Cover and move
The methods of a Sound Procurement Team
“Cover and move”, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin wrote in their best-selling book, Extreme Ownership. This particular phrase is repeated several times, but it wasn’t until the concept was applied to the idea of including “other” teams to achieve an overall goal that it hit me, “That’s what we do with PriceBuyFlow! We’re covering the moves made by construction contractors while they meet demand and maneuver fluid situations.”
The technical elements of Jocko and Leif's plan are such that one element of the team is constantly looking out/about for potential threats, thereby allowing the other element to focus and react to their immediate surroundings. Construction projects can offer a similar kind of volatility and opportunity. However, as Leif and Jocko depict, these opportunities can also become traps, costing contractors valuable time, money and reputation equity. Instead of RPG's and IED's, these situations often come in the forms of ASI’s, RFQ’s, RFI’s, or any variation to the scope or schedule of the project/change in the plan. This is the time that a contractor must move, the time when all of a contractor’s focus is aimed at trading correct communications with their external clients regarding costs and impacts. It's a challenge.
The technical elements of Jocko and Leif's plan are such that one element of the team is constantly looking out/about for potential threats, thereby allowing the other element to focus and react to their immediate surroundings. Construction projects can offer a similar kind of volatility and opportunity. However, as Leif and Jocko depict, these opportunities can also become traps, costing contractors valuable time, money and reputation equity. Instead of RPG's and IED's, these situations often come in the forms of ASI’s, RFQ’s, RFI’s, or any variation to the scope or schedule of the project/change in the plan. This is the time that a contractor must move, the time when all of a contractor’s focus is aimed at trading correct communications with their external clients regarding costs and impacts. It's a challenge.
These challenging times are the times that a contractor habitually relies on personal experience, cognitive strength, and memory. And after each potentially costly email is sent, whether it included a follow-up question or statement attempting to clarify, then what?
Usually silence.
[No Response.]
Meanwhile, the project moves on. Silence is all that is returned from the external client while the matter at hand becomes closer and closer to becoming a problem. Typically, we gain the clarity and direction we needed several weeks later than necessary in order to stay up to ideal speed, causing the team to react. Only now, those weeks have past and we are operating in panic mode.
Luckily, for our teams, one thing that is no longer a worry is whether or not the correct materials are going to be delivered to the correct person at the right time. Instead, our clients are offered real-time levers and mechanisms for monitoring the status of their flow of material to their job sites.
- Contractor: Is the latest change order accounted for with this material delivery?
- Cycle Rate Performance: Check.
- Contractor: Is that written communication that approved the change we suggested accounted for in this material delivery?
- Cycle Rate Performance: Check.
- Contractor: What about the ADA Lavatory Submittal that was a revise-and-resubmit? Is that accounted for in this material delivery?
- Cycle Rate Performance: NO…because this delivery doesn’t include the bathrooms. That material was delivered last week – and, yes, it did account for the resubmitted and approved submittals.
Allowing vendors, field leadership, and field installation input to improve the plan is the ultimate cover-and-move procurement method possible, and that’s what we do at Cycle Rate Performance. Dual-point verification technology applied to material spool/material lists verify that the most up-to date design/construction publications are accounted for. Further, the digital footprints of these transactions are the kind of big data worthy of an application for tracking transactions via blockchain technology.
These records allow contractors to review their performance with immutable clarity and reality. It allows them to take Extreme Ownership of their transactional trends. This process of accountability through decentralization is the core of blockchain revolution, and it's going to change the shape of procurement in construction.
At Cycle Rate Performance, we are publishing strategies and practicing procedures that allow contractors to save money and time by covering their moves. These purchasing practices are, within themselves, an entire book in the Lean Construction* school of thought. *(the version that holds serving the community above profits). If this sounds like the kind of situation that you’re familiar with, then we ask:
When you’re “moving”, who’s “covering” you?
Luckily, for our teams, one thing that is not a worry is whether or not the correct materials are going to be delivered to the correct person at the right time.
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