[meme405]

Originally Posted by Soundy

Oh trust me, I'm all too familiar with this concept. We do CCTV for an upscale restaurant chain you're all familiar with... not one of their new sites has opened anywhere near the final date we're given at the start of the project. A couple of sites (both their smallest and largest stores, ironically) finished close to a year over schedule. So to my thinking, 5 months over isn't too bad considering the relative scale of the whole project.

Of course, in our case, it's usually a case of the designers constantly changing things, with no real procedure for change controls. Then again, the same thing could be happening (probably is, in fact) with PMH1 - you get pencil pushers and bureaucrats hovering around and regularly making random changes that set one part of the construction back... which in most cases, sets other parts back... and when you have a tightly-coordinated schedule, the ripple effect can be just nasty.

Even one trade's delivery delays can have a major ripple effect - like if the flooring guys take delivery a week late of the super-fancy tile that has to come in from somewhere overseas, because a boat was delayed by a hurricane, that affects everyone with fixtures and equipment that sit on that tile... like all the kitchen equipment... which delays plumbing all that in... which potentially screws up the pipefitters who may already have other jobs scheduled for that next week... and so on.

Spoiler!

Several years ago we did a number of installs on new gas station constructions for one of the big oil companies. The lead guy for them loved to feel involved, so he'd pop in now and then to make his presence felt... like if I mounted something just slightly different from the plan (out of sheer necessity), he'd give me crap for not for it "not matching the drawings", yet if I asked him first about moving it, his answer would be, "you're the expert, do whatever you think you need to do".

This guy also loved to make changes on-the-fly. By drawing right on the main set of drawings. Without any change controls. Sometimes without informing anyone else.

I had camera wires hanging under a pump canopy where our drawings showed them, and the soffit guys started their work, drilling holes to drop my wires where they were hanging. Got a call from the site super one day, saying some of my wires were in the wrong place so the soffit guys had been instructed not to drop them through. So I went to site... the super was an idiot and couldn't point out to me just what was wrong with the locations, just repeated that they WERE wrong. So we went in the shack and looked through the drawings... and there, on the master set, IN PENCIL, the bigwig had changed their locations, apparently several days before I actually dropped the wires in the first place, but nobody had ever told us...

So this meant me having to drill new holes in the new locations, then crawling up in the now-enclosed canopy to find where the soffit guys had left them coiled, and fish them to the new locations. AND then of course, both the super and the bigwig bitched about the holes at the wrong locations and wanted to know what we were going to do about them...

This bigwig is the same guy who looked at the drawings for a site with a drive thru, didn't like THE LOOK of the curb sticking out behind the electrical room into the drive-thru lane, so he took his pencil and drew it as a straight line. And the concrete guys busted the curb up and re-did it to the changes. And then the inspector came by and said, no no, can't do that, there has to be that spot to stand outside the electrical room doors. And so they had to bust the curb AND the paved lane up, and do it all over again, to the original plans.

Seeing this kind of shit ALL THE TIME means I have a lot of sympathy for Kiewit on this. With all the different levels of government involved, I can only imagine how much hair their managers have lost.

Before you feel too bad for Kiewit keep in mind that their contract is Design-Build. So if they have issues with people continuously changing things they only have their own engineers to be upset with.

I mean I guess you could say the government may have requested changes here and there, but I doubt it happened too much. I'd also argue that if the government, who basically knows dick, had to step in and request changes, the design by Kiewit must have been rather appalling.

I do know what you mean though, I've been on projects with owners and engineers as you are describing them, not much you can do. There is some opportunities that you can help yourself by knowing your contract, or by using proper change management procedures, but if the person doesn't want to play ball, then you can often find yourself struggling.