No Room to Spare

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How prefabricated building systems tackle tight jobsites By: Bill Forest Ask any superintendent working a tight urban site what keeps them up at night, and space is usually near the top of the list. No laydown area. No room for extra crews. No margin for error. When a project team works together from the beginning with diverse expertise integrated early in the planning process, they can solve many of those problems before they start. Prefabricated building systems offer project stakeholders many advantages, including benefits when battling the challenges of working a small site. Take out the heavy lifting One major […]

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Tight Sites + Fast Schedules

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The art of coordination keeps projects moving forward By Drew Cook It seems like every project comes with the same expectation: get it done faster and do it with less room to work. Whether it’s an occupied office building, a renovation in an active facility or a project squeezed into a dense urban environment, constraints have become part of everyday construction. The challenge, however, isn’t always the lack of space. In my experience, most tight-site challenges aren’t space problems at all. I’ve worked on projects with limited access, shared elevators, occupied spaces, active pedestrian traffic and aggressive schedules. What I’ve […]

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Sustainability’s Missing Dimension: Time

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A Case for Measuring Sustainability in Decades, Not in Moments By Thomas L. Ketron I’ve spent more than 20 years around prefabricated concrete building systems — first on the manufacturing side, now working for the broader industry on sustainability initiatives. In that time, I’ve come to believe sustainability conversations are missing a dimension. Today’s dominant framing measures a structure’s environmental performance at a single moment: embodied carbon of the completed project. It’s an important number, but it’s also the easiest one to calculate, and that has let it stand in for the whole conversation. What’s missing is time — how […]

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Document Today. Protect Tomorrow.

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How to build a practical framework for getting it right By Ken Wanamaker Every superintendent has a story about their daily log making a difference. Maybe a new project manager took over mid-project and got up to speed in an afternoon because you’d kept thorough records. Maybe notes –– capturing exactly what was discussed and when –– cleared up a scope misunderstanding between an owner and trade partner. Maybe the log simply answered a question about when a delivery arrived or how many workers were onsite last Tuesday. Good records keep everyone informed and aligned. The reverse is also true. […]

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Elevating the Craft of Supervision: Leadership Training that Reinforces Today’s Role

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By: NCCER Staff Superintendents hold one of the most complex and demanding roles in the industry by simultaneously managing production, safety, communication, scheduling and risk under constant pressure. As projects grow in scale and complexity — and as crews become more varied in experience and background — expectations placed on field leadership continue to rise. Even seasoned superintendents are navigating an environment that looks different than it did just a few years ago; structured leadership training is emerging as a meaningful way to reinforce and expand the skills the role now requires. Shifting workforce The broader workforce landscape is shifting. […]

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