The Beauty of Teamwork

As many of you know, I am a huge Purdue fan and this past weekend saw my favorite team win its 25th regular season Big Ten Championship. I know that Purdue’s past struggles in the the Big Ten Tournamant and the NCAA Tournamant are well documented, but I’ll worry about that in the coming weeks of March as this team navigates its way through both tournaments. Watching Purdue play basketball this season made me think a lot about teamwork. These guys lost several key members from last years team and added several new faces this year. They came together and ended up having a very successful season.

Teamwork on the basketball court is very similar to teamwork within a buiding project. You have multiple members of the team (the client/owner, the designers and the contractors). All members have to come together and support one another, otherwise you will end up with a subpar project in the end. Much like a basketball team working its way through a 35 game season, building projects can be a bit of a marathon themselves. Up front planning (much like the basketball preseason) is essential to a successful project. If you skip the planning process, you will likely find yourself behind throughout the entire project.

If we can be of help, give us a call so we can team up with you on your next building project.

“Rules” of Construction – A Follow Up

Around this time last year, I wrote an e-bits about “Rules” of construction. I had just gotten home from spending a few days in Florida and the e-bits was mainly talking about how building codes in different parts of the country are unique to each location, but ultimately getting a project from the starting point to the finish line is very similar no matter what part of the country you are in. The photo above is the comparison of the condo building during construction last year and the completed project this year. While in Florida earlier this week, I had the opportunity to see the finished product and it made me think about how interesting it is to see a project go from start to finish. There were lots of building codes that the design professionals and the contractors needed to adhere to, but in the end they were able to construct a beautiful building on a beautiful piece of property.

We at PDMi have extensive building code knowledge not only locally, but across the United States. If we can be of help on your next project, regardless of the location, give us a call.

Things I should have known yesterday…

Several years ago we were in the process of planning a warehouse expansion for a long time client. Over the course of several months we had interacted with the building owner and tenant to determine the building size, height, column spacing and racking layout. Then just as we were wrapping up the planning phase and getting started on the construction document phase, the tenant’s safety group got involved. They requested a pedestrian walkway alongside the fork truck aisles, which caused some major changes. Unlike Adam Sandler in the movie “The Wedding Singer”, no one was mad about the last minute addition to the design criteria, but it did put a kink in the planning process. In reality, this happens somewhat regularly in the design world. It’s rare that our first set of planning documents translates to match the final construction documents.

There are many thing we have found to be true about planning, designing and constructing new facilities and additions to existing facilities, two of them are…

• “Sequence Matters”. When projects are planned, then designed/engineered, then constructed you end up with a successful project. When those three functions are done out of sequence, the project struggles, the stakeholders get frustrated and budgets are affected.

• “Scope x Quality = Budget”. This formula never fails. On any project you can control a max of two of the factors in the equation (not all three) and someone else will control the third. The game is to be sure you are always controlling two of the factors. We talk about this formula often because it is such an important thing to keep in perspective.

The “Things I Should Have Known Yesterday” items can affect both schedule and cost. Give us a call and we will help you identify scope items early and establish workable solutions.