Samantha: Trust me, I know the feeling of that. We renovated our house recently and the upstairs drawing showed the stairs going one way and the downstairs drawing showed it going another way and that was an interesting conversation when it came time to make the decision. And I get your point about being able to make decisions quickly and knowing enough about the intent and the purpose and the use of the structure would allow you, I guess, to make more informed decisions and quick decisions around the right way to go for that.
Richard: Yes, definitely. It’s very important to be able to solve problems. That’s the crux of a construction manager’s job, because they don’t have the luxury of time. So they do need to be very quick and think on their feet, and most construction managers are very manic in that way. They work very fast, they don’t sleep much. They spend a lot of hours on the job. So you have to enjoy your work.
Samantha: I imagine. And what would you say is the most common obstacle preventing construction companies or builders or organizations that are building commercially to deliver on time and on budget? What would you say is the main obstacle there in that industry?
Richard: Well, I like to explain it to people in the sense of…under any project, really, there’s probably three main elements that…whether it’s domestic, industrial, commercial at the forefront…safety, quality, and economy are always working against each other in any one aspect. So obviously you want everyone to go home at the end of the day. You don’t want any injuries onsite. You want to ensure that everybody’s working safely. But at the same time, the job has to be completed on time, within a certain budget, which brings the economy into it. And at the same time, you’re also trying to achieve a high-quality project.
So all those three elements actually work against each other. They contradict each other in a way. And to manage those three processes so you end up with a good outcome is the constant three words that should be on any constructional project manager’s or developer’s mind at any one time to ensure that time and cost come in while those three elements are being addressed throughout the whole project. Yes?
Samantha: That’s a fascinating way to look at it, and I guess, certainly, for listeners to the program in terms of insights, I think that gives us a great insight into the challenges and the obstacles associated with that. Are there misconceptions associated with building either related to those three elements or are they general misconceptions when people embark on these sorts of projects?
Richard: Well, a lot of people misjudge…uneducated people misjudge what a building should cost to build, or how much it does actually cost to build. So cost becomes an issue a lot of the time. That’s quite different on a lot of projects. There are some issues relating to trades, obviously. The industry does have a bad name in a lot of cases, especially when it relates to quality and cost. The industry is full of stories of the tradesmen that come over, charged us a fortune, and we ended up when the doors don’t close or things like this.
We do suffer with a bad reputation in that sense. But not everybody’s in that boat. But the unsuspecting client can get caught out, especially when they’re trying to get a real budget job done. Everyone’s trying to save money. So you can end up on the wrong end of the stick.
Samantha: Actually, just on that, I mean, you’ve been in the industry a long time and you’ve seen a lot of things in terms of the industry. Would you say that over time, quality has decreased with some of the innovations that the industry has? Or do you think that those innovations support quality?
Richard: Well, it’s more of a personal view, I think. Obviously, there’s different products that perform a lot better than products of old. For instance, there’s a lot of composite products that work extremely well in the industry. They might be a lot more costly. In a lot of cases, the costs have been brought down and they perform just as well as products used to.
The time factor has something to do with it. People don’t have as much time to put as much pride in their work, for instance, to build…they used to build beautiful old heritage buildings. You can’t budget for something like that. Nobody’s got an endless checkbook, so things are done fairly basically now and everyone’s looking for a quicker method of construction to cut down costs.
So I think to answer your question, I don’t think the quality is worse now than it was. I think we work in an environment where time is of the essence and money is of the essence. So we end up with a product that reflects that. We’re not trying to build buildings…the pyramids that last for 5,000 years. We build buildings that last 50 or 100 years. So in that sense, the budget is down, the quality might not be as high, but we also don’t have the life cycle we require of a building that we needed before, for instance.
