at least not an accurate one.
Douglas walked the project every morning, after which he disappeared into his job trailer, emerging only if there was a crisis . . . Obviously, today, there was a crisis.
As he got within earshot we could here Douglas yelling to no one in particular, a kind of “it’s not my fault these owners are idiots” self talk that he wanted everyone to hear. Arriving at the tailgate of my pickup, which was my desk and office for the morning, Douglas told me the whole sorry story.
The owners had neglected to inform Douglas the entire 47 acre site would need a security fence, full video monitoring and 24/7 guards at every gate due to federal homeland security regulations on production plants of the type we were building, and this would need to be accomplished within a week or the upcoming Coast Guard inspection would need to be canceled, delaying start up for a month, and plant opening for six weeks. Bad news.
Douglas finished up with, “I’ll tell you one thing boys, these idiot owners are going to drive me to drink, no doubt about it, I’ll be nipping a bit of mee ole' whiskey stash this evening.”
Our crews worked double shifts, as is the case with most crisis intervention, and Douglas passed his Coast Guard inspection with flying colors. So all is well that ends well, right?
Not exactly. Douglas’ budget was busted, his critical path sequence damaged, his nerves were shot and his owners were not happy. So whose fault was it? Douglas, over time, had fallen victim to a malady that strikes many project managers: the proactive/reactive imbalance.
The sign of a project in reactive mode is seen in crisis. If an unexpected crisis occur more than an absolute maximum of 20% of the time, then a project has lost its way, lost its focus, is probably behind schedule and losing money.
Even on the best run projects there will be 10% unexpected crisis events, which you must react to, but any more than that and you can be sure you have a project in trouble. Crisis, for Douglas’ project, became a daily occurrence; his reactive ratio flipping to 80% reactive crisis, and only 20% proactive work.
“Douglas, why didn’t you know about this Coast Guard stuff?” I asked him that evening.
“Well the bloody fool of an owner we have, never informed me . . . none of 'em know a thing about construction. They’re a bunch of bloody production people. I tell ya, I gotta baby 'em all the time.”
“My point exactly, they didn’t know, you should have, right?”
"Bull . . . " retorted Douglas, "My jobs to build, not run there bloody business . . . "
I’ll cut this story short, because you've heard the conversation before. But sufficient to say, you can size up a project quickly by watching for a few days, monitoring reactive vs. proactive work.
- Is energy and manpower caught up in handling one crisis after another?
- Is management blaming others?
If so, this will be an incredible drain on productivity, hindering the construction process. Monitor it closely, and keep your projects in balance. Remember the 80/20 measure, 80% proactive activity, and no more than 20% reactive activity.
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