Panic: The hidden truth behind shooting from the hip!

Don't panic, what?

Congratulations you were just read low on a substantial highway bid, but you're really low, maybe 25 percent under the number two bidder. You put up a bid bond to guarantee that you'll accept the contract, so what do you do?

There was a foot of snow on the area when you went to look at the project before the bid, all of your job walking was from the warm cabin of your rental car. You get the job, upload the budget, the crew mobilizes and a couple of months in, the PM calls to ask you about the blasting budget for that nifty borrow site you chose on a commercial lot. You say, I didn't see any rock under the snow, so there is no budget. What to do?

There is really only one thing that you can do. Don't panic!

You're driving the watertruck one day on the highway job and you see across the median that one of the motor grader's has caught fire. The foreman is there with a small extinguisher, but the diesel fed flames are getting out of control. Do you drive the 1/2 mile to the cross road and then back to the fire? You have about half a load of water, so you know you can make a difference. The machine is insured, but instead of doing the prudent thing, you panic and go flying through the median to get straight to the fire. You picture yourself saving the day and getting accolades from the owner for saving his machine. Only as your truck vascillates from left to right, the water in your tank sloshes over and flips your beautiful truck right onto it's side in the median. You're not hurt, but instead of those accolades, you get fired. Panic is not your friend, ever!

The best action is to stabilize the situation, regroup and make a plan that isn't kneejerk and isn't focused on fault. I've always told my teams to keep the "F" word out of the discussion because assigning blame only forces the mistake makers to become defensive and withdraw their participation in the solution.

We had a project in the mines that called for a heavy HDPE liner with articulated concrete block placed on top to anchor the liner in the spillway section between the pond and the outlet channel. The mine was in a hurry to get this done, because it was a stormwater management feature and the monsoon was coming up quick on the calendar. When our PM called the block supplier to schedule delivery, he was informed that non of the material had been made yet because the particular wire rope that was specified to go between the blocks was not available. So here we were, the vendor had not told us there was a production delay, we had not made any progress checks with the vendor over the 3 months since we wrote them the purchase order. The monsoon storms were building every afternoon and we had our butts hanging out a mile on that spillway. Don't panic..

Plan B was now to put a bunch of sandbags on the liner in the spillway and then the lining was done for the pond and the spillway so if the pond filled up and overflowed, there would not be any erosion. Meanwhile, we told the mine about the wire rope situation and they said "you should have asked, we are fine with changing to something equivalent that is available." They didn't say the "dumb shits" part out loud but the look on their faces didn't make those words necessary. Ok, so we're just delayed a few weeks, but the system is technically functional, so all is well. Right?

Well about a week into the delay, a monsoon thunderstorm rolled across the site, generating 100 plus mile per hour straight line winds. The puny little sandbags were no match for the wind and the venturi affect across the pond. The liner ripped up and let the high winds under the liner for the entire pond. The force was enough to relocate about 100 feet of temporary barrier into the pond.

The situation was a complete disaster that was completely ours in the making. We hadn't done our diligence with the supplier and now we had storm damage in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and the mine's facility was no longer functional.

Don't panic! Right?

So we convened a meeting with the Mine Manager, the Engineer, the Liner Installer, and Mine Operations. We laid out the situation without any finger pointing, we acknowledged where the process had failed and looked to the group to help us correct the problem without bankrupting the project.. It was a simple error that mother nature exacerbated and contractually we were holding the bag. We were honest and humble, so the Mine Manager agreed to absorb 1/3rd of the cost and the Engineer stepped up for another third because he felt that their initial specification for the wire rope had some culpability, and we ate the other third. It wasn't a victory in any sense, but our margin on the job didn't go negative, so I called it a win.

These type of problems often go the complete opposite direction. Stakeholders start panicking, fingers start pointing, and letters start flying. But in this instance, all parties refrained from trying to assign blame and instead spent our energy on resolving the situation in a manner that spread the financial pain as fairly as possible.

The downside to public bidding is that the results are public record and the tendancy is to measure the "goodness" of your bid in relation to where the other contractors valued the project. I've found that some of the best projects have been ones where we left quite a bit on the table and some of the worst projects have been the ones where we were really close. For that reason, panic over bid results is never warranted. You should always review your bid after the fact, not to try and abandon the project, but to identify areas of budget risk and bring these to the construction teams attention, so they can work toward mitigating the risk. Sometimes that's trying to value engineer a better approach, or maybe even adjust the workplan to help aleviate the problems. When the whole team is pulling for a solution, it's amazing what they can come up with.

Don't panic! The solution exists, you just can't see it until the the perspective changes. But you need all eyes searching for the solution without the blinders of blame. Problems and mistakes have to belong to the entire team, because the "F" word will change from Fault to Fail very quickly.

BK