2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 7,500 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Time to Tender?

Why is it that the time taken to put a bid together these days seems to go on at such a frenetic pace? Is it me getting older or is something else going on?

I’ve bemoaned the design teams before about the apparent lack of sending out co-ordinated information on cd’s/dvd’s and remote ftp servers and saying here it is go and get what you need we’ve given you everything you want.

These days though with the click of a few buttons we are being sent more and more information to wade through and less and less time to understand it. And it comes in such confusing layouts/styles/folders that sometimes you just don’t know where to begin.

I had a contractor call over to see me last week with another project to look at, and it made me stop and think about how we deal with things.

The scenario goes…. (insert the names of relevant folders or projects to suit your own story as you wish)

He hands me the cd of information, up pops the folder on screen and then the fun begins…..

What are we looking for?

Well some sort of guidance as to what we’ve got for a start would be good.

Where is that.

I don’t know have a look in that folder there marked folder 1

no, nothing in there…..says contract to follow

ok, look at that one there marked folder 2

Look it’s got dwg and pdf versions of the drawings!

Ah, good a nice list, what are the drawing titles?

I don’t know there aren’t any it’s just a list of numbers

Where’s the drawing register

There isn’t one, well at least not in this folder

And so it goes on…

Now I know the government is talking about making a 20% saving in its Government Construction strategy document that it has just published, but I seriously reckon that if we got our act together and introduced a standard way of issuing electronic information we could save many man hours of each of us trying to fathom out what on earth it was we were looking at that would go towards this target.

Perhaps that could be included somewhere in the very first item of the Action Plan on co-ordination and leadership?

Thanks to Zolna Murray for the inspiration for this blog for her discussion on LinkedIn ‘How to booby trap a contractor’ and the blog she posted on the 27^th May with her list of her top 5 booby traps

Honest tendering

I’ve had a rest this week from my normal blogging and provided a guest blog for John Langford a good friend of mine.

it’s about, as the title says above………. Honest tendering.

It can be found at http://www.cmmuk.com/honest-tendering-derek-mynott

Standards of Tender Information

Now I’m not intending to have a go at designers or Architects here as they have a tough enough job as it is, but working closely with contracting organisations across the country we do see an awful lot of work provided by design teams and the standard we see…………..

We love the advent of electronic communication but please, please, please think about the stuff you are churning out these days. It’s all so easy to burn loads of standard stuff on a CD – oh just in case they might need this or that drawing or document, or to stuff it onto a server and say here’s the password and log in details, away you go sort out what you need!

We spend more time in our office trying to fathom out what on earth has been sent through on a job sometimes now than actually doing the job. And that is saying something! And I know that contractors and subcontractors feel the same way about it too. It’s frequent topic of conversation.

And drawings…….we have to check every time now to see that a drawing is to an actual scale you can recognise! The number of times recently we’ve had drawings that are not to scale……ok might be only between 5 and 10% error but that could make or break a tender submission.

Have to say that the best sets of documents we have seen recently come out on civil engineering projects. There’s always a list of numbered documents, you know exactly the drawings that have been issued (as you always get a drawing register) and everything is just……well……numbered logically so you can follow things. A joy to work with.

So why can we not have some uniformity in standard of documents that are issued by the design teams at tender stage? It seems everyone just does their own thing and dumps it further down the supply chain to sort out. Just saying that’s all……..