Difficult to believe but true

It all started at 22 Freeport, the project that exceeded all our capabilities. The first problem we had was simply keeping track of hourly payroll. Our "system" at the time consisted of paper timesheets, small enough to fit in a wallet. Each day, the worker would get their supervisor to fill in the start and stop times for that day, and sign. This was ok when the team was less than 20 people. At 22 Freeport we had around 200 hourly paid workers.

We got a Compumatic face-recognition biometric clock, and that was amazing. The only problem was that the software that came with the clock wasn't processing the hours in a way that we could feed into our payroll software. My first foray into software development was when I created a Microsoft Access application that kept a registry of our contractors and processed punches from the biometric clock. Called BioPay for obvious reasons, a lot of Infinite users still refer to C-Birt by this name.

Stress levels on the 22 Freeport project varied between extreme anxiety and full-blown panic. If we had a fortnight when the contractor payroll was light, we would worry that the project was moving too slowly and that overheads would kill us. If the payroll was heavy, we would wonder if that money was really translating into progress on the ground or if we were just burning through the budget. We had no visibility and everything felt out of control. We had a full-time Quantity Surveyor who's only job was to create charts to track the progress of each unit, and Gantt charts to predict the remaining duration of the project. He printed the Gantt charts on blueprint-size paper, and there were so many pages that the entire wall of the site office was covered with them. These charts were so far from reality that we stopped looking at them.

We started using inFlow to track our inventory. But Project Managers used hand-written requisition forms to request material, and there was no way to control how much material was issued for an activity. The PM would take a guess at how much material he needed and write a requisition. If the material was damaged, stolen, or used somewhere else on the site, the PM simply wrote another requisition. We were constantly running out of material.

Hourly payroll was handled by the biometric clock, but task payroll was a nightmare. PMs would send in measurements of "completed work" each fortnight. For example, for a tiler they would list the surface area tiled in a given house. We then had to troll through past payrolls to see what the tiler had already been paid for in that house, to prevent him being double paid. Payroll preparation took at least 4 days. And the PMs spent much of their time measuring work, instead of holding the line on quality. The contractors were effectively supervising the PMs. (See my blog article on this.)

The team was in turmoil. It was a competition for resources; every man for himself. And constant fear and blame throwing. In the pressure to be productive, PMs would start their tasks prematurely, getting in the way and creating re-work.

Then there were episodes of binge work, when senior management would decide that plastering was falling behind and we needed to go gang busters on plastering to catch up. This always resulted in two things: a ton of half-completed plastering work all around the site, and the realisation 2 weeks later that while we were going gang busters on plastering, we fell behind on five other trades.

And there was the mystery of empty houses. We were massively behind schedule, pressuring the team for productivity and spending money like a river. Yet, on a walkthrough of the site we would go through house after house with nobody working in it.

The good part? We accepted that we needed radical change.