Done? What Would Smokey Say?

The Production Crew

Early in my construction career I was responsible for the interior build-out of the Headquarters office of the mall developer, Taubman Company, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The drywall contractor had begun falling behind - the steel studs had been installed on time but the wallboard had not started as scheduled. The drywall contractor's superintendent assured me that he would be "done" in two weeks (heard that before?). He said his "production crew" was coming off another job and they were going to "knock it out in no time"-- Sure enough, within a week, the job looked completely different. Upon closer inspection, the crew had installed all the full-sheets of wallboard, and had left uncompleted the cut-outs at the top of the wall, where the structure above and the above-ceiling services intersected the wall. The crew was packing up when I asked them when they planned to finish -- they said they were "done" - another crew did the cut-out work.

The Last 5%

It ended up taking another two weeks to get the last 5% of the wallboard installed---- and the lesson I learned from that experience has become vivid in my mind - There is a natural tendancy on any job to accomplish the high-productivity work (the big pieces, the repetitive work that makes the most money per amount-of-time-spent) FIRST, and leave the rest to be done "all at the same time", "when we come back to finish-up", etc.---

Allowing that to happen adversely affects the attitude and overall quality on the job. If one trade sees another trade's work left incomplete or with significant corrections to be made, they are less inclined to raise the standard themselves. It is best for the project NOT to allow the work to be "finished later" -- the goal should be, to add-on to the Nike ad: Just Do It --NOW!

Done? or Smoldering?

Another lesson from the "production crew" that I have learned over the years is the concept of what "done" means. "Done" should mean "done", but often it means, "complete, EXCEPT for a few things that in my mind are insignificant compared to the overall amount of work I have done, but probably did not bring up . . . "

Many years ago, the US Forest Service had a problem with people leaving campfires "mostly extinguished", and major forest fires starting hours later from the smoldering ashes left by well-meaning campers. They created an ad campaign with Smokey The Bear, where he would urge people to make sure their fires were "out -- dead out". This may be a good image when you think of "mostly complete" work or issues -- similar to a fire that could flare-up unless extra attention or efforts are paid to make SURE.

Smokey would say: DONE = Dead Out.

I hope this is helpful when working with construction teams or in everyday communication--



Answer to the Trivia Question:
President who could write Latin with one hand while writing Greek in the other:
James A. Garfield (20th president), who unfortunately died in office from an assassin's bullet that was never found. They later concluded from an autopsy that he would have lived if the doctors had not tried to find it (!!).