Construction Manager

It started simply. My wife and I had a three-bedroom house and three kids, one being a newborn baby girl. With one kid left without a room, our initial plan was to have our oldest two children share a bedroom and let the new baby have her own room. The two older children acted as if sharing a room was like having a sleepover every night. They were up until all hours, making the nightly feedings exceptionally difficult. After several months of this setup, we realized something had to be done.

The solution for us was to convert our existing den into our daughter’s bedroom and build a new den off of the back of the house. Determined to have our remodeling go smoothly, we hired an architect and worked out every conceivable detail over the next two months. We interviewed numerous contractors and finally settled on one with whom we felt very comfortable. We worked out the details on a contract and the work began. We were so excited. This would give us four bedrooms and would eliminate the nightly raucousness. Peace at last, or so we thought.

Needed: a new tool

After work began, I noticed that the way contractors worked was frequently very inefficient because they managed almost all of their business with a notepad and a cell-phone. Being a software engineer for quite some time, I began documenting scenarios that occurred. After observing the work routine, I realized that a tool could be developed that could alleviate the pain of construction, from the perspective of both the construction company and the homeowner. Granted, some of the things that occurred could have been avoided with such a tool and some not, but in any case I thought my personal experience was trumpeting the need for such tools in the construction industry.

First off, our slab was poured in the middle of a tropical storm. Now while this was not really a problem from a technical perspective, as concrete can be poured in the rain, it definitely was a logistics problem, as our contractor had numerous projects going on that all had to be handled in the middle of that storm. At this point we knew that a construction deliverable management tool must be able to handle the logistics of multiple construction projects going on at one time, all in different locations. In the case of our slab, the logistics got messed up a bit and somehow our contractor incorrectly thought that the roof to the addition had been covered with tarp. As the roof was not completed, a tarp was needed to protect the rest of our house from the rain. So the water pooled up and flooded the interior of the back of our house.

An on-site deliverable management system would have allowed a manager to know what construction sites needed work done. In our case, it would have alerted the manager that a tarp was needed. It also may have indicated that the painting that was going on at two other sites was of much less importance, relatively speaking. In my contractor’s defense, he responded extremely quickly and refunded us every penny we had to pay for repairs to the existing floors.

We survived the tropical storm and the roof was finished…almost (Fig. 1). Because a chimney had to be moved in our project, we were left with a hole in the roof that was not filled until the roofer returned three weeks later. Not being a roofer by trade, it wasn’t until I noticed a bit of dampness on some sheetrock that I realized there was still roofing work to be done.

Fig. 1: The worksite where the story you are reading took place.

Again, it seemed that this slipup could have been avoided by an on-site deliverable management system.

Our troubles seemed to subside a bit until the inside work started. We noticed one set of workers writing a phone number down on our wall. The next day, it was textured over by a different crew. The following day, the same crew came back cursing that their important phone number was gone. Next, there were schedule fiascos. Materials and tools were sent to our house but were needed at another. Workers showed up at the site sometimes with the wrong tools or materials or both.