“The guy is golden. He is everywhere at the same time and the only thing he doesn’t have is enough time. He is the one having the knowledge. He is the one having to check all his sub teams. He is the one having to make all the daily journals, all the delivery reports, everything.”
— L., developer/plant owner-operator.
Construction projects large enough to be complex, but not large enough to have very solid processes often run on several key persons. Heck, even projects with established processes depend on them too. The one we hear often about, the site manager.
One person, every hat
The person with all hats at once: Accept deliveries, sing-off work done, get a digger unstuck from mud, raise damage claims with suppliers, track their staffs’ compliance. They are also the person who then knows if the cables had to be moved or what the client verbally agreed to in the morning.
This is a superhuman ability, it is also a business risk, a capacity constraint and a stressor for the site manager themselves. The more a person is able to hold in their brain, the more this effect compounds.
When it comes to documenting any decisions or finished work. The golden site manager will, after a full day, sit in their office on site and write down all that happened that day. Or at least they think so. The fact is, we have seen many construction journals holding the bare minimums to fulfill contracts. Journals that omitted on the spot decisions to strengthen poured concrete.
Where the record goes missing
Records do not get omitted from negligence or an individual’s failure. They are missed through time pressure combined with the exact brilliance of these people, which allows them to solve problems independently with no trail behind.
Everyone pays a price
Everyone from there on pays in the same currency: chasing. An investor chases progress reports. The project manager chases photos and journals to create reports. And the subcontractor chases instructions given last week, verbally.
This is not a discipline problem, but a design one. Complex project, tight deadline and a person chosen precisely because they are capable of juggling it all.