The Checklist Manifesto_ How to Get Things Right - Atul Gawande [24]
The artistic renderings were spectacular. Russia Wharf was where merchant ships sailing between St. Petersburg and Boston with iron, hemp, and canvas for the shipbuilding industry once docked. The Boston Tea Party took place next door. The new glass and steel building was going up right along this waterfront, with a ten-story atrium underneath and the 110-year-old brick facades of the original Classical Revival structures preserved as part of the new building.
When I arrived for the tour, Salvia took one look at my blue Brooks Brothers blazer and black penny loafers and let out a low chuckle.
“One thing you learn going to construction sites is you have to have the right shoes,” he said.
The insides of the old buildings had long been gutted and the steel skeleton of the new tower had been built almost halfway up, to the fourteenth floor. A tower crane hung four stories above the structure. Ants on the ground, we worked our way around a pair of concrete mixing trucks, the cops stopping traffic, and a few puddles of gray mud to enter the first-floor field office of John Moriarty and Associates, the general contractor for the project. It was nothing like the movie construction-site field trailers I had in my mind—no rusting coffee urn, no cheap staticky radio playing, no cigar-chewing boss barking orders. Instead, there were half a dozen offices where men and women, many in work boots, jeans, and yellow safety reflector vests, sat staring into computer terminals or were gathered around a conference table with a PowerPoint slide up on a screen.
I was given a blue hard hat and an insurance release to sign and introduced to Finn O’Sullivan, a smiling six-foot-three Irishman with a lilting brogue who served as the “project executive” for the building—they don’t call them field bosses anymore, I was told. O’Sullivan said that on any given day he has between two and five hundred workers on-site, including people from any of sixty sub-contractors. The volume of knowledge and degree of complexity he had to manage, it struck me, were as monstrous as anything I had encountered in medicine. He tried to explain how he and his colleagues made sure that all those people were doing their work correctly, that the building would come together properly, despite the enormous number of considerations—and despite the fact that he could not possibly understand the particulars of most of the tasks involved. But I didn’t really get his explanation until he brought me to the main conference room. There, on the walls around a big white oval table, hung sheets of butcher-block-size printouts of what were, to my surprise, checklists.
Along the right wall as we walked in was, O’Sullivan explained, the construction schedule. As I peered in close, I saw a line-byline, day-by-day listing of every building task that needed to be accomplished, in what order, and when—the fifteenth-floor concrete pour on the thirteenth of the month, a steel delivery on the fourteenth, and so on. The schedule spread over multiple sheets. There was special color coding, with red items highlighting critical steps that had to be done before other steps could proceed. As each task was accomplished, a job supervisor reported to O’Sullivan, who then put a check mark in his computer scheduling program. He posted a new printout showing the next phase of work each week, sometimes more frequently if things were moving along. The construction schedule was essentially one long checklist.
Since every building is a new creature with its own particularities, every building checklist is new, too. It is drawn up by a group of people representing each of the sixteen trades, including, in this case, someone from Salvia’s firm making sure the structural engineering steps were incorporated as they should be. Then the whole checklist is sent to the subcontractors and other independent experts so they can double-check that everything