Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

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!