As of this writing, I’ve been a member of Team Van Pelt for just over a year. And what a difference a year can make.
I was brought onboard last April when Mark and Mike Van Pelt asked me to help with what was then a single assignment: to oversee the installation of solar panels at numerous school sites for the San Jose Unified School District (SJUSD). It was an important initiative for the District and they chose to put this specific piece of work in the hands of VPCS. I was happy to take the reins on behalf of the firm.
In the twelve months since, our work with SJUSD has expanded to more than $20 million in work under management. The VPCS on-site crew in San Jose has grown from a one-man operation (me) to a group of five, with another one or two more people likely to join us in the near future.
While I’d love to report that my charm and wit are the reasons for this dramatic business growth, I have to give credit to a few other factors. All of us on the SJUSD VPCS team have employed some time-honored business practices since we’ve been here and I believe they’re at the heart of our good fortune.
Here are some things VPCS has done … at SJUSD and other projects … to nurture and grow the client relationship:
Exceed expectations. First and foremost, we always get crystal clear on what’s expected of us and then we strive to deliver even more than that. Good relationships usually happen when clients get more than they pay for.
Work transparently. Everything we write or produce on behalf of clients is visible to them. We work collaboratively, not separately, on their projects. Whatever’s going on – even the challenges that arise – they’ll hear about it.
Remain accessible. We encourage clients to come and go from our trailers and offices. These projects and our product belong to them. There’s nothing in our work space they shouldn’t have access to.
Adopt then improve processes. In San Jose, we began by listening to their processes and procedures, then – when appropriate – offered our perspectives on how we might make them even better. The result is a hybrid of best practices.
Don’t toe the line. Clients bring us on to lend our professional expertise. We don’t shy away from opportunities to voice our opinion in service to our clients and their projects.
Make the work also be about the people. We make the effort to get to know our clients beyond how well they match their job descriptions.
Form cohesive teams. We honor each VPCS team member’s personal and professional individuality while simultaneously melding a strong unit that functions well together on a project.
One year ago, Mike and Mark Van Pelt entrusted the SJUSD work to me. Since then, we’ve done more than simply grow our book of business with that one client. We’ve proven that delivering an outstanding work product that’s backed by integrity almost always opens the door to more opportunities. And it certainly makes the trip – whether it’s around the job site or around the sun – a lot more enjoyable.
If I were the protagonist in an afterschool special, my story would begin with the hopes and dreams of a young girl who wanted all her life to work in the construction business. She fought hard and battled bullies until she finally landed her dream career that would put her in the field on job sites, side-by-side with the guys who once doubted her.
But that’s not me. I arrived at VPCS more than 15 years ago sort of by accident, looking mostly for a change. Although I grew up with a contractor father who built our family home, I must admit that the roots of my own construction industry experience were planted unintentionally.
Still, I now find myself in a position I love, working in an industry I enjoy, at a firm I respect. Being a woman in the traditionally male-dominated world of construction wasn’t necessarily what I sought out, but it turns out to be a great fit for me.
I am one of several female project managers at VPCS. While there are definitely more men than women in this role (both at our firm and throughout the industry), I, for one, have never been made to feel professionally “less than” because of my gender. I feel really lucky to work for a company that’s basically gender-blind. Mark and Mike Van Pelt hired me – and then promoted me – because they saw my potential. My gender, like my relative lack of experience, was irrelevant. What mattered then and now is how well I do my job.
With only a few exceptions, I’ve encountered very little gender-oriented resistance in the field. Sure, I’ll occasionally deal with someone whose eyes aren’t quite wide open when it comes to women in this industry. But once they realize that I’m there to do my job (just like they are), the issues tend to dissipate and we can all get back to work.
The best part about being a woman in this field – especially being part of the VPCS team that concentrates on school campuses – is serving as a living, breathing example to young people that they can be anyone they want to be. Once, while I was working on-site at a high school, a teacher pulled me into her classroom to participate in a spontaneous conversation with her students. It gave me a wonderful opportunity to answer questions about the whats, hows and whys of my work. I will always appreciate how that teacher singled me out as an example of professional possibility, for both girls and boys.
Perhaps my most profound “woman in a man’s world” moment occurred on a middle school campus. I was overseeing a sidewalk concrete pour, being watched by the curious eyes of a crowd of pre-teen students. One boy turned to the girl next to him and said, “You know – you can’t do that.” Without thinking, I responded immediately, speaking directly to her. “That’s not true. You can do anything you want.” The boy seemed surprised, while the girl seemed pleased. “Yes,” she said with a smile.
I like to think that both of those students’ perspectives shifted a little in that moment. If seeing me do my job helped adjust their thinking about women in construction, if even just a bit, then the sidewalk wasn’t the only thing that got re-formed that day.
I recently returned to VPCS after taking a medical leave. Being sidelined by a long illness is nothing I ever planned. (I don’t think anyone “plans” a long illness.) But when it comes, it comes like a sleeper wave. Still, at the risk of sounding clichéd, the experience taught me a lot – and it now informs many of the ways I approach both my life and my work.
First, a little about my illness: I had been feeling “not myself” for several months. When things became unbearable, my husband took me to the emergency department. Beginning that afternoon, I was in a hospital (either in Santa Rosa or San Francisco) for 24 straight days. I was diagnosed with not one but TWO rare blood disorders, and the doctors assumed I would need a liver transplant. The short story is that my team at UCSF performed a successful stent procedure, the transplant was deemed unnecessary, the doctors and nurses were amazed at my recovery, and I was eventually sent home sweet home.
Although I now take medicine on a daily basis, I’m back to my old activities, including community volunteering, exercising, hiking, kayaking and cooking.
I’m also happily back at work as a project manager for VPCS.
It can be a daunting prospect to come back to work after a long absence, particularly if the time away was due to illness or injury. Luckily for me, I work for a company that has always emphasized the value of workplace communication. That really came into play when I was recovering at home. My VPCS family kept in regular contact with me, always focusing more on how I was feeling and less on when I would return to work. They approached my return to work in an open and sensitive manner, maintaining an open-door policy. I never felt pressured by them; I knew that I could come back whenever the time felt right to me.
There are actually a lot of parallels between managing illness and managing work in the busy world of construction. Learning how to tackle a serious medical issue has broadened my perspective on coordinating complex projects. In both scenarios, it’s important to find the critical path forward. There’s always the potential for stress and even some confusion, but staying on the straight and narrow will lead to the best outcome every time.
I will be eternally grateful to my co-workers, clients and the rest of the VPCS team for the flexibility and peace of mind they have given me throughout this odyssey. In an otherwise unpredictable situation, I’ve always known that I can rely on their unconditional support. The close-knit nature of the VPCS family extends to everyone in the company’s circle. And there’s nothing more important in life than family – be it personal or professional.
Everyone wants to work smarter, not harder. This is especially true in the construction field. Clients expect their projects to be completed quickly and cost-effectively, and they still (rightly) insist on high quality. Construction teams that rely on lean practices are in a better position to achieve these goals.
One of the active VPCS projects offers a great example. We are working on a door lock project for the San Jose Unified School District that involves more than 50 school and operational sites. This project will help the district schools comply with the shelter-in-place requirements associated with California’s AB 211 legislation, which took effect in 2011. (The law calls for new construction projects that go through the State Architect to include locks for doors of classrooms and other large rooms to be operable from the inside.) Down the road, our team will also install security alarms and security cameras throughout the district to comply with the same law.
We began by identifying a vendor for the locks and keys and met with them to discuss project goals. Together, we came up with hardware schedules and plans that were then carefully reviewed by both parties to ensure accuracy and quality when the construction work eventually took place. In addition, we met with the contractor to incorporate some of their insights into the construction plan.
The clients were also involved in the planning phase. VPCS team members met with each site’s principal and office staff prior to the design phase to listen to their ideas on how they would like their schools’ doors to be keyed. This ensured that the work would be done not just to district standards, but to these clients’ standards.
Communicating with and getting input from each member of an effort is fundamental to lean practices. Doing so on this project has allowed us to eliminate wasted money and time, and avoid potential errors by anticipating and solving them before they occur. Clients appreciate this as it makes for a quick and efficient process, and minimizes the demands on their already busy schedules.
We have completed the first ten schools, working closely with the contractor and vendor, and are on our way to starting the second and third batch of schools slated for improvements as part of this project. For each phase, we will follow the same plan and build on it using discoveries made on earlier sites. Those bidding on the remaining phases of the project (including the contractor from the first ten sites) will be delighted to know that our lean approach has yielded valuable information that will help them purchase materials and allocate their time with confidence.
The Van Pelt “family practice” favors a lean approach because it’s a method that works. As a relative newcomer to VPCS, I can attest to how easy it is to get up to speed on lean practices. It gets people involved, engaged and committed to quality. It has the power to open doors for everybody on the team.
Program and Construction Management has become more and more sophisticated through the years. At VPCS, we’ve been able to maintain the quality of our product while keeping up with the ever-changing expectations of the industry and – more importantly – our clients.
The application of meaningful technology has affected virtually every aspect of our business. These days, there seems to be an app for everything! So finding the proper balance between human and technological input has become part of our job. Operating in the eye of this technology hurricane, we are often lured down the road by the “be all, end all” construction software that promises to solve all of our daily challenges.
Along the way, we’ve discovered something pretty profound. It turns out that very few of these applications and software packages solve the most important aspect of our services: person-to-person communication supported by professional expertise with a touch of intuition tossed in for good measure.
Public works construction, at the ground level, remains a time-honored process. No computer or robot has yet to be developed that can match or replace the skill of an experienced craftsperson. Complex construction projects, many of them on occupied campuses, simply can’t be planned or assembled without human effort and interaction.
This is not to say that technology doesn’t have its place in our industry. VPCS uses software every day for document tracking and control to streamline operational processes. Architects and engineers use computerized design, including computer aided drafting, building information modeling solutions, etc.
Still, no piece of software can really get its hands dirty. Staying close to the ground is what sets VPCS apart from its competition.
New ideas don’t easily find their way into the world of construction. Whether it’s due to the age-old excuse of “We’ve been doing it this way for as long as we can remember” or just good-old fashioned resistance to change, the industry has not fundamentally altered its ways for many years.
As a result, our industry’s production stats have decreased in certain places while other industries have increased production exponentially.
Take the manufacturing realm, which has been steadily improving its production statistics for a while now. All because they’ve been open to being “lean” – a concept the construction industry has only very recently begun to adopt. But it’s an idea whose time has come, and one that can radically improve our processes as well as the buildings we construct.
To speak in very general terms, the lean concept focuses on optimizing workflows, removing waste, continually improving processes and making decisions that will add value to a project. If you think these sound like broad ideas, I agree with you. So I won’t attempt to explore here all the ways we can incorporate them into our construction practices. For the purposes of this post, we’ll touch on my favorite element: optimizing the team! (Watch this blog for more on other elements of the lean construction and design idea.)
Let me explain what “optimizing the team” means. If you think about it, you probably spend as much time during the week with your “construction family” as you do with your actual family. Strange but true, given the demanding hours in this business. So the bonds that tie together your team are extremely important and worth strengthening.
Why is that so important? Because a strong team is built on trust. When you know you can count on the people next to you to do their jobs, you won’t have to spend time double-checking their work or making multiple follow-ups to make sure they’re on task. You can rely on each individual’s commitment to achieve at the highest possible level so as not to let the team down. In other words, when a team is optimized, they are far more productive and less wasteful.
Everyone who works on a construction project is a member of the same team, even if we don’t work for the same company. We share the same goals of making a profit for all the companies working on the project (including our own) while delivering the best project with the highest value to the owner.
There are a couple of tools we use to do this. The first is co-location, which calls for all members of a construction team to work out of the same open office. Co-locating builds relationships across the entire team, streamlines the communication process, improves efficiencies, and simplifies the collaborative effort. My multiple experiences co-locating have all been met with great success.
There are different ways to achieve this at the company level. First, trust your employees and empower them to make strong, decisive decisions without having to check in with management at every turn. Second, make sure all companies that are part of a project team have the correct personnel on site who can make these decisions in the co-location space. Third, don’t work in silos and ask individuals to solve problems on their own. Instead, use your team and their strengths to resolve issues as they arise.
At VPCS, we’ve relied on these same tenets for our entire 20-year history. Now that these common-sense ideas are also recognized as the foundational ideas of lean design and construction, it’s easy for us to adapt. Building our business on these principles has allowed us to deliver higher-value projects — constructed by optimized teams — to our owner clients.
