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Tile crew called us, not the general contractor. They couldn’t get a hold of him. We were renovating our house before we moved in, and the GC was supposed to be coordinating all the trades. But the tile and carpet people had a crew to schedule, and they couldn’t afford to have them sit idle. So they came to us. We reached out to the GC too. But he didn’t answer right away. Now

This is not my first rodeo. I’ve managed a lot of projects in my time. So I read his slow response as no plan and I stepped in.

Tile can’t go down until the cabinets are in. And from where I stood, the cabinets weren’t going to be ready anytime soon.

So I told the tile people that. They rescheduled their crew.

And that booked them a couple of weeks out to return.

Then the GC got back to us.

Things were in hand. He’d had a plan the whole time. And the cabinets were going to be ready. His plan had the tile crew arriving just in time, right after the cabinets were installed. But by then it was too late. We’d already told them it wasn’t going to be ready, so they booked out and everything slid by a couple of weeks.

Nobody did anything malicious there. The trade was doing the sensible thing.

They had a crew to keep busy. The GC wasn’t answering, and my wife and I were the nearest answer. And we were doing what we felt like the responsible thing was. We couldn’t see his plan, so we assumed there wasn’t one. His slow response read as no response. So we tried to help, and the help made it worse.

Now there were two plans running on the same house. One was half baked and made up on the fly by us, the other was designed to get the house done on time, and the trades followed whichever one they heard first.

Being reachable doesn’t always make you the person people ask. People take the answer from whoever is closest, not always from whoever owns the plan.

I’ve been on the other side of this too. At home, I was the one filling the gap. At work, I was the GC. I was the construction manager on a design build project with a fabricator.

We had already reviewed and approved the concept design. During design, I chose not to be on site constantly in an effort to save the client money. That was a reasonable call. And I was always reachable by phone or email. But the fabricator went straight to site and worked directly with site personnel. Together, they reconfigured the access stairs.

They improved the approved design. I found out when I opened the drawings in a review meeting to walk through them with the client and their engineering team.

The new stair configuration contradicted code. The drawings had to be redone. And the stairs they were moved completely to the opposite side of the stair of the deck.

Fortunately, it was caught at the drawing stage, not after it was built. So the cost was a redesign, but it was still a cost. And it was on my project. And the biggest part of the problem was mine. I never made it clear that changes had to come through me. So the fabricator thought they were being helpful, working with the site to make sure the client got what they wanted. The site personnel

They were the nearest answer. The same way my wife and I were at home.

And nobody picked up the phone.

So what do you do with this? If you own the plan, being reachable isn’t enough. Say up front which decisions have to come through you and be specific. For me, that should have been once the design is approved, any change to it comes through me first, especially anything that might touch on building code.

And tell the people who are going to be asked, not just the people doing the work.

The site personnel, they were the ones answering the questions. They’re the ones who needed to know to say, that one goes to Chris. Then when someone does reach you, answer fast, even if the full answer comes later.

You might say, It’s in hand, I’ll give you the details later in the week. That takes ten seconds. On a renovation, a message like that a little sooner would have kept a crew on schedule.

And if you’re the one tempted to fill the gap, find whoever owns the plan. The GC, the project manager, the construction manager, whomever it might be, and ask one question first. Do you already have a plan for this? Then wait for the answer before you act, especially when what you’re about to do is hard to undo.

Moving a crew out two weeks is hard to undo when the company is swamped.

I’ll leave you with one question. On the project you’re working on right now, which decisions would you want to hear about before they happen?

And does anybody know that?