A royal flush is great when it’s in your hand. When your competitor has the upper hand it leaves you struggling to get ahead. As a construction project manager, we’re with you every step of the way to make sure you have the best hand and to provide you the royal flush to stay in the game.
For every good card, there’s a substantial challenge faced. Let’s dive into these top challenges and how to play your hand at success with some techniques and technology.
- Poor Communication
- Lack of Structure
- Poorly Defined Expectations
- Time Management
- Unrealistic Expectations (Schedule and Finances)
Poor Communication – Challenge #5
Communication is the key to success in any relationship. Whether employer to employee, husband to wife, parent to child. When there’s not enough communication or the quality of communication is poor between a project manager and his team, it creates a challenging work environment.
Construction sites are hectic, busy, dangerous, and with everything else on your plate as a project manager, we understand how hard quality communication can be. In our recent blog, we talked about the three tips for better relationships between managers and crew, communication was a heavy element.
To communicate better as a manager it’s important to keep a few key elements in mind:
- Be available – Make sure your team can reach you when they need to. If you are in the middle of something and can’t pick up, everyone gets that. Calling back before you end your day is a great way to show them you care, you are available, and to keep communicating because you value it.
- Be Open to Suggestions – Even when you don’t completely agree with your team, listen to them and let them express their concerns.
- Take time to say hi – Whether walking the site to see the team in person or making sure you address your team when you can be face to face. Amazing what this simple effort can do for morale. Acknowledging people and smiling will help you keep more people happily employed than you may think.
- Have a technology to help – This is where we can help. Using busybusy helps remove a lot of information gaps to help you focus on the big things. We have heard time and time again, “busybusy is conflict resolution! Having GPS to talk about things, having accurate time cards to rely on, and having work accomplished reported has helped our company culture immeasurably. As an employer or supervisor, we don’t have to accuse anymore. It’s as simple as, I was looking at busybusy and….”
Also, Implementing busybusy helps handle changes and notify teammates so you have less to remember and can focus on the big stuff. When you update a schedule, busybusy notifies impacted teammates. When you need a signature on a timecard, busybusy notifies the specific employee. We can’t make you an expert communicator, but we can help make your job easier.
Lack of Structure – Challenge #4
Just like communication, maintaining structure and schedule helps a project run smoothly and makes your life as a construction project manager easier. Whether your team is unsure of the hierarchy, where to go for issues, what training is needed, or where to look for schedule changes, structure helps solve all these problems. Structure on a jobsite takes many forms.
- Reporting hierarchy – Who to ask for help, who works for who? Structuring your project correctly and communicating that structure for everyone’s clarity will help solve many issues.
- Training Needs – Training needs to be structured and tracked. Who is eligible to work on what equipment? Who is trained to accomplish each task? If you don’t have structured training records, understanding who on your crew is certified/eligible becomes a major headache.
- Schedule consistency – A routine is great, and while we know you can’t always keep the schedule the same, making sure your crews know when changes have been made is the next best thing. This becomes especially easy when your teams are using a time tracking application for scheduling that sends them notifications immediately to update them on the change.
Poorly Defined Expectations – Challenge #3
We might sound like a broken record by now, but this challenge is directly related to communication. What happens when you’re playing poker and your friend wants to bluff the other players, but can only do it with your help? The problem is, they didn’t tell you exactly what they were expecting and you thought YOU were the one who was going to bluff. Long story short, you both lost. This happens in construction too.
When your team doesn’t know or understand what is expected of them, they can’t perform to those expectations regardless of their abilities or commitment to the project. This also impacts you as a manager and your superiors, but we’ll get into that more in Challenge #1 coming up.
So, how do you provide better defined expectations to your team?
- Communicate – Let them know what you need, when you need it, and when things change.
- Training – If someone cannot perform a task expected of them, train them or provide on-site job shadowing to bring them up to speed.
- Communicate (again!) – This time, we mean communicating expectations through progress. Tell them when they do something great, but also let them know when it’s subpar and needs improvement.
Essentially, if you don’t communicate your expectations from the project estimate, your team won’t perform as well as they could.
Time Management – Challenge #2
Timing is everything. Playing a perfect hand without giving up your position for a bigger pot or sequencing your jobsite, timing makes the difference.
One challenge we see a lot, is running out of time without realizing it until it’s too late. For example, your project has 3 phases and 8 weeks to get it done. Without clearly defined phases and the means to track them, you didn’t know at week 5 that your crew only completed 3 weeks according to the schedule. How do you make up 5 weeks of work in the remaining 3 without asking for an extension or more money? This is a difficult place to be, and while we may not have a solution to this problem, we have a preventative solution to this common challenge.
When you use busybusy, you have accurate time tracking for your team. The time is broken down to show hours on each project, cost codes, easily using cost codes for specific tasks, and has budget versus actual comparison reports so we can help you identify when schedule impacts are occurring before they are out of hand.
We know this time management challenge comes up a lot, hence why it made #2 for challenges project managers deal with.
Unrealistic Expectations (Schedule and Finances) – Challenge #1
This is the motherload. The Ace of Spades in your Royal Flush. The #1 Challenge that we hear all the time and it’s not close- Unrealistic Expectations. Your management thinks your crew can get the job done in two-thirds the time and half the cost. Why do they think you can do this? Often it’s because companies don’t have accurate historical data from previous projects.
As the Project Manager, you’ve been dealt a 2 and a 7 and there’s no saving your hand. Don’t let these types of projects prevail in your company. Address unrealistic expectations with accurate data and build out the historical records to support future proposals, from schedule to estimates and managing the metrics along the way. To get more in-depth at job costing with busybusy, check out the job costing benefits of our app.
Job costing increases the accuracy of project schedules and budgets, allowing you to start and manage a project with confidence, knowing and understanding how expectations are aligned and what you need to do to meet them.
We are here to help
Through all these challenges, we at busybusy are here to help you stack your deck and play your best hand for project and business success. We’re so confident that we can stack the deck and deal the cards in your favor that we’re willing to bet on ourselves and give you a 90-day money-back guarantee. Get busybusy’s construction management tool and make a bet you can’t lose.
