My Corner of the Interweb

And we're back!

OK...so I'm sitting at my desk at roughly 8am Monday morning, refreshed from a great vacation in LA. (Seems like an oxymoron, don't it? Great vacation in LA?) I got sun, I saw and played videogames for a week, I went swimming, I played poker, and I got to meet and hang out with people I'd been in contact with for over a year.

All in all, a good time.

I am trying to develop a plan to increase profitability here. The reason why aren't as profitable as we should be is threefold, in my mind:

1) We have no controls on our production chain. We just build and look at costs haphazardly, when we think something may be going wrong, or we post-mortem a job...by which time it's too late to correct any problems.

2) We do not penalize poor performance, nor reward excellent performance. There's no motivation for the teams to do better or worse...only to get the job done...and even that's something of a joke.

3) The amount of proper supervision on jobs is none. We don't know what our project managers are doing, we do not expect them to tell us on any sort of a reasonable basis, and by the time they're in the middle of a crisis, we're in damage limitation mode, which doesn't help our profitability.

By some accounts, some people would say that our project managers aren't up to the job. I don't believe that. I believe that their morale is low due to the fact that they are not recognized for the work that they do...and they do work hard. I think that all of them are project managers of the reactive kind. That is, they don't really have a plan, per se...but they know what needs to be done. Naturally, as busy as construction gets, they forget things, or do things out of sequence, which costs time and money.

In short, they're not planning, which doesn't allow managers to keep an eye on things, which means that there's no way to get early warning of upcoming problems without relying on the judgment of a single project manager, which can't be good because they're always busy and always reacting after the fact, which means we're destined to lose money due to inefficiency.

Personally, I think that's nonsense...so we're going to start at the very beginning...which is a real fine place to start. Project plans, me hearties! Arr!