Managing Project Document Flow
It's Thursday morning, Bob, the Operations Manager of ABC Construction is sitting in his office reflecting on the progress ABC has made in the last few months. By focusing on better management of the change order lifecycle, ABC has been able to maintain their bid margins and even gain on a few projects. The bonding company is much happier and even the customers are happier because the streamlined processes mean that issues are dealt with quickly - not months after the fact. Even with all this progress and growth, however, there are still some additional problems.
Earlier this week Bob had to let go of one of his Project Managers and friends. Joel had been with the company for a long time and had typically done a pretty good job managing projects. Starting a few months ago Bob had started getting calls from different customers complaining about Joel's responsiveness. Each time Bob went to talk to Joel there was always a reason and Bob left it alone though he grew increasingly frustrated.
Complaints from customers and the field crews continued to trickle in and the final straw came when it became apparent that two of Joel's jobs were going to come in significantly over-budget. The profit fade was completely unexpected – so much for a happy bonding company.
Yesterday Bob spent the day in Joel's office going through the project files trying to get a feel for where everything was at. Joel had six projects, all in different stages of completion. Organizing the project files to see what items were "hot" was top priority.
"How bad is it?" said Randy, the CFO as he walked into Bob's office and sat down. Bob looked down at his desk and replied with the only truthful answer he could think of – "I have no idea but pretty bad."
Bob started explaining that after spending the day going through Joel's files he realized that things had been slipping for months. There were so many unanswered letters, field directives, ASI's and RFI's that there was no way to tell where things were really at. Joel's e-mail was filled with frustrated requests from customers, subcontractors, vendors and even the foremen asking for information a second, third and even fourth time.
Randy just sat silently thinking about how the bank, bonding company and Jack the company owner were going to react. They had worked so hard building up trust again with the new system for managing change orders. It seemed like no matter what problem got solved another one popped up. Bob continued talking – basically thinking out loud while Randy acted as a sounding board. He explained that the document control problem was far larger than the change order problem because there were 10-15 times more general project documents than there were change orders. With upwards of twenty-five projects in progress the document control had become overwhelming, just having to rely on the project teams to keep things organized.
About a year ago he had worked with Jack to create a standardized filing system for projects. This was meant to help project teams keep their files organized between the computer, office filing cabinets and jobsites. Looking at it now Bob realized that everyone was still filing documents completely differently depending on the Project Manager and even then there were variations between projects!
"What the heck can we do to keep this from happening again?" Bob said with a raised voice as his frustration grew.
Randy had no grand ideas and suggested they take a break and head out to lunch and kick around some ideas away from the ringing phones and constant interruptions.
Over lunch Bob asked Randy how they were keeping up with the increased workload in accounting with all the new work. Randy started talking in "Accounting Speak" about transactions processed, receivable aging, payable aging, ratios, etc.
It then dawned on him that there may be an answer to some of Bob's problem in how accounting manages receivables and payables. He starts explaining the reporting and review process to Bob. Whether accounting is processing 20 billing transactions per month or 20,000 they get summarized on report called the Accounts Receivable Aging report. This report categorizes all the transactions into groups based on how old they are – old receivables obviously being bad.
The aging report lets Randy see if the company is trending in a good or bad direction – for instance if 2.4% of the receivables are in the 91+ day old category one month and that changes to 4.6% the following month then things are trending in a bad direction and it should be addressed.
The aging report also lets Randy focus on the problems – the old receivables without having to worry about the thousands of "normal" receivables. He can also summarize the aging report in different ways to see if a problem is isolated to a particular customer, market area or Project Manager.
Bob is interested but is having trouble visualizing how this might help him control his project documents better. Randy grabs a coloring kit for kids from the waiter and starts to sketch an idea.
What if every document that came in was logged into a common system with a date just like receivables are logged with a date when the invoice was created?
What if each document was tagged as requiring Action or Info Only? As activities driving by the document became complete the status would change to Completed – just like an invoice is "Completed" when it is paid.
With that information Bob could create an aging report for documents. This report could be run for the whole company, by project or by Project Manager. Bob stared at the sketch and immediately saw the potential.
- He could see how many documents were flowing in and out of a project in the last 30 days – this would be a good indication of whether the Project Manager was creating outgoing documents or logging incoming documents.
- By looking at the categories of open "Action" items he could get an idea of how fast these documents were moving through the system and getting completed.
- He could focus intensely on cleaning up documents that had not moved through the system for over 30 days rather than trying to focus on the thousands of documents passing through his team each month.
What Randy had laid-out was very similar to the process designed for managing Change Orders except this took it down to the document level.
The check came and Bob was quick to grab it thanking Randy for the fresh ideas. His head was spinning as he started thinking about how to actually implement this process.
As Bob settled back into his office after lunch he found the voice mail light on his phone flashing indicating that he had seven messages. Glancing at his e-mail he had received sixteen new e-mails since they had left for lunch! Wow – they had only been gone an hour. Like most good ideas this one would have to take the back burner while Bob spent the rest of the afternoon and all day Friday managing triage for Joel's projects. Locking up Friday night Bob resolved to work on improving the process of document control over the weekend rather than continuing to fight the fires. He felt comfortable with this decision as he drove home.
Saturday morning comes around and after a good breakfast with the family, Bob drives to the office. He is actually pretty happy about it this morning. Six months ago he figured this was going to be a "regular" part of life. After building and implementing the system for managing change orders things had improved and Bob had rarely been in the office on Saturdays. He vowed to do the same thing with the document control problem focusing on building a system rather than fighting the fires.
After settling into his desk he started brainstorming solutions. He knew from experience that having Project Managers keep logs in Excel would be a recipe for failure. He would be in the same position he was several months ago with change orders – inconsistent logs and no way to consolidate reporting to spot problems.
The solution with change orders was to keep all information in a common system. ABC Construction owned Forefront™ Construction Suite, an integrated software solution, which also included a Project Management module. They had not used the module very much but Bob thought it may be part of the solution to his problem. He logged in and started looking around.
As he looked around he started mentally kicking himself for not implementing this sooner. You could write RFI's, memo's, transmittals, etc., all auto-numbered, pulling information directly from a centralized project directory. Each document would create a log automatically showing date sent, date responded to, etc. The forms could be customized to look identical across the company.
It even had a "Custom Issues" log that could be setup with different categories for keeping logs of drawings, correspondence, safety inspections and all the other project documents that they had been storing in paper files trying to manage.
There was a field called "Type" that he could setup to differentiate between an item requiring Action versus Info Only. This field could be changed to Completed as the project team dealt with the document. The documents could be associated with change orders – making the change order management system even stronger. Reports could be run against all "Action" items creating a perfect to-do list for the project.
It was now close to 2 p.m. and Bob was satisfied with his progress. There was still a lot of work to do but he felt comfortable with the progress he had made. As he was locking up he made a mental checklist of the things he would still have to do. As he drove home he continued to think about the possibilities of having all project documents stored in a single system accessible by anyone from anywhere. This would add a phenomenal amount of control they had never had.
When he got home he walked through the kitchen and grabbed a notepad making a quick list of the things he would still have to do:
- Modify the forms that are part of the Project Management Module to have a consistent corporate look and feel.
- Set-up the categories for custom issues to match standardized project filing system already in place.
- Create written procedures for the project team about how and where to log project documents.
- Create an "Aging Report" for the critical project documents to track document flow.
Bob stuck this list in his briefcase and smiled knowing that he had made good progress towards solving the document control problem. He still had many weeks of triage left on Joel's projects but vowed to never let that happen again.
Over the next few weeks he would continue to work on the system. He also remembered that there was an upcoming class on Crystal Reports and Info Link. Attending would help him efficiently customize the forms he needed and create the aging report specifically for ABC Construction.
Dexter + Chaney's Executive Management Seminar "Integrating your operations with Forefront" is specifically for Senior and Executive Management and defines the step-by-step processes needed to fully integrate construction operations with Forefront.
For additional information or class schedules, click here.