Where do You Waste Time and Money?

For most of us, where we waste time is not immediately apparent.  Obviously if it were, we would correct it.  But in the same way that we have employee’s operating with institutionalized behaviour, so too is our view of our own inefficiencies justified, and often with something as innocent as “that’s the way we have always done it”.  Hence the saying, ” Organizations rise to their own level of incompetence”.   I frequently run across the the regular practice of calling a sub-contractor four to six times to show up for a work assignment.  Now multiply that with how many leads you have, managing how many subs, then add in PM’s coordinating with the leads, architects, and owners….get the picture?

Exploring Project Management

  When people ask me about the work I have been doing recently,  I tell them about the last 10 to 15 years or so, and then about meeting Greg Howell and his partner Hal Macomber 2 years ago.  I found them both to be very interesting, and our time together lead to finding that what we both have in common was a commitment to remove the suffering found in project management.  I didnt know at the time how serious Greg and Hal were about it, and I didnt know there was a world wide community sharing in these same concerns.   One of the next steps I would like to take is to organize a group of people from our local community to explore more deeply the practices of management, the problems, and new ideas and solutions.  I see this as an ongoing opportunity to learn, and connect ourselves to the larger international community for lean construction.  I recognize that some may think our practices at the level of residential may be too different from the larger commercial companies.  But it has been my experience that the kinds of problems they have sound very similar to the kinds of problems we have.  So I invite you to use this blog so we can begin to explore what’s working, and what is not working, and what we can do about it.   Tell me what it is that you would like to see as a priority for our focus, what breakdowns should we focus on first?