When bad news is good news in construction
Why managers need bad news, and how production rates can help
Today’s tl;dr
Managers want bad news as early as possible. Delayed bad news leads to delayed projects.
Production rates can help quantify actual progress, but they’re not magic and have real limitations
With multidisciplinary projects, production rates can be used tactically, but nothing beats proper communication.
Skip to the end for links to what we’re reading this week.
A common story
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
A junior engineer — let’s call him ‘Jase’ — has a sense that a task isn’t going to finish on time, but delays communicating this to his manager. Because who knows? Maybe the team on site will find a way to accelerate progress next week.
The problem is, the team doesn’t find a way to accelerate the task. Work gets further and further behind. But he keeps it to himself he knows it's his job to solve problems and hold the schedule.
It’s only when 80% of the time has passed with only 50% of the work completed that Jase knows he’s going to have to bite the bullet. He needs to tell his manager the truth.
The problem is, his boss has been reporting to her bosses that there are no delays, so she’s understandably a little angry. Jase decides to sugarcoat the bad news and says that he’s only a week behind.
Spoiler alert: he’s at least three weeks behind. This scene is going to repeat itself at least two more times before he learns the golden rule: never wait to give bad news on a construction project.
Managers want bad news
This is a rule that everyone working on major projects learns in their careers. If you’re lucky, you only have to learn it once.
There are always issues on major projects, and the time-estimates for tasks are rarely perfectly accurate. If there’s data coming from site that work is going to take longer, it’s in everyone’s interest to share that information as soon as possible.
Who knows? There might be a way to speed up the task, or divert resources to get it over the line in time.
Worse case scenario, there isn’t a solution, and the task is delayed. But at least your manager isn’t misleading the executive team about the project (and the exec isn’t, in turn, misleading the client).
Managers should make it clear they want bad news
The problem for young Jase is that managers don’t always make it clear what the stakes are.
It’s great for engineers to own their own tasks and be responsible for delivery, but this can’t come at the cost of clear communication.
At the end of the day, it’s the manager's job to build this culture. This might sound a bit wooly for more hard-headed folks in the industry, but it can be the difference between delivery on time and majorly expensive blow-outs.
Production rates can help
The story above is a people problem, first and foremost. But wherever possible, engineers will always look to sidestep people-problems with quantitative data.
In a perfect world, it shouldn’t matter whether Jase has the courage to report delays to his manager. The data should make it clear early in the piece that the predicted time frame isn’t going to be met.
Enter production rates. As we all know, these are metrics used in construction to measure the progress of predictable and repeatable tasks. If you’re digging a tunnel for example, a production rate will give you a sense of how much tunnel has been dug, and how this tracks against the original plan.
Jase may or may not still get in trouble, but his boss will have an accurate view of the job either way.
So far, so good.
Production rates don’t always work
On major projects with a lot of disciplines working together, production rates are more complicated to implement. This is because the work changes qualitatively from week to week, and there’s no single metric that can give an accurate measure of the project.
In this instance, many projects default to re-planning week to week. This is a messy process that requires a lot of information gathering. And a lot of meetings. With tools like Aphex, some of this gets a lot easier, but you’re still not going to get the magic number that an engineer-brain likes to see.
Still, there will always be aspects of a job that can be measured using production rates. Some data is always better than no data, and anything that can give the team a better sense of how the project is progressing is ultimately a good thing.
Always be communicating
For me, there’s no getting around the basic need to communicate with each other on site. The best tools and processes work because they make this easier to do.
Engineers can dream of tracking and metrics that remove this need to surface qualitative information from humans.
But ultimately, there’s no getting around the fact that humans have the best insight into what’s going on at any time. Delivery teams need to talk to each other in a structured way to surface issues early.
Let’s hope this ‘Jase’ (totally not me) has learned his lesson.
On the podcast
We talk about this topic more on a recent episode of The Off Site podcast. You can listen to the full discussion on Apple, Spotify, or watch on Youtube 👇
What we’re reading this week
Amar Hanspal worked at Autodesk for 27 years, including a stint as CEO. The Bricks and Bytes team have his 12 lessons for developing products, including to play the long game and expect the punch.
Another week, another great edition of Last Week in Contech.
An ITV documentary revealed 21,000 confirmed worker fatalities resulting from work on Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030. Tom Pashby at New Civil Engineer looks into the silence surrounding the projects.