Planning

Mobilising a civil construction project is typically a frenetic period. For the lead manager, that’s compounded by countless people vying for their time. When that start-up time comes, most firms have a mobilisation checklist or readiness-to-proceed document. These can be excellent tools. They set out what needs to be done to satisfy client and/or company requirements, based on typically generic principles. There’s no value in making these documents larger or more cumbersome

Have you ever experienced a polar shift in your point of view? Many years ago I was working on a project where the principal contractor dictated that every month we had to produce a certificate stating we had worked in accordance with the project’s management plans. At the time, I was aghast. It was not possible or logical to do this. Plans were drafted to satisfy the faceless few offsite and then put in a drawer to never be seen again…unless of course there was a major issu

Changes easily occur every day in the construction and mining sectors and, industry wide, they seem to be managed begrudgingly, with mixed results. On a recent project, we helped a client change the way they conducted pre-shift meetings while, on another, we worked with a team to guide them through completely changing how they reported their daily activities. These, and numerous other initiatives we’ve supported, have underscored what matters most in managing change. When ch

A common issue for many sites is getting excavator bucket sizing right. It seems straightforward on the face of it – you order a given size and that’s what should arrive. In practice, it’s not that simple. Typically, GP buckets for 30t excavators can vary by more than 12%. If you’re working to a 10% margin, that could mean the difference between making or losing money. When excavators are hired for a site, it’s important to stipulate bucket sizes and then run a check to see

On the face of it, the question ‘how much is a cubic metre’ is pretty simple: it’s the volume occupied by a cube where all sides are 1m in length. However, for those of us working in bulk earthworks, it’s slightly more complicated. Three stages of earthmoving Earthmoving generally involves three processes: Digging Hauling Placing At each of these stages, the material has a different density. That’s why we like to be careful with how we name the volume it occupies. What’

Inspection and test plans (ITPs) are a ubiquitous part of nearly all civil projects these days. The question is, are they useful? One of our observations, drawn from many sites and clients, is that ITPs have morphed into something more like a work instruction or process flow. People have tried to make ITPs the ‘everything’ document and, when that happens, they rapidly become a ‘nothing’ document. In many cases, they’ve become so large, convoluted and all-encompassing they are

Back when GPS kits were first being bolted on to diggers, we were all told how great it was going to be for trimming batters. This new technology was going to do away with manual methods like batter rails and, as a result, cut the cost of batter trimming (which had always been relatively high). The system was also meant to be so effective that we’d hardly even notice work was going on. Maybe it was meant to be so fast it would become one of those things that ‘just happened’ –