When I was a Wet Utilities Superintendent, I wasn’t the best one in the world. Luckily for me, Mike and Gilbert were good foremen; if I could make sure they had something to do, they were pretty good at doing it. The challenge was making sure they had something to do.
Our project was a light rail job in Los Angeles County, and as you can imagine our alignment crossed city streets—and the publicly and privately owned utilities they contained—in numerous places. All we needed to do to install a new storm drain line under the railway was make sure we had pipe, a completed design, permits, inspectors (for the client, City, and County) ready to come out, survey layout, any conflicting utilities such as gas or power service out of our way, and a number of other small things I’m not remembering off the top of my head.
In other words, the likelihood of something coming up to prevent our “Plan A” operation was always lurking in the shadows.
As a Field Superintendent, therefore, I learned to ‘expect the unexpected’.
When I first started working with Mike and Gilbert, we had roughly twenty intersections worth of relocations or pipe protections to perform. Call it sixty activities ranging in duration from one to five days. The concept of ‘float’ lost its meaning from where I sat. If I got a call that, say, a gas main that should have been relocated in Avenue 50 was not going to be moved for a couple more weeks, and that gas main blocked the 36” RCP I planned to have Mike’s crew install the next day, I needed to figure out what Mike was going to do.
Maybe there was a 24” storm lateral that needed to go in at Avenue 53. The pipe was there; things were in place; and after a few phone calls where I used my best indoor voice the inspectors agreed to meet me at the new location. In other words, Mike’s crew would be occupied tomorrow, and I could move my attention to the day after.
Did we just consume float to avoid delay?
If Avenue 53 was the only operation in my back pocket, and there were no options available to me the next day, One Could argue that I had one day of float when I learned of the gas problem at Avenue 50. However, if we had scheduled our work with Level 4 detail, Avenue 53 might have been a finish-to-start successor to Avenue 50, and both activities could have had zero float. That relationship would have, of course, been resource-driven logic, not physical logic, so strict CPM rules could be bent in the field.
How could my manager have seen the kind of ‘give’ my schedule
truly had? What sort of non-CPM complementary tool could we have used to help us?