The Checklist Manifesto_ How to Get Things Right - Atul Gawande [27]
Man is fallible, but maybe men are less so.
In a back room of the field office, Ryan Walsh, a buzz-cut young man of about thirty wearing a yellow reflector vest, sat in front of two big flat-screen displays. His job, he explained, was to take all the construction plans submitted by each of the major trades and merge them into a three-dimensional floor-by-floor computer rendering of the building. He showed me what the top floor looked like on the screen. He’d so far loaded in the specifications from nine of the trades—the structural specs, the elevator specs, the plumbing specs, and so on. He used his mouse to walk us through the building as if we were taking a stroll down the corridors. You could see the walls, the doors, the safety valves, everything. More to the point, you could see problems—a place where there wasn’t enough overhead clearance for an average-size person, for example. He showed me an application called Clash Detective that ferreted out every instance in which the different specs conflicted with one another or with building regulations.
“If a structural beam is going where a lighting fixture is supposed to hang, the Clash Detective turns that beam a different color on-screen,” he said. “You can turn up hundreds of clashes. I once found two thousand.” But it’s not enough to show the clash on the screen, he explained. You have to resolve it, and to do that you have to make sure the critical people talk. So the computer also flags the issue for the submittal schedule printout and sends an e-mail to each of the parties who have to resolve it.
There’s yet another program, called ProjectCenter, that allows anyone who has found a problem—even a frontline worker—to e-mail all the relevant parties, track progress, and make sure a check is added to the schedule to confirm that everyone has talked and resolved the matter. When we were back at the McNamara/Salvia offices, Bernie Rouillard showed me one such e-mail he’d gotten that week. A worker had attached a digital photo of a twelve-foot steel I beam he was bolting in. It hadn’t lined up properly and only two of the four bolts could fit. Was that all right, the worker wanted to know? No, Rouillard wrote back. They worked out a solution together: to weld the beam into place. The e-mail was also automatically sent to the main contractor and anyone else who might potentially be required to sign off. Each party was given three days to confirm that the proposed solution was okay. And everyone needed to confirm they’d communicated, since the time taken for even this small fix could change the entire sequence in which other things needed to be done.
Joe Salvia had earlier told me that the major advance in the science of construction over the last few decades has been the perfection of tracking and communication. But only now did I understand what he meant.
The building world’s willingness to apply its strategies to difficulties of any size and seriousness is striking. Salvia’s partner, Robert McNamara, for instance, was one of the structural engineers for the Citicorp (now Citigroup) building in midtown Manhattan, with its iconic slanted rooftop. It was planned to rise more than nine hundred feet on four nine-story-tall stiltlike columns placed not at the building’s corners but at the center of each side and steadied by giant, hidden chevron-shaped braces designed by William LeMessurier, the project’s lead structural engineer. The visual effect was arresting. The colossal structure would look like it was almost floating above Fifty-third Street. But wind-tunnel testing of a model revealed that the skyscraper stood so high above the surrounding buildings in midtown that it was subject to wind streams and turbulence with forces familiar only to airplane designers, not to structural engineers. The acceptable amount of sway for the building was unknown.