Thanksgiving is near, which means along with Aunt Carol's green bean casserole and a tryptophan-induced coma, we've got an epic weekend of football to look forward to. This also means we've reached the halfway marker for football season, separating those teams that are reaching their goals from those that are falling way short.
It’s no secret the goal for our team at Buffalo Construction, Inc. is to make our client partners happy – that’s our “touchdown.” Let’s imagine a football as one of our projects. Much like your favorite football team, we must have a developed game plan to get the football from one end to the other.
So, what’s our game plan? We call it the HERD Build Cycle.
HATCH A PLAN
Every good team knows that preparation for the next game is critical. As soon as an opportunity comes to our team, we begin to “hatch a plan” - assigning a project team, including identifying a project manager, superintendent, coordinator, and any other teammates we see fit. Having a team dedicated to each project prior to award helps us to be proactive, identifying any obstacles and developing a game plan that takes those factors into account.
EVOLVE & BRIEF THE PLAN
We know the ball is headed our way, so now what? Through collaborative planning sessions, our team defines our project objective, identifies the threats and resources, and assigns accountability through detailed courses of action for each of the project milestones. We come out of this stage with a rock-solid plan from the start of construction to turnover.
ROAM
What do Buffalo herds do best? They roam. We now have the ball and a plan to get it from one side of the field to the other, with all our focus on delivering a quality product to our customer. This phase is all about executing our plan. What happens when something doesn’t go as planned? We adjust our plan through agile, collaborative meetings held frequently throughout the duration of any given project. There is no such thing as too much communication on or off the field during the construction phase of a project, and we take that to heart.
DEBRIEF
At the end of the game, we don’t only care about coming out on top. We want to understand what we can do better in the next game – on the next project. Once a project is turned over to the client, we score each one of our projects internally and conduct debrief meetings to discuss our experience and what we have learned that we might be able to apply to future projects. These lessons learned and best practices have significant value, so we ensure that they are communicated to all of our project teams across the entire organization.
Each one of our projects goes through this cycle. It’s a game plan that works – just take a look at a number of our “touchdowns” in our project gallery below.
To learn more about the Herd Build Cycle, click to listen to Buffalo Construction Inc.'s CFO/COO, John Hunter, featured on the Afterburner Podcast. John details how using this process helps our team identify lessons learned and standardize best practices to positively impact each of our future projects.