I was the project manager for a church building that ran from 2019 to 2022, straight through COVID. It moved and crashed at the speed of construction. Supply chains fell apart, everyone involved was spending more than they meant to, and the only way to make it stop was to finish.
If a decision could be made in the direction of finishing, that is how we made it.
Writing down why lost to finishing every time.
We counted every building cost, constantly, for three years.
Someone from the church called me a few months ago to ask why we’d gone with a particular supplier. The original choice didn’t meet the intended use for the space, so we made a call that was right for the conditions then and for what we expected to be true later. I knew the answer immediately, because I am where the answer lives.
The building has been done for four years. That last part is a work design problem, and it is the only cost from that project still running.
Costs that arrive as events get counted
Every cost on the build created an event: a price went up, a delivery slipped, or a decision had to be remade inside a week. Each one came as a call or an email, on a day, to somebody, and got argued about by people who were paying close attention.
Being the source of answers came as a question, months apart, one at a time, each one answerable in five minutes.
Nothing about it presented as an event, so nothing about it entered a conversation.
The costs with an end date, and the one without
The loud costs were real, expensive, and justifiable. They were also finite.
When the building was done, the overspending stopped. The supply problems stopped. The arguments stopped.
Every cost that got counted ended when the project ended.
The finished building doesn’t show the reasoning behind the decisions, the conditions we were working in, or the expectations we were working from. The questions route to the one place that holds them four years after everyone else moved on, and that’s me.
The same structure, two seats
The contributor’s version. You carry a short list of things only you can answer, added to a question at a time. You haven’t written it down and you haven’t said it to anyone, because saying them sounds like a complaint about a job you like. Being the person who knows is worth something, and there is real satisfaction in answering well and answering fast. It is also the only record that exists.
The leader’s version. You know which initiatives need you in the room. What you haven’t done is add up the hours. There’s been no reason to. Each conversation is 20 minutes on something that matters. Your teams come to you because asking you is faster than reconstructing it themselves, which makes it the correct move for them every single time.
What ten minutes buys
Write the list of questions that came to you last week because you were the only one who could answer them. Give it 10 minutes. There will be more than you think.
Then read the list to someone who understands what the questions mean and the work behind them. Someone who knows what the time and the interruptions cost you.
In your head, that list is a feeling. Or it is nothing at all, because answering questions is part of the job. On the page, you can measure it and put a cost against the projects that caused it.
A cost that arrives one question at a time is easy to carry and hard to describe. That is why it outlives every cost that was loud enough to argue about.
If this is the kind of thing you want more of, the longer arguments live at Good Work at a Distance.