25
Apr 24

Mucking in – Grey Lynn!

I have one story about this 4 unit project off Richmond road in Grey Lynn – adjoining the previous one I posted about. Amongst my development management tasks, along with design mgt I was in charge of marketing the homes – i.e. giving the agent all the tools to seal the deal in pre-sales. So, we had a hard Saturday deadline for a launch date. I had a Portacom ordered to arrive on Friday morning for the display materials and we were going to create a little landscaped enclave out in front to make it all look good – a hill, some lawn, rocks, path etc. Landscaper booked for Friday arvo. Portacom arrived, I fit it out with all the marketing collateral.

Landscaper a no show.

Friday night, I was in a panic, I did not want to miss my deadline. So the flatty’s at the dungeon on Garfield, Parnell and I, after a few, decided f the landscaper, we would deliver before open home at 12pm.

7am Saturday, a bit dusty. All four of us jumped in the Holden Kingswood station wagon and headed south. First stop the trailer hire place, then the dirt and rock place, then the ready lawn place in Drury, then some outdoor furniture thrown on top.

Fully loaded golden holden back up the motorway thru Ponsonby and we started shoveling off the back of trailer, created a mound and laid ready lawn and some river rocks like André Le Nôtre (google it!).

Job done.

Agent turned up 3 minutes later, nailed the sales, no doubt ONLY because of our manicured front entrance.

Boss dropped off boxes of Heinys, to the dungeon, later that afternoon after he heard what had happened. No doubt, there were none left Sunday morning.

Gen Z into that do you think?


25
Apr 24

Strategic Asset Mgt Plans

Just finished a comprehensive review of housing portfolio related Strategic Asset Management Plans and Asset Mgt Plans and their frameworks. Thanks for those who sent through examples. Keep’em coming as I like to extract the best bits, especially the practical actions over the theoretical rhetoric. This is all preparation for a client workshop (to nail these plans) we are holding for a community housing provider in a couple of weeks.

Part of the Xpect Insight delivery promise: we do our homework on our own time!

http://aenspire.com/xpect/xpectInsight.pdf


24
Apr 24

The Dream Build

This project in South Auckland was pretty much ready set go when I got involved. 73 standalone homes arranged around two pocket parks, sold out. I only had two tasks, get the house builder underway and sort out a teeny weeny swale along the main road. Well the swale turned out to be a bit of a mission as it didn’t have adequate budget once council decided what we needed to build was more onerous than our original consultants infrastructure design.

The build was anything but a mission, it was a dream. Primarily because of the onsite house to house manufacture style employed by the main contractor. And a well drilled building and design team with spectacular programming of their subbies. The rolling production line delivered one home every three days, on time, every time.

The development manager (me) and the Engineer to the Contract had nothing really to do. Good learnings about productive building though.


24
Apr 24

CEO/Director? Health & Safety???

If you are a CEO and/or director of a construction company you have a big responsibility. Health & Safety. Those who do not take this responsibility seriously, well, take a look at recent news to see how far the authorities will go, if the most unfortunate happens on your site. Trying to grapple with the vast reams of H&S information kept me awake at night. The H&S audits. The directors duties. Just thinking ‘have we done enough’ to keep the staff and subbies safe? Construction sites are dangerous places. It’s a constant battle by project managers to keep everyone in check. And basically it’s never ending, question – was I doing enough?

Well the reality is you can probably never do enough. And the minimum that we had previously settled on, was simply not good enough. So I decided that as a construction company we would look to continuously improve H&S by having one clear vision. Every step we took would be to improve ourselves until we achieved the international standard ISO45001 status for Occupational Health & Safety. Our H&S improvement plan was literally the Table of Contents for ISO45001, and we worked on filling in the blanks. Over time each blank filled in represented an improvement.

Alongside this, was taking a practical risk adjusted approach to H&S.

Every site was a full PPE site, so no one had to make a decision whether they should wear a hi-vis vest, a hardhat or steel cap shoes. If the property was under construction, even if it looked finished and the scaffold down, didn’t matter. No PPE, no access. I got extremely ‘annoyed’ if anyone flouted this rule. I definitely named and shamed.

We celebrated success onsite, for those subbies who made a difference – you may have seen some photo’s in posts.

I forced the senior management team on site, to not just observe, but to directly interact identifying the risks. We kept a schedule, showing how many times a year they visited…important for the office bound staff to get out.

Anyway, something is brewing on this front, to help those of you without the resources I had, to better manage your H&S obligations – so stay tuned.


24
Apr 24

Xpect Safety

Xpect has partnered with Advanced Safety utilising the digital platform Site APP Pro to provide Health & Safety solutions for the development and construction industry. For contractors, developers, project managers and consultants.

With Advanced Safety, you gain a partner committed to simplifying health and safety, enabling you to concentrate on your core business activities while keeping your team safe and your projects compliant.

Site APP Pro is a New Zealand developed and supported powerful but user-friendly mobile health & safety application. These guys are also going places, having expanded to the North American market.

More info here http://aenspire.com/xpect/xpectsafety.pdf

Or go straight to our landing page for a demonstration:
https://www.siteapppro.com/partners/xpect-safety