How it all started?

West Coast Eagles Stadium. We were contracted to do the structural steel. Endless variations. Delays in payment.

The main contractor on the job - I won’t name it explicitly - said he would handle the variations after the job was complete. You can see where this is going. He never did. But much to his “credit” - he did ask for the proof of this changes ¹.

I think he knew full well that it would be nigh impossible to extract the documentation hidden amongst thousands of emails, and hundreds of PDFs, and to present it in an manner so that you could be reimbursed. Even if we managed that, he would question the hours taken, and if there were no hours - then he’d question the cost. Basically it is a cheap scam. However - he did have a point. In order to pay out a claim, you need documentation.

It was then that I realised, you need a means - a system of collecting the variations.

And then came the objections from management: fear.

“But clients will not pay, you’ll scare away the clients etc”

… and the clients did not pay. But why?

1. My theory was that the docs weren’t good enough.
2. That the docs were not submitted in time.

I had begged and proposed to management that we pay staff - the ones who originated those “change requests” or variations - to pay them a cut. Much to management’s credit: he relented after unceasing pressure.

And the result: first-class documentation.

Now it’s much harder for clients to deny them - because they are so obvious. And as I suspected, we found a curious anomoly: we found that the clients started beggin for the variation claims. The docs: they want them! So from an initial premise of “don’t charge clients for extra” work - we are now curiously having to deal with clients who are begging for them. Time has proven those fears are baseless.

What made it work?

Incentives: paying people IF they do it properly.

We had tragic instances in our precast division were staff:

• “forgot” to put in a variation.
• or where a guy - let’s call him Narimathu (with an “N”) - wrote all his variations down in a note book.
• or another guy - Sajesh (with an “S”) had logged many thousands of dollars of variations, but had not submitted a single one.

But once you start paying people: all of those problems mysteriously disappear. Now: they are eagerly watching to see if changes come, which would affect their project.

….and morever they will fight hard for them.

Proof of the Fight

How can we further channel this “nuclear energy”

Deadlines

Incentives are like a nuclear reaction: they are super powerful, but they must be channeled effectively. The next frontier is to incentivse staff to deliver projects QUICKLY - and to a pre-determined deadline. Right now - there is zero incentive to deliver a project on time.

We can change this with a bonus system for delivering projects at a date that the client requires them. And if they are not delivered on that date - we need documentation as to where the hold-up is.

Adding a bonus to this component would incentivise staff to hound the other trades - engineers and architects - in order to get the projects completed on time.

We have not incentivised this system yet, but I feel it would be a worthy edition to what we call “the Quote App”.

I am now begging management to implement an incentive for delivering ON TIME! People will run hard if they deliver to a set deadline, they will be happier, because they get paid, for delivery.

Marketing

….and there is zero incentive to engage in market.

If you want something, incentives it

Incentives will change the game. If you want an outcome, incentivise it.

I detest the philsophy that “you can’t incentivise every thing”.

Wrong. You can. And you should incentivise everything that matters.

¹ Aparently