Archives for September 2013

One thing I’ve come to appreciate, is my morning routine.  I was always a morning person but I was never that intentional about what I was doing each morning.  In Darren Hardy’s book “The Compound Effect” he talks about creating a morning routine.  Basketball players, golfers, baseball players all create pre-shot routines to help ensure they will perform consistently every time.  How you start your morning sets the course for the whole day.  Here is how I’ve been starting my day…

I typically start my day with stretches and crunches. I’ve had back problems off and on over the years and decided a couple of years ago to keep a consistent routine of warming up each morning.  I do stretches for about 5 minutes, another 15 minutes of crunches and another 5 minutes of stretches.  I do this religiously and haven’t missed a day in years.

Next, I do some free-form writing.  I heard about this from Farnoosh Brock on her Prolific Living podcast.  The idea is to write about 3 pages every morning.  In the morning your mind is clear and writing can help you get your thoughts together.  3 pages or 750 words is a good length to shoot for.  I use a website called www.750words.com.  This makes it easy to write each morning, tracks the length of your writing, and helps keep you consistent.

After my writing, I exercise.  I’ve found the only way I can be consistent with my exercising is doing it in the morning.  It also gets your blood flowing and gives you energy for the day.  I either do the treadmill or go out for a walk.  I target about 10,000 steps each day.  I use the fitbit device to track my steps.  Now, I also like the ida of combining my exercise with learning.  So I either read when I’m on the treadmill or listen to an audiobook while walking.  I can get through about a book every week by following this routine.  I get my cardio and I enhance my mind at the same time!

Next I spend a few minutes planning my day.  I’m currently using Trello to do my planning. Trello works like a Kanban board where you create different lanes and put your tasks on the board.  I can then review my current projects, make updates, move my priorities for the day around and get myself set for what I need to accomplish for the day.  In addition, I have the rest of my team using this software also, so it makes it easy for me to assign tasks to someone else’s board or see what they have going for the day.

After that, time to shower, grab a quick breakfast and head into the office.

This routine helps me set the course for my day.  I’ve gotten my exercise in, did some creative writing, got some reading or audio books in and planned what I need to accomplish for the day.  By the time I hit the office, all sorts of things can happen.  But no matter what, I’ve had a great morning and I’m ready for whatever the day may bring.

At Walters & Wolf, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about training.  There are two main categories of training in our industry.  One is the training you receive when you first come to work at our company.  This type of training is completely the responsibility of the company you work for.  The other type of training is what you receive after your introduction to the company.  This type of training is more self-guided and helps you grow.

For the first category, we decided to create a process that we could do over and over and continually improve.  We took a simple project that we had previously completed and then built our training program around it.  So, for a new project manager, you would do the following:

1. If the person is brand new to our industry, we will use the Gana Estimating course to give them an introduction to our industry.  We use this book as a supplement to the training since it can be a bit dry.  It has lots of good information but you need to take it a little at a time.
2. We begin with doing a takeoff and an estimate for the project.  This teaches you how we do our estimates, where we put our data and where to find information.  It helps you understand what the standards are and as a project manager, gives you all the information you will need to find the information your estimator will create.
3. Now that you’ve estimated the project, we do a mock kick-off meeting.  You see what to expect from this meeting, what questions you should be asking and what to look for in the documents when you get a new project.
4. The next step is to create a schedule for the project.  One of the first things we do on a project is build our plan.  This is the best way to know what you need to do and when you need to do it.  It is also one of the main communication tools we use with our customer.  We use Microsoft Project at our office.  We go through a training program on the program, then we have you build a schedule from scratch then at the end you build a schedule using our templates.  We then use some mock scenarios to show you how to adjust your schedule if you can’t get to the customer’s start date and how to do your weekly updates.
5. The next step is to build a cost projection for the job.  This gives you the schedule of values information, gives you a tracking method for the project costs and gives you a way to communicate your margin goals and how you are doing against each cost code.
6. We then go through Transmittals, Submittals, Change Order Quotes and Information Approval Logs.  These are our method of communicating with the customer.  We have standard methods for all these processes and we need to give our new employee a chance to learn and practice these skills.
7. We then review shop work orders, purchase requisitions, labor monitors and the other processes we follow to get our work coordinated with the other departments.

As you can see, the process starts with creating standard work.  One of the best tools for creating a great training program is making standard processes for each of your steps.  We have similar programs for drafting, purchasing and takeoff.  These steps help you get up and running faster and give you an introduction to all the tools we use.  Each step of the training is conducted by a different senior PM.  So, by the end of the training, not only do you have a good introduction to our process, but you’ve met and worked with almost everyone in the department.  If you have a question on schedules, you have someone to ask.  If you can’t remember something about the purchasing process, you know who to go to.  We work as a team and your other PM’s are your best resource.  We want you to ask a lot of questions and share what you are working on and not be afraid to ask for help and the training helps you build that network right away.

This initial training is a great starting point.  But as you progress in your career, it becomes necessary to keep learning.  An on-going training program is required.  Here is what we do at our company;

1. Monthly vendor training.  Every month, we have a different vendor come in and give us a class on their product, their company or their industry.  These are typically lunch sessions that go from 12:00 – 1:30.  It’s a great way to learn about a new vendor, a section of the industry you are unfamiliar with or new products that are being introduced.  These are available to everyone.
2. Skills training.  These classes are typically devoted to a specific skill that would be good for our employees to master.  Classes in Autocad, Revit, Inventor, Sketch-up, On Screen Takeoff, Microsoft Excel, Word or Access, our Takeoff program, etc…  We hold these types of classes about 3 times per year.  You would have one class per week for 3 – 4 weeks.
3. Lean training.  Since this is the main company focus, you will be placed in a lean class.  Classes meet each week for one hour.  You learn about lean and with your class will participate in a 5S and a group improvement process.  You will also learn to create your own individual videos and how to upload them to the company’s youtube site.
4. Group projects.  This was another form of training that we created.  We set up a list of projects that we would like to tackle.  We then gave the list to the team and you could sign up for something that interested you.  We had a group that built their own 3d Printer and learned how to use it.  We had a group that explored mobile technologies and how to apply them., another group was exploring the different BIM software and how we might use that.  Another group had a book club to read one of the latest business books.  Each group then reported back to the whole team and explained what they learned to help everyone in the group know more about the subject.
5. Outside training and conferences.  These would include outside classes at the local colleges.  There is a great night program at Stanford that a number of people regularly attend.  The Autodesk University conference is a great way to grow your engineering team.  There are outside classes in Revit, Inventor and other Autodesk software that last a few days if you need a more intense approach.  Leed training is another topic we do externally.  For our more technical people there are developer conferences in jquery, DNN and ADN.  We have people in advanced lean training that learn by going to other companies and doing kaizen events and even touring factories in Japan.  These types of classes are typically requested by the employee and reviewed on an individual basis.

People are the only appreciating asset in your business.  Helping them grow and become the very best they can be should be the goal of every company.  Experience will come from their day-to-day work but training will help them grow much faster.  A great training program will help you retain great employees and reap the benefits of their new knowledge.

When I worked at smaller companies, we never had an internship program.  It wasn’t until I came to Walters & Wolf that I got to see what an internship was.  In the beginning, it was really just the company’s way of bringing in college students to see what we do.  The program wasn’t very intentional.  What people would work on, what types of things they would learn and how they would learn them would vary between interns and year to year.

Starting a few years ago, we decided to really tune up our internship process.  I thought it would be great to write about it because I really love what we have developed and what we have accomplished so far with this program.  If your company does not yet hire interns or if the do hire interns but your program could use some tweaking, then hopefully some of these ideas will help.

The goals of the internship at Walters & Wolf are several:

1. Teach people about our industry.  Most people are not familiar with the glazing industry so this helps them see what our business is all about.
2. Give them something for their resume.  They are going to graduate and need to go out and find a job.  A good internship should give them experience and accomplishments that will fill out their resume when they graduate.
3. Teach them about our company.  We are unique.  They will undoubtedly work at other companies but we want them to see our culture and our excitement.
4. Grow their personal and professional network.  They will meet lots of people at our company and make new friends and connections.
5. Maybe come to work for us!  If they love our company and we love them, there could be a fit.  We are always looking for great people.

So to begin with, we started with who we wanted to hire.  If we were going to hire interns, why not hire the best we could find.  So the first thing we had to do was decide what an intern recruiting and interview process was going to look like.

For recruiting, we decided to start with the colleges that we felt would have the best applicants for our industry.  At first we started in Chico because they have a large construction management program.  But we soon decided to start recruiting from some of the great schools in the Bay Area also.  Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Clara, San Jose State all have great people who might fit into our organization.  So we have a booth that we bring to the career fairs, put ads on all the bulletin boards and see how many resumes we can get.

In a previous post, I wrote about our interview process.  We had used our recruiting efforts as an easy way to tune up our interviewing skills.  We developed a set of behavioral questions that help us see who would be the best fit.  Entry level interviews are hard because you can’t ask questions about previous work experience in your field.  So most of our questions have to do with how they would fit in with our organization.  Look at my previous post for examples.

So after screening the resumes we conduct our interviews and when that is complete we pick our top candidates.  Some years we will have one student, some years we will have 2 or more.  It just depends on who we find.  My suggestion is to get good at one then work toward more if you feel you can handle it effectively.

When it is the student’s first year with us, we follow the following program:

2 weeks in sales.  This is where things start in our company so this is where they start.  They learn how an estimate is created, they attend some of the design meetings, they will create some takeoffs and learn the process that our sales department goes through to land projects.

2 weeks in operations.  We will have them run through the same training program we give all new project managers.   They learn how to read plans, create RFI’s and submittals, price change orders and see how all of our processes work.

2 weeks in the shop.  The spend one week in Shop A fabricating stick wall and one week in Shop B fabricating Unit wall.

2 weeks in the field.  They will spend time going to different job sites and doing some actual installations.

After 8 weeks, they have a pretty good overview of what our company does and how each of the departments function.  At this point, they are ready to start their project.  We create a list of projects for them to choose from.  They can find something that peaks their interest and will help our company.

So this is the interesting part about internships.  We are all busy.  There is never enough time to tackle all the things that we should be doing.  It is hard enough to stay in front of the curve with the work you have going let alone take on more projects.  But here you have this young, bright, excited person who is willing to work at your company for 10 weeks or so during the summer.  No, they don’t know what you do.  No, they can’t run a project or sell a job.  But they can move your company forward on things you just don’t have the bandwidth to tackle.  In the process, they will learn, gain an accomplishment bullet for their resume and you can have something you didn’t have 10 weeks before.

So, what types of things?  Here is a short list of things we’ve had our interns working on in the last couple of years:

1. Making our legacy data digital.  Creating a searchable database of older projects and their shop drawings.
2. Going paperless.  What does it cost us currently to print all of our drawings?  What tools are available to move into the digital age?
3. Using Autodesk Inventor.  We had heard this was a great tool for a number of things.  We did not have any internal expertise.  So, we had an intern learn the program, create some models, find the best practices and see how it might fit into our engineering process.
4. Experiment with modeling.  BIM models of curtain walls are big.  When we model in Autocad they get hard to manage.  What methods could we use to mitigate this issue?  If you build a model in different platforms, how does it perform?
5. Create a submittal module.  On every project we need to submit product data.  Could we build a central repository for all of this information and make the submittal process easy?  Something that everyone could update to keep it current so you don’t have to go find the data every time you start a new project.
6. Create a warranty module.  Same idea.  We submit standard warranty data all the time.  Create a central repository for this information so the PM just has to select what they want and they get the most current warranty information, maintenance instructions, etc…
7. Create standard engineering data.  We have taught our interns how to use Autocad and then had them build standard details, fabrication tickets, fabrication data, etc… for our systems.
8. Advanced energy modeling.  What software is available.  How do we use it?

These are just some of the projects we have worked on in the last couple of summers.

The amazing thing about today’s youth is that they don’t think there is anything they can’t do.  They live in an age where anytime someone thinks of something they want, they just write an app to do it.  So we just give them the information and let them try to figure it out.  They have time, youth and the internet on their side.  A little instruction each day to keep things on track and they can come up with some pretty amazing solutions that would take your other employees years to do.

I’m posting this today because it is the last day for our intern program for this summer.  I really look forward to our summers and the interns we get to work with and we had 3 great people this year who really helped to move our company forward on a bunch of fronts.  I’d like to thank Eunice, James and Ryan for all their work this summer.  Creating a great intern program can be rewarding to you and the students you hire.  Hopefully this article will inspire you to give it a try!

One thing you ending up having to do when you become a manager is learn to Interview someone.  Hiring is the most important job as a manager and it can have a huge impact on the direction of your company so becoming good at interviewing is essential.

Most people approach interviewing as a “feel” thing.  They just talk to someone about their career and try to get a sense of the person.  That wasn’t working for me.  I wanted interviewing to be more science than art.  I wanted to create a process out of it.  One that we could continuously improve on. So we did a bunch of research and here are my tips for learning to conduct a good interview:

1.  First, know what you are looking for.  Spend some time with other people in your company coming up with a list of behaviors that successful people in your company have in common.  You are trying to hire someone that will fit your company and be successful there.  So you need someone that blends with the organization and will be able to fit in.  For example, in our company, we found that the successful people were humble.  If you went into Randy Wolf’s office today and asked him to help you with a glass takeoff, he’d jump right in and help you.  He is the owner of a multimillion dollar corporation but he wouldn’t think twice about it.  You will find that from the COO and everyone else in the firm.  No one cares about titles or prestige or the office or parking spaces.  We would all sweep the floor or clean the bathroom if that’s what’s required.  So you need to know that about your company before you interview someone.  List out all your qualities.

2.  Now go and grab a few books on behavioral interviewing.  Past performance is the best indicator of future performance.  So the process works like this.  You create questions around what someone has done in the past.  If they’ve done it in the past, then they probably would do it in the future working for you.  So in our example, maybe your question is:  Tell me about a time that you had to do something that wasn’t in your job description.  Or:  Tell me about a time when you were asked to do something you had never done before.  When the person gives you specific examples of things they have done in the past, you can see how they would react to things that they will run into in the future.

3.  Create a standard list of questions.  Yes, this is a process and not an art form.  So you are going to ask everyone interviewing for a project management position the same set of questions every time.  As you use the questions over and over, you will be able to see which ones are really working and which ones are confusing or not getting you what you want and you can modify them as you go.  As you hire people, if they work out great or even if they don’t work out at all, you can then look back on your interview questions and modify them to address things you may have missed or need to update.

4.  Practice interviewing people.  Here’s what we did.  We had our HR professional give us a class on behavioral interviewing.  We set up a group of people that are typically interviewing people and went through the class.  We then used our summer intern position for our practice.  First, our group interviewed a group of people in the company that we thought were great hires in the last few years.  We brought them all in, asked our standard list of questions and listened for how they would answer the questions.  We then tuned up our questions and we were ready.  We have lots of people respond to our intern ads so we just set up a group of about 8 people to interview.  We had all of our team in the room and we picked one person to conduct the interview.  One of us would do the interview using the standard questions and the rest of us would take notes.  After the interview, we would give that person some constructive feed back on what went well and where they could improve.  We each did 2 – 3 interviews like this and worked hard to improve our process each time.  The fact is that you rarely get to see someone else do an interview so the experience was amazing.  By the third interview, people knew where to probe, how to get the candidate to be more specific and really get to the heart of the question. We learned how to ask the questions clearly and naturally and we really dialed in our questions and our process.

5.  Interview a lot.  If you don’t do it often, you don’t get good at it.  You should be interviewing all the time.  You want to have a bench of potential candidates.  You don’t want to have to start interviewing after someone gives their two week notice.  Hiring should be a process and you want to have months to find good people, not weeks.  If you are interviewing all the time and finding good people, then when a position becomes available you will have a list of people to call and you won’t be placing ads for the open position.

6.  Interview for fit, not for skills.  This is tough.  You need to find people with great potential, not just someone who can do the job right now.  We will hire a person with the right attitude over a person with years of experience every time.  Yes it takes time to do the training, but then you have an amazing person instead of just someone who can fill the spot.

Hopefully these tips will give you some ideas on how to improve your interviewing process.