a Ticket to Paradise

Okay, so you have heard that Scrawny projects are hugely more successful. You don’t have 10,000 hours to develop mastery but you want to give her a go. You’ve signed the Manifesto

What's next?

Some options are: hire a coach, take a "2-Day Scrawny Project Delivery Fast Track Workshop", or take a shot of rum and go on an adventure with me. The adventure is adopting a Scrawny Project approach to save tons of cash, so we can all go on a nice adventure to Treasure Island. To see if the bounty is big enough to entice other pirates on this adventure, let’s do some PIRATE MATH to see if we can afford ‘the ticket’ to paradise.

Will a 4x productivity increase buy us ‘the ticket’?

Now, saving enough cash for ‘the ticket’ for every project participant really sounds too good to be true. But the reality is that you can complete projects six months early and have time for an adventure. So can we check the math and see if we can afford to go?

Currently, only 10% of work effort on construction projects creates value, as compared to 60% in manufacturing. Some of the best Lean construction projects can achieve better than 40% value creation. 40% is 4x more productive than 10%, and so this should be the target.

Now if we are talking about a $10m project, and 50% of that is labor, a 4x improvement in productivity would represent a labor cost of $5M/4 = $1.25M. Let’s say we are a little optimistic so double that to be safe, to $2.5M. So, realistically with a good effort we could save $2.5M, or 25% of the project cost. That would surely provide enough funds for extra profit, and ‘the tickets’ to paradise.

So assuming that there is enough incentive to give Scrawny Project Delivery a go, let’s load up the rum and other provisions, and set sail.

The treasure (productivity) union is now going to steer the ship, so we need the Captain, Collaborators and Gunnar Master to support the change in thinking needed. This should not be a hard sell, as everyone gets a reward.

The Owner gets a high performance project in less time, and at less cost (value). The Designers get to add a successful project to their resumes that will lead to future work (leadership). The Contractors get done early, make more profit, get a great testimonial, and a possible owner partner out of the deal (market share).

Now this just doesn't happen by magic, there are systems that some really smart people have developed for construction, that are key for success. This should be no big deal as remember:

"Average people with Brilliant Systems can deliver Exceptional results"

Also remember to spend your profit wisely!

Spend the profit on beer, partners of despicable nature, dancing all night long and waste the rest!

Sign up here for more Great Pirate Stories and a copy of "The Scrawny Project Playbook"