Category: Work

I am an Owner’s Project Manager and Architect for the State of Nevada Public Works Division.  We remodel, plan, and construct facilities for State Agencies for Using Agencies.  The way our system is set up, we ultimately hold the contracts with the Consultants and Contractors.

I’ve worked on projects as small as a kitchen demolition in a mental health facility to a $44M Education Academic Building for Nevada State College.  This post is based on my experience developing this process during construction administration for this major building (we are a couple months from substantial completion).

Primary Goals for a Web Taskboard + Weekly Check-in Process

1. Minimize Emails (or at least email searching).
2. Centralized hub for Tasks (and information) between the Owner and Architect. 
3. Create space for synchronizing the Owner and Architect (aligning priorities and identifying unspoken concerns)

Web Taskboard

We use the basic free package of Asana and have not found any significant limitations. 

This task board is only used for coordination between the Owner and the Architect’s PM.  The CMAR is not involved since another ad hoc communication channel could cause confusion. The Architect keeps track of their own internal tasks separately (such as typical RFI or Submittal processing), and I keep a separate things-to-do list for project tasks that don’t concern the architect.

We treat Asana as an open, free flowing space.  Tasks and Deadlines can be added or assigned to anyone.  There are only two restrictions:

1. If a new task is assigned to someone else with a deadline in less than a week, then a courtesy phone call (followed up by “manual” email) is expected.
2. Hard Deadlines are to be noted in the Title of the Task.  Otherwise, dates are merely treated as “preferable goals” to signal intent, and it is not a big deal if they are shifted.

When a task is added, relevant files (documents or key emails) are uploaded into the task.  This eliminates use of email inboxes as repositories of information.  Someone should be able to open the task in Asana and have all the relevant information to start work.

Weekly Check-in

A critical part this process is our weekly check-in.  I’ve found it typically takes an hour.  We have a standing placeholder on Monday afternoons, but we are flexible since it’s just the Architect’s PM and myself.  That said, we never skip a full week.  The call is loose and will veer into tangents, but it follows this rough Agenda:

1. Project Vibe
2. Run through the Asana List
3. Go through Recent Walk Thru Comments (due to the pandemic, I conduct my job walks alone)
4. Any other Open Items?
5. Long Term Look Ahead
6. Next Steps (this week’s priorities)

Analysis

In theory, this system could minimize ad hoc emails between me and the Architect’s PM.  Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen in practice, because there are always other parties (such as the Architect’s Principal in Charge, Contractor, Using Agency, etc.) who needs to be included in key communications.  However, this system has successfully eliminated email searching because Asana has centralized all project tasks between us.

This system has given me a much better feel for project progress, despite operating under strict quarantine (we live with our in-laws).  My relationship with the Architect’s PM was great before implementing this system, but this tool has been indispensable in maintaining tight synchronization during the usual chaos of construction administration.  Before implementing this system, I could sense slippages of miscommunication; now we are never more than a week from airing out any concerns before a misalignment could get serious. 

The weekly synchronization gives me a clear grasp of project needs and priorities.  This has empowered me to focus intensely on my immediate tasks at hand for the rest of the week (for this project or otherwise).

The system isn’t a magic bullet, we still need to execute.  For example, it would have been extra slick if I had started our FF&E purchases a month earlier than I did.  The tasks were on the list the whole time, but I did not stay on top of my responsibilities to push this part of the project forward at the perfect time.  However, the task board certainly helped me avoid the much worse event of being a month late!

This process isn’t free – it costs an hour every week.  2.5% of the time where two professionals aren’t executing direct deliverables (not to mention the separately held OAC meeting and job walks).  The best analogy is to call this practice “PMt insurance”.  I believe this regular time commitment has helped prevent small issues from becoming big emergencies.

We tried Microsoft Teams and Asana.com.  I hoped that MS Teams would integrate better with MS To Do, however that feature only works with the user whose server is hosting the Team.  So, we went back to Asana because it is very consistent in its email distribution (allowing the Architect to keep a record of all communications), and because I prefer Asana’s “List” (spreadsheet) interface.  However, I would use MS Team for internal-only project teams, and I am open to trying other systems if someone feels strongly about it.

I have Asana’s iphone app, but I don’t use it for task management. However,  I use Asana’s phone app to make “notes” during the job walk.  I then discuss these comments on the weekly call with the Architect’s Project Manager and she incorporates relevant items into her weekly field reports. 

Personal style disclaimer: I prefer one-on-one phone calls for resolving project issues since I feel decisions and gameplans are developed fastest in this manner.  This process systematizes such a preference for handling non-urgent tasks between me and the architect.  Other PM’s personal styles may differ.

Future Experiments

I plan on utilizing this process for future projects, starting at the design phase. I will request that the Architect select their preferred website (Monday, Trello, Wrike, Teams, Asana, etc.) and include any necessary premium costs into their fee.

For the design phase, I plan on extending the invite to the Using Agency and the CMAR’s Preconstruction Team.  I still do not think this will be an appropriate communication channel with the CMAR’s team during construction operations.

I wonder if this process will minimize large group design meetings, or at least streamline them, since much of the updates could be handled via the web taskboard and in the weekly check-ins, especially since we hold formal presentations (and subsequent meeting minutes) after each of the major design phase deliverables.

I’m not sure if this will be useful for smaller projects, but I’ll give it a shot on my next one.

I might try doing this for internal communications, such as a weekly check-in with my direct supervisor.

References (some links)

General Thoughts

• https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/08/13/dont-delegate-using-email/#comment-433165
• https://knowyourteam.com/blog/2020/05/14/the-best-way-to-hold-a-remote-one-on-one-meeting/
• https://www.quantumworkplace.com/future-of-work/check-in-meeting
• I am a fan of Cal Newport’s  Deep Questions Podcast, so I plan on picking his newly published book, A World without Email.  He is a big proponent of the web task board.

Sample Agendas

• https://www.managementcenter.org/resources/check-meetings-sample-agenda/
• https://asana.com/guide/examples/meetings/one-on-ones
• https://www.quantumworkplace.com/future-of-work/one-on-one-meeting-guide

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Ria Lyn Smith, who was my co-conspirator in developing this process.  I initiated this system after reading about remote team weekly check-ins during the initial lockdown, after construction had started on our building.  I grateful for her willingness to add this experiment on top of all the other fires of construction administration.

Also thanks to my AIA roundtable partners – Scott Knudson, Nea May Poole, Rachel Oleinick, Heather Pierce, and Emma Tucker for the lovely conversation that spurred me to finally put this post together. Finally, thanks to Heather Holmstrom for reviewing a draft and proposing some edits for this post.

My colleague made a blunder with his Excel file and lost two days of work. I wasn’t able to help him recover the garbled data, but before hanging up, he asked me if I could look up data on a separate worksheet in order to auto populate cells based off of a furniture tag on the main sheet. That quickly lead to a MS Teams call on a Sunday evening and a couple google searches later I hit the jackpot and save him two more days of labor.

The tip of the iceberg was two grown men hooping and hollering about a successful excel formula.

This moment was only possible with the powerful suite of technology in our homes. The laptops, the broadband, and our newfound familiarity with video calls. A simple text on a cell phone became a full blown weekend meeting in a few minutes.

Under that were years of tinkering in Microsoft Excel, starting when my dad showed me formulas on a spreadsheet while I was in junior high. Normally, I’m not really into tech, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Excel. The spreadsheet is such a seductive way to numerically model the world. I’m nowhere near a ninja, but I’m in the upper percentile compared to other architects. I’ve never taken a formal course, but every time I’ve run into a question, I’ll make that extra web search to lock in the answer. Every little moment accumulates into a decent library of knowledge and an easy ability to search for what one doesn’t already know.

And then there is my relationship with my coworker. We first met at a previous firm and worked together for a couple years. He moved on but soon invited me to pursue this gig with the state. We come from different worlds, but we’ve always had an bond with each other beyond the transactional relationship.

We’ve always had each other’s back, especially on a quiet Sunday evening as the kids are wondering why daddy started dancing around the home office.

I was requested to put together a bio for Rice Mentorship Program’s instagram page. Here is what I wrote, with the photos I submitted.

Justus Pang is a registered architect who has worked in Berkeley, Houston, and Las Vegas.  His project history includes residential remodels, new apartment complexes, adaptive reuse conversions, and commercial, government, and hospitality tenant improvements.

His experience includes working as a laborer in a construction crew after college and summer internships with a landscape architect.  Since 2018, he has worked for the State of Nevada as an Owner’s Project Manager.

Having participated within all roles within the industry, his focus is on fairness to all parties, strict quality control of the design and construction documentation, developing a collaborative environment, and continuous process improvement.

Ideally everyone walks out of my project with a smile and proud of the work.

I spent 2010 working for a small firm doing a mix of single family renovations, custom houses, and small commercial work. The principals were a lovely couple, but when you’re the only employee in a three person firm there is a hard ceiling which is impossible to ignore, even for someone who isn’t particularly ambitious.

I wanted to try out life in a larger firm working on bigger projects, so the year was fraught with frustration as I pondered how to make a change in the midst of a recession.

2011 rang in with a sudden opportunity to join a large firm, and I spent the next two years working on a 300 unit apartment complex before heading off to Las Vegas.

I didn’t realize was that 2010 would be my last year as a professional residential architect. In retrospect, I should have savored that moment. I’ve always loved the craft of designing and documenting remodels, even if it is not a particularly well paying niche in the profession.

This past decade has put me on a financially stable path and lead me to to work that I greatly enjoy, so the tradeoff was well worth the price. But even at its kindest, the passage of time is always a touch cruel. You rarely know what you’re losing, until it’s long gone.

In July, I passed the two year mark at my job.

Two is not typically a big anniversary, but our entire schedule is wrapped around the legislature’s biennial cycle. The legislature meets at the start of every odd numbered year, so the spring of every even numbered year is a mad frantic rush to prepare budgets for all the different agency requested projects.

I was quite fortunate to be hired in summer of an even numbered year. It gave me a full eighteen months of training before being were thrown into the budget preparation process, and this was the final hazing before I could fully call myself a state employee.

As promised, it was utter chaos for the months of April through June, barely keeping my actual projects afloat while estimating 29 projects. Most of these were requests from previous years and won’t be approved. But one doesn’t know which project might suddenly become a high priority for the agency, so even the old numbers needed to be double checked, just in case.

We should have been done by the end of June, but we had one final hurdle this cycle – uploading our estimates into a new database. As to be expected, the new program had a rocky roll out, especially for the project managers in Las Vegas who had a difficulties connecting to the main server in Carson City.

Late at night before my employment anniversary, I slid into my desk to input my last four projects, joining my two fellow Vegas architects on Microsoft Teams. It was a throwback to the old studio days, architects working late at night, shooting the shit.

In the midst of it all, the boy wandered out of the bedroom.

So I spent the last moments of my second year with the SPWD doing loops in the backyard, chasing the sandman.

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.