MBiz

27 MBiz | june 2017 Total Project Management founders Jamie McCulloch (left) and David Poole at the rammed earth house their company built. Photos by Darcy Finley rammed earth experience and worked with Lafarge to supply the specialized product for the concrete walls. The unusual nature of the building required input and expertise from the entire team, which included piling contractor Subterranean, structural engineer Tim Krahn, S & J Construction, Heritage Electric, Keith's Custom Sheet Metal, Howell Mechanical, Derksen Plumbing and Heating, Greg Jorgenson of Energy Efficient Engineering and carpenters Jef Rempel and Josh Sawatzky. All the team members had input and could devise solutions during the project, for example, by figuring out a way to run a geothermal heating system through the pilings that support the house. That's an example, on the scale of an individual home, of a construction philosophy TPM embraces, ensuring that all aspects of a project fit together, from planning and design stages through to the commissioning and start-up of the completed building. The TPM philosophy was developed in response to a number of common problems that result from the traditional tendering approach, in which a building owner selects an architectural plan, provides contractors with a short period to look at the plan and submit their estimates and then chooses the lowest bidder. All too often, that low bid fails to take construction challenges into account. And contractors may not have enough time to spot errors or faulty assumptions in the architect's plan. The results can include cost overruns and building deficiencies that need to be fixed later. TPM gives the contractors and the architectural team more time to collaborate and allows contractors more time to gather input from suppliers and subcontractors. And all members of the team can fill in each other's knowledge gaps. As Poole explains: "Sometimes we'll look things over and I'll see things from the design side that Jamie won't know. And Jamie will see things from a construction perspective that I won't know." "Construction is the only industry that builds its mistakes and then corrects them," he adds. By comparison, he notes, industries like aviation and aerospace use technology to plan and test everything before sending a newly designed airplane into the sky. "So we're like NASA then," says McCulloch, cracking a smile. ■ TOTAL PROJECT MANAGEMENT Rammed earth is a technique in which a special dry mix of low-cement-content concrete is used to create walls that can be textured and tinted to resemble the natural stratification of a rock face.

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