Practical project management lessons from environmental, demolition, remediation, and industrial work. For project engineers, developing PMs, and field professionals. Delivered every Friday.
Friday Field Notes: Start Here
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If you’re new here, Friday Field Notes is a short newsletter delivered every Friday, with practical project management lessons from environmental, demolition, remediation, and industrial work. 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 when the work isn’t going as planned, 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 project management lessons from environmental, demolition, remediation, and industrial work. For project engineers, developing PMs, and field professionals. Delivered every Friday.
Good morning team, This week’s topic: small tools and consumables. 1. From the Field Nobody calls an emergency meeting because the project bought another box of cutting wheels. Small purchases rarely look concerning one at a time. Over several months, though, the job may go through far more blades, filters, hoses, batteries, PPE, and other consumables than the estimate allowed. Some small tools will also disappear into gang boxes, service trucks, and whatever mysterious place tape measures go...
Good morning team, This week’s topic: equipment cost exposure. 1. From the Field Equipment costs don’t wait for someone to notice them. A rented excavator can be fueled, inspected, parked in exactly the right spot, and accomplish absolutely nothing while the rental clock keeps running. Sometimes the delay can’t be avoided. An approval may still be pending, the work area might not be ready, or the sequence may have changed. The trouble starts when “we’ll probably need it later” becomes the...
Good morning team, This week’s topic: labor hours. 1. From the Field Knowing that a project used 500 labor hours does not tell you much by itself. You need to know what those hours accomplished. That is where labor tracking becomes more useful. If 500 hours produced 1,000 units one week and the same 500 hours produced 650 the next, something changed. The reason could be completely legitimate, but the project team should understand it. I’ve found that labor discussions become much more useful...