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Category: Construction Project Management

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How to Make Your Office and Field Crews More Productive

Over the last 20 years, the construction industry sector has only managed a 1% increase in productivity (McKinsey). You are probably losing money right now on one or more projects. We can do better with the right tools and smarter scheduling.

Most of us use the philosophy ‘use the right tool for the job’ as often as we can. It means we want to be efficient at getting the job done right the first time. Even with this focus, 26% of construction workers say they are frustrated by the lack of tools they need to do their jobs better (TINYpulse). When it comes to managing crews and teams, this simple philosophy can be modified to ‘use the right person for the job’ equipped with the right tools of course. According to KPMG, over 50% of construction professionals report one or more underperforming project in a given year. Understanding the resources your people represent helps you focus on ways to reduce possible project losses by proactively managing people and equipment resources.

Like a well-organized tool chest, every tool has its place and is easily accessible. To get that well-organized crew tailored for each job, you need to track experience and expertise levels, certifications, and credentials that have to be continually renewed.

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According the National Association of Home Builders, 56% of builders report they are suffering due to the effects of the skilled labor shortage. With a

tight labor market, if you’re not jotting down the experience and expertise of your crews, now is the time to start. This doesn’t just apply to field workers, it’s important across all business. With so many new labor entrants needing to be trained and brought up to speed, communications between the jobsite and the office are more important than ever. Real time communications on the job site is challenging enough with the right people. Having the wrong people complicates work quality and can draw out the time it takes to complete a project.

There are many reasons to track experience, expertise, and certifications, including:

  • Job site requirements, such as current CPR certified
  • Transportation requirements, such as current DOT card
  • The equipment an employee has been trained or certified on
  • Job side badging (and background) for specific customers
  • Expertise level with construction processes and/or equipment
  • Renewal dates for key certifications, such as Journeyman card or contractor licenses
  • Continuing education requirements to renew key certifications
  • Certifications by state and renewal requirements
  • Optimize crew assignments

Many customers require training and badge certification to work on the job site. Companies like Apple, NVEnergy, Google, and others all have classes and background checks your workers have to go through to be allowed on their construction sites. It’s not uncommon to mistakenly send out a crew to NVEnergy to work on a job only to have them rushed off to a class for four hours before they can work. Unbadged crews generally result in being turned away at the construction site, leaving you scrambling to find the people that have the badged credentials. More time and money wasted because the list of credentials was either not up to date or not looked at.

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SMART SCHEDULING

In nearly every environment today, someone on your team needs to have some kind of certification on the job. While tempting, a list like this is not something you can just risk keeping in your head. Required job site job documents could be something as simple as a current CPR training certification or more extensive DOT card. If you’re like most of us, you have a list of people and their certifications in an Excel spreadsheet somewhere that someone is supposed to maintain. The problem is that list often gets lost in the daily work grind and often not kept up to date. Excel is a good tool, but it’s a like an island you have to travel to to visit. Out of sight, out of mind is generally a bad policy in this instance.

KEEP YOUR COMPANY RESOURCES CURRENT

There are some tools you can use online to help remember key events, such as renewing a DOT card or attending continuing education classes to keep your certification up to date. The most accessible tools are part of an email subscription you already have. Google email (or G-Suite), Office365, and iCloud all have reminder features that you can setup to remind you when an team or crew member needs to renew one or more certificates. Much like the an excel spread sheet, you must manually update these reminders and remember to enter in new ones.

MANAGE YOUR RESOURCES

The right tool for the job in this case is an integrated system that tracks employee certifications and allows you to search and find the right experience level, certifications, and credentials and assign them to a crew or team. These ‘integrated’ tools allow you to assign people to jobs/workorders based on the job requirements. This way you won’t accidentally create a crew without the requirements. Modern construction software should include a way to track certifications, renewals, expertise level, and training on equipment and processes.

The expertise and credentials of your employees are one of the most significant advantages your have in competing for and executing successful projects. With a 21.4% industry wide turnover rate, its hard to find and keep skilled labor (Bureau of Labor Statistics). Keeping track of your people’s experience can help you focus on who you want to keep.

Sending the wrong people on a job can impact project profitability. Don’t get caught with the wrong people on the right job, find and use tools that work best for you.

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How Technology Can Reduce Complexity and Increase Profit on Construction Projects

It is said a picture is worth a thousand words, it’s truer in construction. What’s the first image that comes to mind when you hear the words ‘construction site’? The mental picture summoned up generally looks something like an excavated site with people working on it wearing helmets and goggles. This mental image reflects the external characteristics of the contractors working on the site, the business and operation engines behind the businesses are much more obscured. Behind this image are project managers and superintendents that manage the workflow, many with spreadsheets and good old-fashioned notepads. These front line managers often don’t know if a project is on track to be profitable until the accountant runs the numbers at the end of the month.

Every construction project has its own set of unique challenges because of complex operations ranging over the project life cycle. It’s rarely possible to keep track of everything that happens on a work site. Many factors arise that serve to distort communications and operations, such as weather, site location, cell phone reception, Internet access, missed emails, scheduling conflicts, and many more. It’s not if something goes wrong, it’s when. There is no way to eliminate problems on projects, it’s impossible. What you can and should do is to work towards implementing processes and policies that reduce the risk as much as possible. One of the way we can keep projects safe and profitable is by using technology to automate some, most or all areas of operation. Two key areas are bidding and planning. Both areas have lots of options in the market, you are bound to find one or two that work for you.

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STREAMLINED BIDDING

Bidding is the first major cog in the business engine, without successful bidding a company will go nowhere. Bidding ranges from simple to complex depending on the project and if you are a General or Sub Contractor. Whether you are bidding to residential consumers or the Federal Government, you need a successful strategy that includes the ability to quickly create bids in order to be responsive to your customer.

There are many Sub Contractor specific bidding tools that enable you to use pre-defined values for common tasks, such as the time it takes to install an electrical panel and run 1,000 ft of wire on 20 drops. These tools make it fast and easy to create bids. Using bidding software can reduce the time it takes to create bids so you can get more done in the day.

It’s not enough to crank out bids fast, you need to track bids whether successful or not and compare them to your job costs. Tracking your contract budgets with bids over time gives you the data to make better decisions on bids. For example, do you have the resource capacity to execute the project, how much do you need to sharpen your pencil to get the business. Tracking project costs to the contract budget tells you which ones had the most profit, change order costs, how much labor it took, what loss rates were on materials used, and many other metrics you need to be more successful.

Tools like Excel are great, they work well and are easy to use, and with a little effort you can customize a spreadsheet to meet your needs. The challenge with spreadsheet driven bids is that they are not connected to anything else that automatically tracks the difference between the bids and the costs. The most effective way to streamline bidding is to use software that fits your needs. Use some software that works for you. You don’t have to use ours, but I hope you give it a try.

PLANNING

Planning your project is critical, but if you are like 99.999% of the rest of us that work on projects, you know that nothing ever goes according to plan. Plan, then plan for the plan to change. Keep it simple, flexible, and adaptable. There are a range of tools on the market to help with planning. Nearly every contractor I talk to about how they use software for planning tell me the same thing… they use it to set up the main project plan, then never touch it again after they print out a hard copy to pin on the construction trailer wall. Tools like Microsoft Project work well and are widely used today. Most of the Gantt Chart based project management tools in the market are not connected to anything and cannot dynamically update as things change. Updating projects in planning software requires manual entry on an ongoing basis with any project, which means it generally doesn’t get done.

Dynamic project management takes project planning software to the next level, but it requires technical connections among project partners and software companies. In short dynamic project management factors in the fact that projects change quickly and we need to adapt quickly to manage them. You need an adaptive process coupled with predictive tools, such as automated critical path analysis.

Using the right software will reduce complexity and increase profit margins in your organization. If you don’t know if your projects are on track to be profitable or not, you need to take a close look at software tools that work with your processes that automatically track project costs and budgets. Don’t wait until the end of the month to find out project costs are out of control.

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5 Effective Ways of Managing and Motivating Your Construction Workers

Motivation is the key factor for generating higher production levels. A motivated workforce influences operational efficiency, especially in production-intensive industries like construction. The construction industry is fundamentally labor dependent, it’s essential to keep your team well-managed as well as maintain high levels of employee motivation.

Listed below are 5 of the most effective ways a construction company can motivate and manage its workers.

RECOGNIZE

The most common form of employee motivation is appreciation and recognition. It’s a natural human need to be recognized and feel valued. Appreciation doesn’t always have to be in the form of monetary rewards or raises. It can be something as simple as saying ‘Good Job’ or ‘Well done’ whenever a worker has produced quality work or put in some extra effort.

Such acknowledgment accounts for intrinsic motivation which leaves a greater impact on the worker than other motivational factors. Another way of recognizing hardworking staff members is by naming employee of the month or employee of the day. This not only encourages the worker to keep doing better but also creates a healthy workplace competition.

REWARD

Even though monetary rewards aren’t the only form of praising an employee, they are effective ones. Bonuses and raises act as a strong motivational tool, especially if the worker has worked extra hours or done additional jobs. Apart from bonuses, rewards can also be in the form of gifts, vouchers or a company-organized day out. In general, it can be anything that shows the workers that their employers notice their hard work and their efforts never go unnoticed.

EMPATHIZE

Simply recognizing and rewarding employees is never enough to ensure a fully motivated workforce. Employees expect their employers to be concerned of their well-being and value them as an important part of the organization. This can be done by being respectful towards your workers and showing them your concern in significant personal events like birth of a child or demise of a family member.

SPECIFY GOALS

It is impractical to expect your staff to know exactly what their tasks and goals are when you hire them. Everyone needs to know what exactly is expected of them. Employers must set smart and achievable goals for the workers and clearly brief them about them. The best approach is to discuss these goals with the employee beforehand. This would promote ownership in the worker towards an assigned task. However, if goals aren’t clearly defined, it results in poor performance and hence substandard production.

TAKE CARE OF THE NEW GUY

Let’s face it, the numbers on new people entering the construction profession aren’t as good as anyone would like. There is a labor shortage, we need good skilled people. It can be rough starting a new profession, how a younger person experiences their first weeks on the job will influence their decision to make construction a career or not. Don’t tolerate any hazing new people, instead give them the support they need to learn how to thrive in construction.