How binge work slows down your housing project

Binge work happens on a multi-unit housing project when you focus your resources on one task and just go nuts on that task to the exclusion of all else.

Binge work is exciting. It feels like you're really speeding things up, like you're getting super-efficient at executing this task. And you probably are. But while you're doing great at this task, you're neglecting others. And you're massively slowing down the overall project.

Don't believe me? Let's walk through an example.

Let's look at a sample of 10 houses, with three tasks that each take 2 days and get done in this sequence: tiling, drywall framing, and electrical rough-in.

In normal production each team gets assigned to 1 house. As soon as the tilers finish their house, the drywaller moves in. As soon as the drywaller is done, the electrician moves in.

Under this scenario, by Day 20, all houses will have been tiled. The drywallers are right behind, so all houses are framed by Day 22. And the electricians get done on Day 24.

Now let's binge work it!

First, we let the tilers loose on all 10 houses at the same time. They get super-efficient and cut their time per house from 2 days to 1.5 days. Now all houses are tiled by Day 15.

Wow! Looks like we just shaved 5 days from our project duration!

That worked so well that now we must binge on the drywall work too.

We give the drywallers all 10 units, and they are so efficient that they cut their production time in half, and get all units done in 10 days. By day 25, all houses have been framed!

We may as well binge on the electrical work, because all the houses are empty now anyway. We give all 10 houses to the electricians, they also double their speed, and they are all done by Day 35.

So…we reduced our tiling time by 5 days, our framing time by 10 days, our electrical rough-in time by another 10 days…and INCREASED our overall duration from 24 days to 35 days??!!

Yup. Because while the tilers were hogging all 10 units, the drywallers had to sit on their hands until Day 16, instead of starting on Day 3. And instead of the electricians starting 2 days after the drywallers, they also had to wait 10 days.

But in the real world, your pain will be a lot worse:

Quality control will go through the window. Because you have so many houses on the go you will have to pay the teams for work-in-progress, instead of insisting they complete a unit 100% before being paid. Now in addition to the time you lost on the first go-around, you'll have to spend time going back to fix work. Nasty.

Your teams won't have continuous work, so either they will have to supplement with work on other projects (and then be unavailable when you need them) or you'll have to pay them extra-high rates to compensate them for their down time.

And you'll be tempted to send them into units that aren't quite ready for them yet. Which will lead to out-of-sequence work, which will inevitably lead to re-work. Nice.

While binge work looks impressive and feels exciting, it's an unimaginative, knee jerk response that indicates the contractor doesn't have control of the project.

Having an orderly flow of activities, with one trade following the other through a unit without any dead days, looks easy on the surface but requires a whole different level of organization and execution. It results in a lot more work going on at the same time on the site. Procurement, warehousing and logistics will really have to be on their game to keep the site fed. Contractor payroll will be huge, so your financing must be adequate. Every last person on the team must be on her game.

Now this is truly exciting: the project is moving incredibly fast, quality control is amazing, re-work is almost zero, profitability is soaring. Yeah man, welcome to C-Birt!