Big touble in little….town in the middle of nowhere.
Covers Period 30 April – May 4:
The best week so far at work! Plenty of variety and a chance to get the boots dirty, thus avoiding paper cuts in the office.
EDC SloarWall
At the end of the previous week the contractor had sent me a Risk Assessment (Called an Accident Hazard Analysis AHA over here). Essentially this was pipss poor and far too generic. I bounced it back to them with comments along the lines of ‘take this seriously or I’ll cancel your investigation’. This resulted in them sending ther H&S guy to supervise the task and conduct the relevant briefs and incorporating the issues that I had raised. Even so – our COn-Rep picked their guys up for lack of high-vis clothing, baseball caps under helmets, impropper ise of helmets, not using fall arestors when on the platform. Each of these issues were addressed on site before work continued but it was a constant bug-bear. The contractor has left with a much clearer perspective on the standards that the Corps requires. I have followed this up by sending the chapter and verse out to all parties who are expected to produce the AHA’s. In this respect we demand 100% commitment and complience – or they get 0% work completed at their expense…….I look forward to the inevitable repeat prescription on this.
Have been able to get the tech guys to be less vague about how they intend to deal with the roof ducting – as this overlaps two projects and had not been clearly defined as to where the responsibility on this project ended and the next one began. I was uncomfortable with the initial response as although everyone was happy to carry on working, it left contractual vagueries – and we all love those.
Ashley Reservist Centre.
Issues over defects on a loading ramp have come to a head and I have been giver catre-blanche to go and sort it out. This is going to be the basis for TMR 1 for me as there are opporetunities for technical analysis and research as well as contractual issues to solve. I booked the hotel etc and set off to spend 24 hoursd on site to investigate the defects, interview the contractors and gather evidence.
Breaking down the issues this is a historical birds nest of problems which will take a while to consider and provide appropriate solutions, but the best thing I was able to do was to apply the ‘big levers’ principle as preeched by the Moran and the Farmer. Cutting away all the chaff allows me to find the lever that allows the issue to be resolved and for work to continue. Bottom line solution is that the contractor will undertake spectrographic testing of the placed concrete to prove ifit was up to specification. This then triggers a decision point. If the concrete is up to standard, they recommend and submit remedial actions for us to authorise (at their cost). If it is sub-standard I will work with them to prove the extent of the sub-optimal concrete and the questionable areas will be removed and replaced (at their cost). Simples – but there are a plethora of other issues that also need to be resolved, some of them diplomatically, some of them bluntly. Other issues that need to be resolved are:
– Contractor’s Quality Control procedure has been historically lacking and is still not up to speed.
– USACE Quality assurance procedures are not being followed and need resolution.
– Materials testing documentation is not clear enough to give contractor the level of assurance he needs.
– USACE ConRep is not working cooperatively with the contractor…and vice-versa.
– Deficiency reporting procedure is not working or being applied appropriately.
– Communication on site is inadequate and will continue to cause further delays and disputes.
– Areas of the specification do not comply with the working drawings. Essentially we have 2 song sheets and each party is using whichever suits them best.
From here a quick and dirty report will be produced to get the ball rolling on the resolution. I will then drill into the detail and generate two versions of the findings. One for consumption within USACE and one for the contractor to see. Wrap all of this together and hopefully a TMR will fall out of the other end.
DDSP ECIP Buildings 732 / 760
Used our ninja APMP qualification and skills to review and comment on the proposed PMP for the energy efficiency projects for which I will be Project Engineer.
And in Other News
Enjoyed a site visit to the Mechanicsburg Reservist Centre project which appears to be running on fumes as far as funding goes……they said no blasting as well and look where that got them.
This week’s road kill includes deer, blackbird, hedgehog and possum…although the possum may have been pretending.
We enjoyed our first ever Cinco de Mayo celebrations / Kentucky Derby day. We attended a party where I now see that the theme was meant to be Kentucky Derby (i.e. posh hats and day at the races atire)……I went with the Mexican theme instead. And when we were in the fancy dress shop I saw the coolest Iron-man mask and simply had to have it. So to keep in the theme (or what I thought was the theme) I went as Iron-Man dressed as a mexican (with grigo moustache attached to the mask). In the group photos from the party there is one character that looks decidedly out of place.
Commercials on TV continue to horify me. Apparently your kids can get premature wrinkles. So if you really care about your kid’s future, you owe it to them to treat them with child friendly botox.
Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog 
Hi Matt. Interested to hear how your ‘ninja’ APMP qualification and skills came in useful as part of the PMP review. Could be useful info to feed back on future courses? Cheers Steve.
The real benefits came from just having an understanding of who does what and why (in a project structure sense) and what the communication avenues and stakeholder engagement is meant to be. The review I looked at simply glossed over a lot of the above and as such I was able to do a ‘what if’ analysis which then confirmed to the original writer that they really did have to think about ‘who is meant to review a particular submission, in what time frame, why certain other departments needed to be kept in the loop and why certain roles needed to be attributed to individuals in order to make sure they are not missed.’
Looking at the internal documentation – It is strikingly obvious that whoever wrote the USACE manual on project management was influenced in the same way that we were on the course. The internal publications alone should have been enough to point the author of the PMP to address the above observations.
Without addressing the points I raised the project would still go ahead, but there would have been confusion if things began to go wrong, a lack of communication between stakeholders and a potential for things to be missed as there were no real clear definitions of responsibilities.
Hope this helps,
McFry