Inside Third & Bond: Week 80

Today the Third & Bond bloggers from Hudson Companies explain the importance of everyone working well together…It isn’t about cooperation so much as coordination. At the site now we have six to seven trades working simultaneously. Each trade is focused solely on getting its own work done. To be efficient, they need to stay out of each other’s way and not fall behind. There’s a practical sequence for constructing a building that enables one trade to follow another. It starts with the obvious: excavation, then foundation, and then superstructure. Once the superstructure is in place, the trades must be coordinated with more forethought. The carpenter is first and comes through to lay out the track for the demising walls.

Then the HVAC subcontractor follows to lay out the ductwork. It’s important that the ductwork be installed next because it’s bulkier than the plumbing and often both have to fit into the same narrow vertical chase or in close proximity to the decking above in order to avoid the dreaded dropped ceiling. Then the plumber comes through and installs the pipes. And so on until every trade has come through from carpenter to tile layer, electrician to painter. Many of the trades have repeat performances. For example, once all of the innards of the walls are in place like the plumbing and electrical conduit, the carpenter comes back through to hang the sheetrock. The plumber will also come back later to finish up the fixtures.

On occasion a trade will get slowed down or stuck and a following trade will leap-frog. For example, last week the plumber had caught up to both the HVAC and the carpenter and wanted to leap-frog. So Kiska had the plumber mock up the layout of the demising walls, checked it, and then let the plumber do his drilling and pipe installation in places unaffected by the work of the other subs.

Sometimes a subcontractor, in a hurry to complete the work, will come across an issue and create his own solution. Problems arise when that solution ends up working only for that sub and not any of the others who follow. You can imagine the tempers that flare when one sub blames another guy for screwing up his work. An anonymous source gave us the punch line to a story about an insurance claim and the coordination issue that caused it: it would have been practically impossible for anyone to have fallen from that spot except as the result of an unusual force such as a fist to a jaw.

Coordination issues on site can and do escalate from building problems to interpersonal problems. The trades tend to avoid intermingling eating lunch separately, going to the same bar but sitting at different tables, that kind of thing. There are stereotypes, hierarchies, and annoyances amongst them. For example, we’re told the electrician tends to think he rules the roost because everyone depends on him for power. If he gets mad enough and the power blows out… he can demonstrate his irritation with another trade by his reluctance to juice them back up. But that’s just a story that a carpenter told us…

Like any other work place the biggest wild card are the people in it. Their hard and soft skills alike make a difference in how the project itself is executed. We can plan it all out on paper in the most minute of ways, but when it’s real people confronting real constraints in the physical world, anything can happen.

Inside Third & Bond: Weeks 1-79 [Brownstoner]

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