ABSTRACT
When I was a teenager my father was a general contractor who built houses. During summer vacations from school I worked with him. One Monday, I got in the pickup truck with him and drove to the site where three houses were being constructed. The basement walls had been completed the previous week, and my father had hired three carpentry crews. When we arrived at the site, there were the carpentry crews drinking coffee and eating donuts, as is typical for construction people. Immediately my father noticed that there was no lumber with which to construct the three houses. He got into the truck and drove to a telephone (cell phones hadn’t been invented yet) and asked about the lumber. He was told by the yard foreman that the lumber was being loaded on the truck as they spoke, and that the best they could do would be to promise that it would be delivered by the end of the day. Pop had no choice but to tell the carpenters to go home and, yes, they would be paid for this day, and to please come back tomorrow. It wasn’t until many years later when I was running a project in the execution phase that I realized that much of my work involved “making sure the right person shows up at the right place, at the right time, with the right understanding of what needs to be accomplished, with the right tools, equipment, and material with which to be successful.” Any break in this chain of necessary conditions will cost the project time and money, and frequently both. Pop had everything arranged except for the lumber. This one coordination failure cost him 12 days of carpenters’ salaries and 12 person-days of work lost.
