I’m talking mostly about huge, designer buildings or skyscrapers that take a team of architects and years of experience to design. How are then the construction workers, who, in my narrow-minded world do not necessarily have to be very educated, able to synchronize in such a way that everyone knows exactly what to do to turn the architects’ plans into reality, and in such a short time?
In: Engineering
It’s like the military. You have crews run by crew foremen managed by site foremen governed by project planners.
Consider the offices of any large corporation – how does each individual know what they should be doing? A hierarchy of superiors.
These other posts are basically right, but also the other thing is that they’re also often complete shitshows — poor communication, finger pointing, covering for other guys fuckups, etc. These factors all waste time and money. Big developers often assess HUGE penalties to the coordinator for delivering the project late – like 15k per day. Projects running behind will often authorize huge overtime bc it will cost them less than being late.
I’m in the fence business. I’m currently at a site where 20 apartment complex’s are being built.
I don’t really understand how they do what they do, but from what I can understand is this. There’s several dozen crews doing what they know best and there’s usually one contractor that is in charge of everything. This one contractor has a main blueprint of what’s supposed to be done. There’s also a blueprint of the individual compex’s.
It all starts with ground work, then foundations, framing/roofing, siding, interiors (drywall windows appliances), landscaping, fencing (if the main contractor decides for one), asphalt/concrete (parking/sidewalks).
I hope this has explained some of the process or given you a better idea of what goes on.
Generally a single company is hired to do the overall site management. They set the schedule, organize the sub-contractors, manage deliveries of materials, and do everything else it takes to make sure construction proceeds. Each individual sub-contracting company will have their piece of the project schedule and plans provided to them, and then they break that out into individual tasks for their teams of workers. So when you show up to the site with your tools you know what your job is for that day/week, but you don’t need to know the entire project plan.
The plans are turned into a large flow chart with multiple timelines of activities for different crews and types of task. Single jobs are scheduled depending on what prerequisite stages have to be completed before that one, when a particular skill group or raw material will become available, and so on.
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