Talked with a junior PM last week who changed how I look at daily reports

Honestly, I always thought daily reports were just paperwork for the GC. Then I sat down with a junior PM named Marcus over lunch. He showed me how he uses photos and timestamps to track crew productivity. He pulled up a project where a 3 hour delay got buried in a generic report. Now I actually write specific notes like "flatwork crew waited 45 minutes for concrete truck #2." Has anyone else tweaked their reporting format and seen better results?

3 comments

3 Comments

drewgonzalez12d agoMost Upvoted

Heard a GC superintendent talking about this at a safety meeting last month. He said they started doing "time lapse" pics every 30 minutes on their big jobs. Caught a crew standing around for almost an hour waiting on material that was sitting in the yard the whole time. Now they just snap a phone pic at each hour mark and add a one line note. Saves a ton of headache later.

miles_garcia11d ago

That thing about "time lapse pics every 30 minutes" from drewgonzalez sounds good but I'd bump that up. Every 30 minutes is way too spread out for catching real slowdowns. I've run into the same problem where a crew looked busy in a single snapshot but were actually waiting 10-15 minutes between loads. We did one job where the drywall crew was only working 25 minutes out of each hour because they spent the rest walking back and forth for tools. A photo every 30 minutes would have shown them in different spots but never caught that they were wasting half the shift. Now I snap one at 15 minute marks and scribble down what actually got done in that block. It takes maybe 30 extra seconds per round but it's caught so much wasted time that my subs actually started scheduling their material drops tighter.

joel_martinez12d ago

That's a solid idea from @drewgonzalez with the time lapse pics. I started doing something similar on our jobs after a concrete pour went way over schedule. We set up a cheap phone tripod in a corner and snapped a pic every 20 minutes. Turned out the pump operator was taking breaks without anyone noticing because the foreman was always on the other side of the site. The pictures showed exactly where the bottleneck was, which the daily reports never caught because everyone just wrote "pouring concrete" for the whole shift. Now I keep a small notebook in my vest and jot down times whenever something stops moving. It's a pain at first, but after a week it becomes a habit. The super actually thanked me for it during a dispute with the concrete supplier last month.