Written by: Michael Terpstra
Maximizing efficiency and productivity in construction is crucial to project success. In the practice of construction surveying there is no one way ticket to achieve this.
Construction surveying can be more efficient by accounting for the following practices. Understanding a construction site and applying good judgement, minimizing back and forth communication between multiple parties, completing redundancy checks and communicating, preparing effective survey data, and applying consistency in control and methods.
Judgement and understanding are two key aspects in keeping your time on site as a surveyor from going over budget. When a surveyor understands why he is completing the task he is completing, he can then understand what the client wants specifically out of the survey and get in the mind of the client. With full understanding the surveyor will not need to go overboard to complete the task. Too many times a surveyor doesn’t truly understand why he is doing something; this results in second guessing the work and spending too much time on site. The result is extra time trying to make a survey meet certain standards that do not need to be met. The opposite can happen if the surveyor underestimates how precise a survey needs to be and doesn’t meet the requirements. Ultimately this results in extra time charged, extra work completed, and unneeded information delivered that the client will be expected to pay for. When this happens on a consistent basis, the cost of a project can get excessive. Therefore, taking the extra 30 minutes to truly understand the task at hand can save a project money in the long run.
Minimizing the amount of back and forth between multiple people and multiple parties can also attribute to excess confusion on a job and un-needed delays. Most of the time this is unavoidable as there are going to be various trades to complete one construction project, but there are ways to minimize this from happening to an excessive degree. One way is for the surveyor to take the initiative and ask the client to provide specific information regarding the construction site. When this happens, the client will go to a trusted source and provide the information needed. The alternative that sometimes can happen is when the surveyor doesn’t know this information until he is onsite and receives miscommunication from multiple sources. From a surveyor’s perspective, this misinformation can be limited when they complete the field to finish portion of the project themselves, this will also limit multiple surveyors on one job. When one surveyor sets the control, surveys for the project, and creates the deliverable via CAD, it eliminates confusion between multiple people who try to understand what the other employee has done. There can also be miscommunication from the initial stages of a project when the project manager is the only one who understands the client’s request. When this happens, information is likely to be missed by the surveyor. Ultimately if the surveyor is taking the client request, completing the survey, and creating the deliverable they are less likely to miss key items as they are fully involved in the project.
Communication goes hand in hand with construction site productivity. When a surveyor is to complete a task, he needs to be clear on expectations. He needs to know of any specific concerns related to the work he is completing. When a problem arises during work, he needs to communicate the problem and solution with the client prior to leaving the jobsite. Failure to comply with these communication standards results in wasted time and resources. This can result in a job being 80% complete. Rescheduling delays can be attributed to this and need to be avoided at all costs.
Survey prep needs to be completed in such a way that the surveyor can adapt to the contractor’s needs. When prep is to a minimum there is going to be missing information for the surveyor. This results in the client needing something that the surveyor is unable to provide in a timely manner. The surveyor’s prep needs to be displayed in such a way that he can fully understand all aspects of the design and not just what he is required to lay out that day. It is inevitable that if a surveyor shows up on site with the bare minimum prepped, he will need to come back to site within a short time frame to finish what that client wants completed. It’s better to be over prepped than under prepped.
Redundant checks are a great way to improve efficiency. The key concept here is to get things right the first time. The way to do this is to apply redundant checks on your survey layout using various methods prior to continuing work. Doing these backchecks indicate whether a design is compatible or not. From here, incompatible parts of the design would be noted down and the survey would continue with a method that will guarantee the survey matches the current design drawings.
Consistency plays an important role in surveying. How we set control and best practices can go a long way. When surveying it is most beneficial to find a method that works well and continue to use this method on a consistent basis. The more we change our minds on processes and how we set control, the less effective we are at our jobs, the more easily confused we will be, and the harder it will be to comply with other parties. If our methods are consistent, we can complete the task at hand and not have to think about the processes we use to get there. This frees up our minds to think about more complex problems related to the job, while other methods start to become more habitual. When we are consistent in the way we work, the relationship between surveyor and clientele can be more in sync during a project.
These are all best practices to how a surveyor can maximize efficiency and productivity in construction.