The Lead Carpenter approached the General Contractor with a grim expression.
“You know how I said we’d begin framing the basement later today? I’m afraid that’s not going to happen. Unless, of course, you want the toilet in the theater.”
It was the early construction stage of a custom home. The basement floor concrete had been poured and the carpenters had chalked the lines for the walls of the lower level. They noticed that the plumbing for the toilet was actually two feet over from where the plans said it should be, which located the toilet in the planned theater room. The plumber was called to the site and admitted fault – they had improperly placed the piping. Thanks to the carpenter for escalating this quality problem as soon as they knew it!
Here’s the project management take-away from this experience:
Many tasks in a project plan have clear dependencies. We dig a hole before laying a foundation before installing the plumbing rough-ins before pouring the concrete floor before framing the basement. Each of those subsequent tasks is an opportunity for the task worker to perform a quick QUALITY CHECK on the previous task. That’s an expectation we should explicitly ask of task workers. “Hey the task which preceded your work – see any problems there?” This particular problem could have been caught even earlier, if the concrete workers had compared the blueprints with the roughed-in plumbing lines.
This is an extraordinarily efficient way to BUILD QUALITY CONTROL into your project plan. Each task dependency is an opportunity for a quality check of the previous task, surfacing issues as quickly as possible. Workers executing a successor task should have an implicit accountability for checking the work quality of the previous task.
This simple observation has enormous implications when choosing project management software.
Ask someone what software they are using to manage project work and you’ll hear a wide array of answers. There are plenty of Project Management solutions available. More accurately, there are plenty of firms that MARKET their software as a project management solution. If you wade through this marketplace at all, here’s one VITAL tip to help you sort through them — be sure they explicitly feature the ability to plan task dependencies.
Lesson: If the project management system (software) does NOT feature task dependencies, move on to something else.
