Well it’s about 120, ranging from half-hour tasks to exercises that take days to complete. The list ranges from writing to utilities companies to discover the whereabouts of underground services, risk assessments for early trades, requisitioning long lead-in materials, producing the contract programme and scheduling information requirements from the design team.
With no cabins and phone or IT connections the site manager’s office tends to be either the front seat of a car or the end of someone’s desk back at head office – less than ideal for getting 120 tasks done.
With help from several site project managers, I recently analysed all these tasks. The results were sorted into broad categories according to the length of time each took (see table). Not surprisingly a significant proportion of time is spent on buying and arranging site resources. Virtually no time is dedicated to “improvement” – again, not surprising, as the early priority is to get the job going. However, the project managers agreed that too much time is spent on routine administration - such as filing and managing drawing registers. They also agreed that time spent on admin was to the detriment of the real value-adding activities such as planning, communicating and liasing with the client.
We then looked at how to improve the chances of getting the project off to a flying start and thereby making the job easier.
This simple strategy emerged.
time spent on admin was to the detriment of the real value-adding activities such as planning, communicating and liasing with the client
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% of project manager’s task time in first four weeks
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Source
Construction Manager
Postscript
Dave Stitt has led a number of change and improvement programmes for major contractors and now runs his own consultancy, DSA Building Performance. Contact:dsabuilding@btopenworld.com or visit: www.dsabuilding.co.uk
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