Practical, experience-based project management lessons for project engineers, developing project managers, and field professionals.
Friday Field Notes: Start Here
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If you’re new here, Friday Field Notes is a short weekly newsletter built around practical project management lessons from the field. I originally started writing these notes for Project Engineers I was helping develop. The goal was simple: give them something useful they could read in a few minutes and apply to a real project. A lot of project management is learned through formal training, procedures, software, and project controls. But some of the most important lessons come from experience. You begin to recognize where projects start to drift, what information matters, which questions should be asked earlier, and how small decisions in the field eventually show up in cost, schedule, documentation, and client conversations. Friday Field Notes is my attempt to capture some of those lessons. Each issue is intentionally short and usually includes five parts: From the Field Leadership Perspective Field Observation Spreadsheet Tip Question for the Week The subjects range from forecasting and cost control to schedules, change management, documentation, production, submittals, RFIs, leadership, and field execution. If you’re a Project Engineer, developing Project Manager, superintendent, estimator, or field professional trying to better understand how projects are actually managed, this newsletter is for you. A few good places to start are: Forecasts Are Not Budgets Daily Reports Are Project Records Change Orders Start Before the COR My goal with Friday Field Notes is not to make project management more complicated. It is to help developing project professionals get better at noticing what matters, asking better questions, and connecting what is happening in the field to the overall health of the project. If that sounds useful, stick around. There will be another Field Note next Friday. Have a great weekend, Dan The Project Prodigy |
Friday Field Notes
Practical, experience-based project management lessons for project engineers, developing project managers, and field professionals.
Good morning team, This week’s topic: look-ahead schedules. 1. From the Field A look-ahead should represent what the project team actually believes is going to happen over the next few weeks. That sounds obvious, but I’ve seen look-aheads continue showing activities that everyone onsite already knows are not going to start on the dates listed. At that point, the document stops being a planning tool and becomes an exercise in updating dates. A useful look-ahead should reflect current field...
Good morning team, This week’s topic: project schedules. 1. From the Field A project schedule is obviously a planning tool, but I’ve found that its real value comes from how well it helps people understand what is supposed to happen next. A schedule can be technically correct and still be difficult to use. If the field team cannot tell what areas should be available, when subcontractors are needed, or what activities are driving the next few weeks of work, the schedule is not doing much to...
FRIDAY FIELD NOTES #12 Submittals Protect the Work Good morning team, This week’s topic: submittals. 1. From the Field Submittals are sometimes treated as an administrative requirement that must be cleared before the work can begin. In practice, they serve a much more important purpose. A submittal gives the project team an opportunity to confirm that a proposed material, procedure, supplier, plan, or piece of equipment meets the contract requirements before it is incorporated into the work....