What’s Next?

Over the years, the one concept that I have personally tried to teach the people who have worked with, and for, me is to think about ‘what comes next?’ Whether it involves water piping a battery of fixtures in a wet wall, or planning production scheduling for a new project, thinking ahead and knowing what comes next in the queue of things to do is imperative if you want the job to come to a successful conclusion.

As an example: once, years ago, my company was doing the plumbing on a multi-story office building with core bathrooms. The wet wall had a lot of back-to-back fixtures—urinals, water closets, lavatories and a couple of showers. The journeyman who was assigned to pipe the wall on one of the floors was a decent mechanic who did neat, clean work but was not so quick on forward thinking. In other words, he rarely, if ever thought about “what’s next.”

An illustration of this lack in forward thinking: this journeyman sat down on his rolling stool and began piping the water in this wet wall. Tees were a critical component (lots of flush valves, after all). The fittings were ordered and brought to his work area in boxes, along with the appropriate lengths of copper tube, and just about everything he would need to complete the job. So far, so good, right?

Well, as it turns out, the foreman missed ordering a reducing tee at the very end of the run. A lapse that those of us who have “been there, done that,” can understand and appreciate. “Stuff” happens. The issue here isn’t that missing fitting, it is the cascading events that proceeded because of it, and a real-world illustration of not thinking about “what comes next?”

The journeyman whose job it was to plumb the wet wall never took the time to lay out the fittings. He simply started plumbing at point “A” and just reached into the box with the fittings. He continued right up until he hit that missing tee. At that point, he simply stopped and packed his tools for the day. Unfortunately, the plan had been to have the wet wall water piping installed and pressure tested in one workday, and to move on to the next floor the following day, and so forth. The timeline for the work was tight, but not impossibly so. Still, by not thinking about “what’s next?” the journeyman threw an unintentional monkey wrench into the production schedule for the plumbing portion of the project.

Worse still, the foreman was not informed about the lack of the final tee until the following day when that journeyman told him that he needed it to finish, and he had to go back to that floor for another hour or so. Certainly not a major problem, right? Well, yeah, it was, because the crews had already been lined out on the work on the next floor. Material had been laid out, work assigned and chopping a journeyman from that crew, for even an hour or two, impacted that day’s production and the job schedule. Simply using “what’s next?” thinking could have avoided the problem and streamlined the project just a little bit.

Further, the foreman noted that the tee in question had been missed on the take off for all the wet walls (although, fortunately, not in the original estimate) so the problem could have been repeated on each of the 34 floors in this particular project, or at least a few floors until it became obvious. What if no one, or anyone in the position of having to know, gave any thought to what came next? The error would have been compounded and the loss in production, and dollars, would have snowballed. The preceding was a small snapshot of the problems that the lack of “what’s next?” thinking can do.

Today, the use of BIM in conjunction with CPM (critical path method) in project management and job scheduling really makes trade coordination much more efficient than it has ever been. The two methods can, and do, save time and money across the board. Subcontractors who embrace these methods see real improvements in their profit margins. The “headache quotient” also is reduced accordingly.

CPM and BIM both have one thing in common. At their core, they are asking “what’s next?”  Even the “float” in a CPM timeline takes into consideration errors of omission, substitution and unforeseen delays. In trying to eliminate glaring errors by detailing every phase of a project the “what’s next?” thinking makes everyone’s job easier.

“What’s next?” thinking needs to be emphasized at every level when you are in business. The concept is one that needs to be ingrained in your business plan and in your job performance. It will save your company money and aggravation from the bottom to the top. Using that type of thinking is like wrapping an entire project up with a bow. Teaching it to your people, and re-enforcing that mindset at every opportunity will pay off.

The Brooklyn, N.Y.-born author is a retired third generation master plumber. He founded Sunflower Plumbing & Heating in Shirley, N.Y., in 1975 and A Professional Commercial Plumbing Inc. in Phoenix in 1980. He holds residential, commercial, industrial and solar plumbing licenses and is certified in welding, clean rooms, polypropylene gas fusion and medical gas piping. He can be reached at [email protected].