Category: Work

I just finished analyzing a major change order for the my building.  I’ve handled smaller ones, but this is the first time I’ve stared down a quarter million bucks in bite.  Before sending out comments to my contractor, I thought I’d type up how it went, since this week-long push has been a good distillation of various tactics that I have found useful for tackling an unfamiliar, scary project.

• Jump in and thrash around.

When confronted with a new and difficult task, the first danger is analysis paralysis.  The best antidote is to start by assuming the initial efforts will be wasted.  Knowing the first few hours are inevitably suboptimal, I am mentally free to just jump in.  The sooner I jump in, the sooner I’ll to cobble together a better strategy for completing the project.  

Unless there is an obviously better first step, a good default is to categorize a project into smaller pieces, so I started last Wednesday evening by sorting out the subcontractor bids.   But I wasn’t done thrashing around yet.  Thursday morning, I started analyzing the first couple bids.  Only by jumping into the deep end did I realize that I was missing a critical item.  It is hard to analyze changes without the original.  I needed to get an older set of plans from the office.  

• Make room to breathe.

I didn’t have an opportunity to go to the office till Sunday, but intervening these days weren’t wasted.  I spent Thursday afternoon and Friday clearing out a bunch of little tasks and emails.  I spent Saturday doing absolutely nothing, we often underestimate the important of rest!  On Sunday I picked up the plans.  Even though I did not do anything on this project, these days were critical days that set me up for the big push.  It was important to recharge my energy and have the confidence that there weren’t any urgent work fires while I spent the next few days offline. 

• Eat the biggest frog first.

Monday morning was got chewed up with random work detritus, and I finally started in earnest during the afternoon.  I quickly realized I needed to step back.  I couldn’t analyze numbers until I had a better grasp of the basis for these prices.  I needed to grind through every line on the architect’s change narrative as well as every cloud and delta on their drawings sheets.  

So that’s what I did on Tuesday.  Being nitpicky has negative connotations, but it was the necessary tactic for this effort.  I highlighted every item on the sheets and compiled any thoughts and comments into a detailed list.  I had hoped this would take half a day, but took the entire day.  However, I now had a thorough grasp of what had changed.  Just as important, I was now confident in my grasp of this knowledge.

• Tackle the easy ones first.

On Wednesday (a week after I started) I finally started on the main task – crunching the numbers.  Unlike the previous day, I took the opposite approach and started with the easy bids first.  Since I am new to being an owner’s rep, I don’t have a deep well of experience.  Heck, I was still designing the spreadsheet for compiling the numbers!  It made more sense to slowly tiptoe into the deep end, better to make my mistakes on little items before tackling the really complex bids.  By the end of the day I had gone through analyzed all fifteen bids and plugged their numbers into my now-refined spreadsheet.

• Tidy up your mess.

The last 5% of the project always takes an inordinate amount of energy to finish well, but these last steps will separate a mediocre product from a good delivery.  In this case, I needed to clean up the spreadsheet.  The analysis was the hard work, but it won’t do much good for the contractor if it isn’t readable.  Plus, I won’t be looking at these numbers for a couple weeks before the revised pricing comes back.  If I quit before getting thoroughly organized, I will waste a lot more time getting back into the numbers after my short term memory has faded.  As always, suck it up, finish strong.

This effort involved quite a bit of tedious grunt work, but life is rarely glamorous.  I had been architecting long enough to jump in without much fear, but I’m new enough as an owner’s rep to be pleasantly surprised at how smoothly this effort went.  The opening and closing steps are consistently critical for any endeavor.  The art is found in aptly playing the middle three tactics during the meat of the project.  It’s a game of mixing and matching different approaches to keep progress moving effectively.

All in all, it went fairly well this time, which must be why I’m bragging about it on this blog.

Thanks to the cadre at Akimbo who accompanied me during this effort as well as the fine folks at wecoffee.io who letting me hang out in their virtual workspace while I typed this up this post.

Have fun on your own projects!

When I first joined the division twenty months ago, all agreements and invoices were still paper transmissions.

At the time the process for filling an invoice was:

1. Consultant sends invoice up to Carson City for accounting.
2. Accounting processes the invoice and sends it back down to my office in Vegas.
3. The project manager reviews and signs invoice and sends it back up to Carson City.
4. The deputy administrator signs the form and sends it across the street back to accounting for final processing and payment.
5. Check is mailed down to the consultant.

In short, paying an invoice would involve moving one piece of paper 3 times (430 miles each) just to get processed, not including the check.

Let’s not even get into signing actual contracts, which require eight signatures and eleven steps.

If this virus had hit six months earlier (the official rollout for digital invoice processing happened in October), we would have been forced to go to the office just to perform the most basic task of paying our vendors and executing contracts.

I shudder to think about trying to develop these new processes without being able to meet in person, and while still learning how to work remotely!

Of all the unfortunate inconveniences of this pandemic, we were extremely lucky that we had just entered the 21st century with our document management.

Last week I spent a moment walking the job site.

Doesn’t sound like much, but this was a new experience for me.

In the past I’ve always been the architect, so I was escorted by the contractor as we walked the project. But now I am the Owner, so the contractor told me to enjoy my stroll and went back to their work.

Walking the site by myself was an unexpectedly contemplative activity. It’s just starting. The building pad has been set with a few of the footings poured. Rebar sticking up everywhere. There were a few earthwork guys in massive machines scraping down the new parking lot to get it open in a few weeks, a year before the main building is completed.

As an architect you live in a world of paper. More accurately you live in the computer, flying through the model space of your building information model. Even though I’m no longer practicing, being the owner isn’t much different except for the pesky financial spreadsheets that now take my attention before those plans and drawings.

Either way, I’ve been in paper space for the last twenty months since I joined the state public works division.

But now, here is 12 acres of disturbed land that was parking lot and desert a mere three months ago.

Dirt, rock, concrete, steel. Spray paint, stringlines, mushroom caps, formboards.

In eighteen months, this will be a new building, filled with college students earning a degree, kids at the daycare, professors crafting their lesson plans, speech pathologists honing their craft.

In eighteen months, the roll of papers that will have been my companions for three years will be frozen in storage, an archive of yesterday’s efforts.

And the men and women currently buzzing around this jobsite trailer will have moved onto another patch of desert, materializing the dreams of another owner, a different architect, another group of users.

I just read an interesting statistic. Employment at architectural firms nationwide dropped from 224,500 to 184,600. That means 39,900 jobs were lost in about four months. More than 1 in 6 architects were laid off.

I was one of the lucky ones. I had gotten a gig with a small firm at the start of 2008, so I avoided being laid off even though my hours were cut down to 30 a week. Even though my bank account was not happy, I used the extra time to take my exams.

But still, when you see your colleagues losing jobs and scrambling for work, it leaves an imprint.

Ultimately, we’re all freelancers.

Bosses that preach “family” might not like to hear it. Unless you to throw a child out of your home every time things get rocky, such proclamations ring hollow.

Remember, one out of six.

it does feel weird to “settle” into a “terminal” position, but sometimes the tradeoff just isn’t worth it.

chatting with a friend about advancing up the hierarchy

I guess it can’t hurt to think about these things now. With the pension system (and life in general), you will eventually leave since it makes zero economic sense to stay after one has fully vested. But it’s gonna take a really long time. Way longer than the 3 year 10 month max length tenure I had in previous firms.

On the one hand, I’m seeing friends and former colleagues starting their own firms and being named as principals. On the other hand, one of my colleagues is just about to celebrate 29 years with the division in the same position, a Project Manager II, just like me. He talked about getting to watch his kids grow up, remodeling his house, and coaching little league, and soon he will be pulling 75% of his income to not work for the rest of his life.

You don’t get your name on the front door, and the parachute might not be that golden. But it sure isn’t a bad deal either.

Tradeoffs. Choices. Difficult words.

I was listening to an interview of Seth Godin, where he posited that you can have maybe two or three attributes that stand out at the office. If you are consistent with these attributes, it will eventually become your personal brand. So pick carefully and don’t ever break these promises you make to your customers.

Assuming that I only pick out two items to promise to my customers (Seth stated that two is doable, three is difficult, and four is virtually impossible), there are four major questions that need to be answered.

1. Who is my customer?  Is it my immediate supervisor, or his boss, his boss, her boss, or the Governor?  Is it the using Agency?  Is it the consultants that I manage? Is it the silent investors behind the project (all the taxpayers of Nevada)?
2. What will be attribute X
3. What will be attribute Y – and if I put attributes as a simple X-Y matrix, is there anyone else at the office that already fills that niche?
4. Given that I’m unwilling to sacrifice my personal life for the division, what am I willing trade off to make sure I never break the promise of X and Y?

It’s an interesting rubric, but there won’t going to be an answer here. To pick out only two attributes is going to take some hard thinking. As always, choices are more difficult when it means excluding other options.

It is an odd moment when you realize that someone your age is actually better than you at something thought was your particular strength within the profession.

I’m certain it will only be even weirder when I work with someone younger than me who I recognize as superior in this specific role of project architect.

It may take a little bit of time, but if I stay on this detour of being a client side project manager the inevitable will happen.

Architecture is a practice, and I can feel the rust setting in already.

The morning after I made my decision, someone else piped up with new information that might affect it.

I had moved forward based on the comments from someone higher up in the hierarchy, but I hadn’t waited for someone closer to the situation.

It is indeed a balancing act, between keeping up the tempo up but not rushing in without proper deliberation.

I don’t think I got it right this time, but I do have the fallback on being open and honest with my partners, so it won’t be a total surprise if I adjust course.

It’s a balancing act. I needed to make a decision that would most likely make one company quite bit of money over another company.

So it wasn’t one to rush into, but also one where it was basically a 50.5/49.5 winner take all split.

After I gave everyone a chance to provide their input, I realized no one wanted to own the decision, I went ahead and made a call.

Sometimes there are perks to being the owner’s PM.

No need to overthink this.

Hopefully I didn’t rush it.