I spent 2010 working for a small firm doing a mix of single family renovations, custom houses, and small commercial work. The principals were a lovely couple, but when you’re the only employee in a three person firm there is a hard ceiling which is impossible to ignore, even for someone who isn’t particularly ambitious.
I wanted to try out life in a larger firm working on bigger projects, so the year was fraught with frustration as I pondered how to make a change in the midst of a recession.
2011 rang in with a sudden opportunity to join a large firm, and I spent the next two years working on a 300 unit apartment complex before heading off to Las Vegas.
I didn’t realize was that 2010 would be my last year as a professional residential architect. In retrospect, I should have savored that moment. I’ve always loved the craft of designing and documenting remodels, even if it is not a particularly well paying niche in the profession.
This past decade has put me on a financially stable path and lead me to to work that I greatly enjoy, so the tradeoff was well worth the price. But even at its kindest, the passage of time is always a touch cruel. You rarely know what you’re losing, until it’s long gone.
Two is not typically a big anniversary, but our entire schedule is wrapped around the legislature’s biennial cycle. The legislature meets at the start of every odd numbered year, so the spring of every even numbered year is a mad frantic rush to prepare budgets for all the different agency requested projects.
I was quite fortunate to be hired in summer of an even numbered year. It gave me a full eighteen months of training before being were thrown into the budget preparation process, and this was the final hazing before I could fully call myself a state employee.
As promised, it was utter chaos for the months of April through June, barely keeping my actual projects afloat while estimating 29 projects. Most of these were requests from previous years and won’t be approved. But one doesn’t know which project might suddenly become a high priority for the agency, so even the old numbers needed to be double checked, just in case.
We should have been done by the end of June, but we had one final hurdle this cycle – uploading our estimates into a new database. As to be expected, the new program had a rocky roll out, especially for the project managers in Las Vegas who had a difficulties connecting to the main server in Carson City.
Late at night before my employment anniversary, I slid into my desk to input my last four projects, joining my two fellow Vegas architects on Microsoft Teams. It was a throwback to the old studio days, architects working late at night, shooting the shit.
In the midst of it all, the boy wandered out of the bedroom.
So I spent the last moments of my second year with the SPWD doing loops in the backyard, chasing the sandman.
I just finished analyzing a major change order for the my building. I’ve handled smaller ones, but this is the first time I’ve stared down a quarter million bucks in bite. Before sending out comments to my contractor, I thought I’d type up how it went, since this week-long push has been a good distillation of various tactics that I have found useful for tackling an unfamiliar, scary project.
Jump in and thrash around.
When confronted with a new and difficult task, the first danger is analysis paralysis. The best antidote is to start by assuming the initial efforts will be wasted. Knowing the first few hours are inevitably suboptimal, I am mentally free to just jump in. The sooner I jump in, the sooner I’ll to cobble together a better strategy for completing the project.
Unless there is an obviously better first step, a good default is to categorize a project into smaller pieces, so I started last Wednesday evening by sorting out the subcontractor bids. But I wasn’t done thrashing around yet. Thursday morning, I started analyzing the first couple bids. Only by jumping into the deep end did I realize that I was missing a critical item. It is hard to analyze changes without the original. I needed to get an older set of plans from the office.
Make room to breathe.
I didn’t have an opportunity to go to the office till Sunday, but intervening these days weren’t wasted. I spent Thursday afternoon and Friday clearing out a bunch of little tasks and emails. I spent Saturday doing absolutely nothing, we often underestimate the important of rest! On Sunday I picked up the plans. Even though I did not do anything on this project, these days were critical days that set me up for the big push. It was important to recharge my energy and have the confidence that there weren’t any urgent work fires while I spent the next few days offline.
Eat the biggest frog first.
Monday morning was got chewed up with random work detritus, and I finally started in earnest during the afternoon. I quickly realized I needed to step back. I couldn’t analyze numbers until I had a better grasp of the basis for these prices. I needed to grind through every line on the architect’s change narrative as well as every cloud and delta on their drawings sheets.
So that’s what I did on Tuesday. Being nitpicky has negative connotations, but it was the necessary tactic for this effort. I highlighted every item on the sheets and compiled any thoughts and comments into a detailed list. I had hoped this would take half a day, but took the entire day. However, I now had a thorough grasp of what had changed. Just as important, I was now confident in my grasp of this knowledge.
Tackle the easy ones first.
On Wednesday (a week after I started) I finally started on the main task – crunching the numbers. Unlike the previous day, I took the opposite approach and started with the easy bids first. Since I am new to being an owner’s rep, I don’t have a deep well of experience. Heck, I was still designing the spreadsheet for compiling the numbers! It made more sense to slowly tiptoe into the deep end, better to make my mistakes on little items before tackling the really complex bids. By the end of the day I had gone through analyzed all fifteen bids and plugged their numbers into my now-refined spreadsheet.
Tidy up your mess.
The last 5% of the project always takes an inordinate amount of energy to finish well, but these last steps will separate a mediocre product from a good delivery. In this case, I needed to clean up the spreadsheet. The analysis was the hard work, but it won’t do much good for the contractor if it isn’t readable. Plus, I won’t be looking at these numbers for a couple weeks before the revised pricing comes back. If I quit before getting thoroughly organized, I will waste a lot more time getting back into the numbers after my short term memory has faded. As always, suck it up, finish strong.
This effort involved quite a bit of tedious grunt work, but life is rarely glamorous. I had been architecting long enough to jump in without much fear, but I’m new enough as an owner’s rep to be pleasantly surprised at how smoothly this effort went. The opening and closing steps are consistently critical for any endeavor. The art is found in aptly playing the middle three tactics during the meat of the project. It’s a game of mixing and matching different approaches to keep progress moving effectively.
All in all, it went fairly well this time, which must be why I’m bragging about it on this blog.
Thanks to the cadre at Akimbo who accompanied me during this effort as well as the fine folks at wecoffee.io who letting me hang out in their virtual workspace while I typed this up this post.
When I first joined the division twenty months ago, all agreements and invoices were still paper transmissions.
At the time the process for filling an invoice was:
Consultant sends invoice up to Carson City for accounting.
Accounting processes the invoice and sends it back down to my office in Vegas.
The project manager reviews and signs invoice and sends it back up to Carson City.
The deputy administrator signs the form and sends it across the street back to accounting for final processing and payment.
Check is mailed down to the consultant.
In short, paying an invoice would involve moving one piece of paper 3 times (430 miles each) just to get processed, not including the check.
Let’s not even get into signing actual contracts, which require eight signatures and eleven steps.
If this virus had hit six months earlier (the official rollout for digital invoice processing happened in October), we would have been forced to go to the office just to perform the most basic task of paying our vendors and executing contracts.
I shudder to think about trying to develop these new processes without being able to meet in person, and while still learning how to work remotely!
Of all the unfortunate inconveniences of this pandemic, we were extremely lucky that we had just entered the 21st century with our document management.
Doesn’t sound like much, but this was a new experience for me.
In the past I’ve always been the architect, so I was escorted by the contractor as we walked the project. But now I am the Owner, so the contractor told me to enjoy my stroll and went back to their work.
Walking the site by myself was an unexpectedly contemplative activity. It’s just starting. The building pad has been set with a few of the footings poured. Rebar sticking up everywhere. There were a few earthwork guys in massive machines scraping down the new parking lot to get it open in a few weeks, a year before the main building is completed.
As an architect you live in a world of paper. More accurately you live in the computer, flying through the model space of your building information model. Even though I’m no longer practicing, being the owner isn’t much different except for the pesky financial spreadsheets that now take my attention before those plans and drawings.
Either way, I’ve been in paper space for the last twenty months since I joined the state public works division.
But now, here is 12 acres of disturbed land that was parking lot and desert a mere three months ago.
Dirt, rock, concrete, steel. Spray paint, stringlines, mushroom caps, formboards.
In eighteen months, this will be a new building, filled with college students earning a degree, kids at the daycare, professors crafting their lesson plans, speech pathologists honing their craft.
In eighteen months, the roll of papers that will have been my companions for three years will be frozen in storage, an archive of yesterday’s efforts.
And the men and women currently buzzing around this jobsite trailer will have moved onto another patch of desert, materializing the dreams of another owner, a different architect, another group of users.
I just read an interesting statistic. Employment at architectural firms nationwide dropped from 224,500 to 184,600. That means 39,900 jobs were lost in about four months. More than 1 in 6 architects were laid off.
I was one of the lucky ones. I had gotten a gig with a small firm at the start of 2008, so I avoided being laid off even though my hours were cut down to 30 a week. Even though my bank account was not happy, I used the extra time to take my exams.
But still, when you see your colleagues losing jobs and scrambling for work, it leaves an imprint.
Ultimately, we’re all freelancers.
Bosses that preach “family” might not like to hear it. Unless you to throw a child out of your home every time things get rocky, such proclamations ring hollow.
I recently went on a Kaizen kick borrowing all the books on this subject from the library.
Most were straightforward business books from the mid to late 90’s, before the malaise that hit Japan and mad the subject less of a juicy marketable subject.
But One Small Step Can Change Your Life, by Dr. Maurer, was an interesting self help book where the main premise is that very small steps can ultimately be very fruitful, hence the title. It is a very optimistic book, with quite a few examples from both business and historical lore as well as personal interactions by the author.
Like any self help book, it is a persuasive hamburger – it starts and ends by selling you on the effectiveness of of the topic with a multiple steps process in the body of the text.
In this case, you are given a primer on kaizen as a business practice and then some examples on how this approach can be applied to one’s personal life. This book’s six-point program consists of:
Ask Small Questions
Think Small Thoughts
Take Small Actions
Solve Small Problems
Bestow Small Rewards
Identify Small Moments
And then it closes with a reminder that kaizen is good for both for changing course on bad habits (or jumpstarting inactivity) as well as stacking gains on top of previous successes.
The basic premise is that sustainable change comes from small steps that are consistently applied over a long period of time. This stands in contrast to the “innovation” or bootcamp mentality – which are banking on shocks to the system to make lasting change.
The issue with the drastic change approach is that sometimes the system will often bend but snap back into place – the inertia is too much. Kaizen is small so it is immediately actionable, and it entails such small steps that the recalcitrant system doesn’t know what hit it.
Coincidentally, I listened to a podcast about meditation and one of the suggestions for creating a practice is to just aim to meditate for 1- minute every day. While such a goal may seem ridiculously paltry, it creates a habit and it creates opportunities where you decide to meditate for more than a minute. While the decision to go an extra minute may also seem miniscule, the podcaster noted this choice was actually quite momentous. That first minute is motivated by an extrinsic factor (your previous commitment to meditate for a minute every day) but the second minute is voluntary and motivated by intrinsic factors now that your obligation has been satisfied.
This seems to me to encapsulate the spirit of this book. Make a small step and the ride the wave to continuous improvement.
it does feel weird to “settle” into a “terminal” position, but sometimes the tradeoff just isn’t worth it.
chatting with a friend about advancing up the hierarchy
I guess it can’t hurt to think about these things now. With the pension system (and life in general), you will eventually leave since it makes zero economic sense to stay after one has fully vested. But it’s gonna take a really long time. Way longer than the 3 year 10 month max length tenure I had in previous firms.
On the one hand, I’m seeing friends and former colleagues starting their own firms and being named as principals. On the other hand, one of my colleagues is just about to celebrate 29 years with the division in the same position, a Project Manager II, just like me. He talked about getting to watch his kids grow up, remodeling his house, and coaching little league, and soon he will be pulling 75% of his income to not work for the rest of his life.
You don’t get your name on the front door, and the parachute might not be that golden. But it sure isn’t a bad deal either.
I was listening to an interview of Seth Godin, where he posited that you can have maybe two or three attributes that stand out at the office. If you are consistent with these attributes, it will eventually become your personal brand. So pick carefully and don’t ever break these promises you make to your customers.
Assuming that I only pick out two items to promise to my customers (Seth stated that two is doable, three is difficult, and four is virtually impossible), there are four major questions that need to be answered.
Who is my customer? Is it my immediate supervisor, or his boss, his boss, her boss, or the Governor? Is it the using Agency? Is it the consultants that I manage? Is it the silent investors behind the project (all the taxpayers of Nevada)?
What will be attribute X
What will be attribute Y – and if I put attributes as a simple X-Y matrix, is there anyone else at the office that already fills that niche?
Given that I’m unwilling to sacrifice my personal life for the division, what am I willing trade off to make sure I never break the promise of X and Y?
It’s an interesting rubric, but there won’t going to be an answer here. To pick out only two attributes is going to take some hard thinking. As always, choices are more difficult when it means excluding other options.
It is an odd moment when you realize that someone your age is actually better than you at something thought was your particular strength within the profession.
I’m certain it will only be even weirder when I work with someone younger than me who I recognize as superior in this specific role of project architect.
It may take a little bit of time, but if I stay on this detour of being a client side project manager the inevitable will happen.
Architecture is a practice, and I can feel the rust setting in already.
