PROCESS OF DISCOVERY In the medical arena, autopsies can confirm connections between clinical symptoms and diseased organs. They can improve understanding of illness, confirm or disprove the quality of care, and increase medical knowledge overall, leading to better diagnoses and treatment in the future.
In the less clinical vernacular of remodeling, an autopsy or debriefing can show what went wrong and what went right in a particular project, and what you might do differently (or more of) in the future. What you meant to spend, what you did spend, and what caused the slippage. Who did well, and whose performance fell short. What the client liked and didn’t like. Where your company excelled, where it faltered, and what opportunities it might have missed.
“There’s always something you can learn, even if it’s the good stuff,” says Walt Mathieson, an accounting and technology consultant. “What are the things you do better than anyone else, the things you can make more money doing more of?” Keep debriefings positive, he says. “It’s not a fault-finding mission. It’s an educational mission for improving processes going forward.”
Mathieson has written a white paper (downloadable at www.mathiesonconsulting.com) that outlines a number of guidelines for the debriefing process. He cautions, however, that “there’s not a checklist” for every remodeler to follow formulaically. “There are many potential areas of exploration and discovery,” he says, “but if you’re looking for a one-page list of boxes to check off, you might miss some real nuggets. Sometimes you don’t know what the problem is until you come across it.”
“Everybody thinks, ‘Let’s catch the problems,’” says Paul Bauscher of Bauscher Construction & Remodeling, in Loveland, Ohio. “We want to catch the successes as well.” His company debriefs for 45 minutes to an hour after every project, from small bathroom jobs to whole-house remodels.
Key to the meetings’ success, Bauscher says, is that they are at once formal, in that they stick to a typed agenda and review detailed job cost analysis reports, yet “we’re very open. Everyone has the freedom to say we could have handled this better,” ideally by offering solutions instead of pointing fingers. Finally, Bauscher’s team completes a “project score card” that ranks nine categories on a scale of 1 to 10. “I have to believe that if your field crews like certain projects, they’re going to be in a better mood and be more productive,” Bauscher says.
VITAL SIGNS Premier Builders, in Wilmington, Del., debriefs after all projects as well as during them, in weekly operations and production meetings. “Our belief is that there’s something to learn from every job,” says Candace Roseo, vice president. Scheduling benchmarks are integral to Premier Builders’ interim-debriefing process. Gantt charts compare target and actual dates for both the design and construction phases of a project. After a job closes —typically around 30 days out —Roseo and team complete a checklist that covers close-out procedures and reviews finances. The checklist also allows for subjectivity, asking for “the best thing we did,” “the worst thing we did,” four more best and worst points, and the strong and weak points of every individual involved, including office staff and suppliers.
“We debrief on the fly, too,” Roseo says. She cites a recent situation where cabinet changes were discussed, documented in meeting minutes, but not indicated on the actual plans. Twenty cabinet faces (for a dentist’s office) arrived with holes drilled on the wrong sides. As a direct consequence, the company now requires any design changes to be noted on the actual plans, next to the signatures of the project manager and owner.
Other improvements inspired by debriefings at Premier Builders:
- Product specs are triple-checked before orders are placed.
- Each job gets an on-site storage trailer to keep materials from going missing, being damaged, or getting in the way during construction.
- The project manager and field supervisor do two “internal job walks” and punch lists before final walk-through with the client.
DISSECTING THE NUMBERS Without a body, there’s nothing to autopsy. Without finances, there’s no quantifiable way to compare the accuracy of your estimating to the realities of production. Even time-and-materials contractors should debrief, Mathieson says. He recommends being open book with direct expenses, but says to be sure your staff understands the bigger financial picture. “It’s incumbent that the lead carpenter knows that the owner isn’t just pocketing the gross profit on the job,” he says.
At Greg Smith Co., in Falls Church, Va., owner Greg Smith takes time during and after projects to compare the actual costs of labor, materials, and subcontractors to their estimated costs. When there’s a variance, it almost always involves in-house labor, as his trade contractors work for a fixed price. Smith still sees value in having in-house crews, so he is adjusting his markups and hours to offset their occasional inefficiencies.
At Harrell Remodeling, in Mountain View, Calif., an extensive project oversight process culminates in a line-by-line analysis of the estimated and actual costs of every aspect of the job. Questions asked might include: What was the construction revenue and gross margin? The design revenue and gross margin? Was enough budgeted for administration? What did we learn from this project? (See “Lessons Learned,” right.)
At Advanced Kitchens and Advanced Contractors, in Marietta, Ga., all 11 employees help to “dissect” active projects at weekly production meetings, says Ed Cholfin, president. Using work-in-progress reports, they can compare original and current contract amounts, change orders, job-completion percentages, and more. The company also reviews timelines, expected delays, and strategies for minimizing their impact.
This process concludes with a job autopsy shortly after receiving all project numbers and client surveys (performed by Guild Quality, www.guildquality.com). “The agenda is short and sweet,” Cholfin says, but numbers are reviewed at the granular level, down to how much was estimated for tile, how much it actually cost, and what caused the variance. In the year since beginning these meetings, gross profits have climbed 10%, he says.