Strategies and Tactics: Focus, MEP, and Lessons Learned
A New Tactic, Career Advice, and Strategies to Improve the Industry
A New Tactic: Focus on What’s Actually Important
It's easy to succumb to the daily pressures and problems of the jobsite. To constantly feel like everything needs to get done today. No one ever told me that it would be okay if I didn't get it all done. Here's a tactic to learn where to focus your energy and understand what actually has to get done, what can wait, and what problems don't need to be solved.
Create a list of everything that needs to get done.
Using your project's schedule, choose which tasks need to get done according to what's coming up.
Ask your superintendent to confirm that you're on the right track.
Be comfortable being uncomfortable not committing to everything today.
Career Advice: Know Your MEP
Learn and and expand your MEP and Low Voltage (Security, IT) knowledge. When it comes to project turnover, these systems are essential to a streamlined closeout and training process. Kyle Nitchen's newsletter, The Influential Project Manager, has an awesome article to help anyone get familiar with MEP systems, even for those fluent in MEP, like myself.
Improvement Idea: Solve the Lessons Learned Problem
Everyone in the industry seems to have a database for “Lessons Learned.” I'm not sure how beneficial these databases are yet, as I have yet to see how they get around the industry's knowledge management problem: Teams need to know the Lesson Learned at the right time in the project.
With a database, the team is expected to search manually for a Lesson Learned that may apply to their current project. It's easy to lose track of these tasks as there could be a near infinite amount of Lessons Learned to incorporate. This task itself becomes an administrative nightmare.
How can a team plan for mitigating a Lesson Learned that may be relevant in 6 months?
In my research for ASQ's CCQM certification (I’m helping write the Body of Knowledge), I came across this quote from Tim Howarth and David Greenwood's Construction Quality Management: Principles and Practice: "However, recent research into cross-project learning led Newell to conclude that 'there is accumulating evidence that the medium of capture and transfer through ICT (information and communications technologies) such as databases and corporate intranets is limited in terms of how far such technology can actually facilitate knowledge sharing" (148).
I believe this happens because the database doesn't teach anyone anything. Yes, it tells us something, but nothing is learned. Learning is evident when people's behavior changes from the last project to the next one. That change in behavior is what actually prevents the problem from happening again.
Instead of trying to track every Lesson Learned and figure out when and where it should go, what if we instead think about how we can change project team behavior for the better? The ideas surrounding planning presented in How Big Things Get Done are a great starting point. When we see "planning" as a behavior, how can we plan better?
The solution may be treating Lessons Learned like materials and equipment: needing to be delivered “Just in Time.”
What I’m Writing Next
I’m finishing Part 7: Implement and Measure the Success of Your Business Case.
Make it a great week!