Happy 4th July!
In my capacity as British Army Officer and Diplomat extraodinairre – I have been telling everyone here at the office that my role over the holidays is to accept the colonials back into the fold and look over the terms of their complete and unequivocal surrender on July 4th……. This is entirely met with scepticism. Even my t-shirt comemorating the war of 1812 is doing nothing to win them over. My work will be cut out for me.
Much the same os for Chris Warner – there is not a great deal of new stuff to speak of – just grinding the handle on existing stuff.
EDC Solarwall
By pressing the Government employees for swif tturn around on submittals we have brought the contractor almost back on track with his schedule (so he owes us!).
Reviewed the commissioning report – and took pleasure in pointing out all of the deliberate mistakes from where they cut and paste from other projects. (Proving it’s not just us that do it.)
65% design submission comments completed – contractor now has to push out the 100% design. We will soon be gearng up for the on-site phase coming in mid to late August.
Risk management documentation reviewed and approved with comments.
General – this contractor is certainly now making all of the right noises and is consistently hitting submittal dates and taking all comments and guidance on board with no push-back. This is unnerving seeing as pretty much every other project is FUBAR. I’m waiting for the tidal wave. The only real sticking point I ever seme to have on this one is with the Client who occasionally appears too busy to facilitate the RFI process. It has also been interesting to see the evolution of the project schedule witrh applied costs. Initial estimates were clearly way out in certain areas and now that granularity has been added you see huge drops in some areas and massive increases in others…..but the bottom line is that the proffit in Government work is massive!…where do I sign up?
ECIP 732 / 760
Having upset a few folk by giving my honest opinion of the PMP for this project they have gone ahead and scheduled the kick-off design meeting…….without us. They also failed to include any personnel that would help them with the independent checks. They now have a very limited time to get design approval and guess what? – Holiday week for 4th of July means there is as much chance of that happening as the Americans surrenduring to me and re-joining the Empire. Perhaps this will be the antithesis of the EDC project.
C4ISR Tobyhanna
This is a Request for Equitable Adjustment where the contractor claims we owe them cash for a finished project. The current figure sits at $1.25M with outstanding elements from his sub contractors at $1M, This has swallowed the bulk of my time over the las couple of weeks.
I developed some tools to help me analyse the REA and break down the individual parts. These also work as a collaborative tool and form a record of decisions for posterity for if (or more likely WHEN) this goes to litigation. The tools are in 2 parts. One is a word document onto which all parties can assess and analyse the letter itself which is scanned and embedded in tables. Each page contains summaries of our interpretation of the info, additional RFIs, action points and lines to take. The second part is a timeline for the whole project which gathers and collates facts to compare the Contractor’s claims to evidence found on the system or in the files. The collaborative nature of this means we can keep applying more data for more granularity and I have had a summer-hire working along side me to do this.
The great confidence boost was when the top contracts guy in our office admitted that he intends to steal my ideas for his other REAs and the Schedule specialist described the content so far as the gold standard that other offices should try and emulate…so I’m pretty chuffed with that!
Given the nature and size of the claim – there has been a sudden buzz at District and every man and his dog wants to have input. As a result I have sent out a Charlie-Charlie-1showing the matrix on who can do what so as to prevent mission creep. Too many chefs and all that.
And in other news:
Have witnessed the craziest electrical storms ever.
Wife has had yet another MVA fail. The bureaucratic nazis refuse to give her a drivers licence because passport says Ulrike Marie Fry – & Social Security Card says Ulrike M Fry…..so she’s clearly not who she says she is and is not to be trusted. We’re now back to square one on this.
Ultimate road kill (back by popular demand) – This time it was the top of the food chain. A guy was run over and killed just outside a shopping mall near the mechanicsburg project. Police and medics were trying to move the body and stopped the traffic. Pillock behind me decides he needs to beep his horn a lot because that will definitely get things moving again. I wanted to get out and smack him but the police man was already busy enough without having to arrest me as well.
Happy 4th of July everyone!
Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog 
Matt
There will almost certainly be mileage in analysing the way that you have dealt with the Request for Equitable Adjustment for a TMR. By this I mean that there would seem to be a great opportunity to analyse the complex factors that make up this sort of issue on both the Client and Contractor side of the argument. You could then explain how your explicit understanding of these factors led to the form of construction of the tools that you produced and the key stakeholders that you targetted. The final yards would be developing some metrics for demonstrating the success of the tools, perhaps with a brief comparison to a similar issue that was dealt with in a less structured manner. The aim being to demonstrate cost and efficiency savings and perhaps recommendations for process changes within the USACE to deal with this sort of situation. You could even describe how you would further improve the system if you had the time / oppotunity. What do you think?
Jim
Jim,
Very many thanks for the comments and I will certainly be basing my next TMR on this. (The reason I’m doing this at all is because I was having a whinge about needing more contractual stuff to get my teeth into – so they gave it to me in spades!) I think a lot of the reasoning behind the novel approach is my lack of experience in the USACE domain of REA. This has resulted in me breaking it down into understandable packets for processing and realising the need for third parties to have input. My focus has been on making it clear and understandable and that has led to clear cut decisions and action points being generated. I also know that I am unlikely to be around when this claim comes to fruition, so everything I do has to be a clear record that someone else can pick up and run with. Over the next couple of weeks I will begin drafting the headings for the TMR for a quick scan by PEW staff for guidance.
Invited the neighbours to an English Tea Party 4th of July bash…..they didn’t get it. We just ended up drinking malted beverages by the pool and having a day off work…..worked for me!
Nothing happening?? Fantastic QS and contract management stuff! It also fits well with a recent discussion in this office about the difference between unencumbered proactive task delivery as per RE on Ops vs the commercial and increasingly bureaucratic nature of civil industry where it matters little what has been delivered at what pace but more who has allowed and what and will pay for it either now or as a future risk they carry. Interesting to read a little about your position between the two and dealing with the swoosh click of umbrellas as well as trying to deliver a product. Definitely a TMR in this; plenty of opportunity to look at how previous similar issues played out, particularly if you have devised a better solution that can then be compared and critically reflected upon in terms of ‘and if I did it again I’d tweak it like this…’.
Sorry to learn that recent road kill has stepped up to fellow human beings. Good luck with your campaign to accept the surrender. It does look a little like the trade embargo continues with regards to Ulrike; last time the US behaved like this was…..1807 and look where that got us all…
Richard – thank you also for the comments ref the TMR opportunity. (See response to conehead Jim) I will certainly add those elements to the TMR as well.
Hmm – I wonder if a sudden spurt in constructive input to future TMRs is a reflection of forthcoming results in recently marked efforts?…..ah well. Brace brace brace!
Have you thought about offering them tea bags as an Independance Day present (OK, I know it’s a day late), and if you could get some Tetleys from a shop in Boston………