013 – Execution Realism: Why Most Project Schedules Lie (and How to Fix Them) with Travis Arlitt

Orion Matthews: [00:00:00] Welcome to the major project podcast. I am your host, Orion Matthews. And in this pod we are learning from the people that work on projects over $1 billion, trying to tease out the lessons and learnings from these big endeavors.

And today my guest is Travis Arlet. Travis is a senior planning and field execution specialist. He has over 25 years in the capital project delivery, including 16 years. On the owner side Travis has supported some serious mega projects. Angola, LNG, Wheatstone, LNG, Chevron’s, Bigfoot, TLP, and the. Billion dollar superior refinery rebuild.

And most recently Travis has been working on the Santos Pick a seawater treatment plant. And I’m really excited about what we wanna focus on. We’re gonna talk about something that he calls and I think is great name execution, realism and progress truth. So that’s grounding schedules in field reality and helping leadership make decisions, uh, before problems become really expensive.

He is also the [00:01:00] co-founder of Day One Model, which is a progress based planning and forecasting approach, uh, built on basically his experience and some of that execution, realism, and progress tooth. So, Travis, welcome to the podcast.

Travis Arlitt: Thank you, Orion. Thank you for having me on. Excited to be here.

Orion Matthews: Awesome.

Well, you know, before we get started on talking about execution, realism and, and all good things, maybe you can give us a little history about how you got into major projects. What, what excited you about going into the field, um, where you got your degree, things like that a little bit.

Travis Arlitt: Sure. I grew up in a construction family, and remember my great uncle had traveled construction and took my dad with him when I was a kid.

And so I’ve always had that idea that it’s a potential career. And went to a and m actually started in computer science which you, uh, which is your background. Yep. I was also in the Aggie band in the Corps of Cadets [00:02:00] and I. I didn’t quite come to terms academically at the time with that degree.

And then I found out they had, I didn’t know they had a construction degree and I, I switched to there and excelled. Did really well and enjoyed that and just started traveling to various project sites. It got started with the contractors, Morrison Knutson, URS, Zachary, and then made the switch to the owner side in 2010, I guess.

And, uh, it worked a lot of Chevron projects. Shell met with Shell Santos recently and currently a little operator out of Perth that’s doing an offshore Papua New Guinea platform and a production facility.

Orion Matthews: [00:03:00] Nice. And so you’re an interesting story, uh, from going from Texas a and m and then really traveling the world.

It seems like you’ve got a lot of global experience and I, and I understand that was kind of your intent. Do you have any interesting kind of lessons or, or thoughts for the audience that is thinking about maybe going global or

Travis Arlitt: remember what I was on a project. We’re the construction manager for Chevron, and I was with an EPC in, uh, Colorado, the pe, and I saw the owner side planner, and I just realized that’s what I wanted to do.

I went to another project with that EPC, uh, levy in New Orleans. But on that, during that project, I kept a note card on my little kitchen island that said Work for the owner International. I listed my salary and I just kept looking at that for a year. And right at the end of that project, I got the call that they needed a planner urgently in Angola for a Angola [00:04:00] LNG, that Chevron group I worked with in Colorado.

I made a good name for myself and had an opening. And, um, that’s how I got over there is rotational and it was just so exhilarating to me to to, you know, set foot in Africa for a big l and g and, um, I was OSBL, so outside of boundary limits, just housing developments and roads. But the main planner, he had his guy, his back to back, went to a different project.

So I got to fill in on the ISBL side, which is really cool, and learned quite a bit about how they operated and um, yeah. Then, you know, when you in this world, you impress a project team or like a business manager and they just take you with them as a known commodity, especially when you’re going from domestic to overseas.

They don’t want to [00:05:00] necessarily take a risk on a, on an unknown. So that same project group brought me to Malaysia for the Wheatstone project in 2013 and, um, and that that same project manager brought me back here in 2020 for the Santos job. So that’s just, that note card kind of led to those thin threads and just doing good work for the right people and some luck involved, and you kind of get what you keep your mind focused on.

Orion Matthews: Boy, that’s that that’s powerful advice. Sometimes I, I imagine if you’re working on a project and you’re like, what’s the point of this? Or, this isn’t where I ultimately want to be, but those little reputational wins follow you and then possibilities open up.

Travis Arlitt: Yep. Definitely.

Orion Matthews: Well, thanks for a little history.

How about we get into it? I, I am super excited to talk about [00:06:00] execution, realism, and progress truth, because I, I think we should probably start with just defining it, but. I think the words are really powerful and can we deliver this? Can people get realistic about what’s happening in the field? Um, so maybe break it down a little bit.

Like you, you’ve obviously done a ton of thinking and then you, you even created this day one model to really try and iron that out and create a whole model around execution realism. So maybe you can start with sort of why, why is there a gap? How did you get passionate about solving it? And then what does execution, realism progress?

Truth really mean

Travis Arlitt: that we could probably go back to that Colorado project for Chevron, and that’s I gave them that realism. And from the contractor side, you don’t usually have access in the way that I did to the, to the client. And, uh, but that job, because we were their CM arm, I was able to talk freely with [00:07:00] Chevron, which was, I took advantage of.

But, um, it was a tale of two stories going on at the same time that really highlight what, what was happening. And so I, I was gone. I went to the field as my first field assignment as a lead planner, and it was a big compressor station with, water, sand separators. And then there’s well pads that were built out with, not compressors, but quite a bit of equipment, then interconnected with pipelines.

And then, um. You know, roads and infrastructure. So I had created this schedule and my task was create the, the ubiquitous level three, and then have three week look ahead meetings with these guys and make sure we’re on schedule the typical way you would do it. So here I am, I’m pulling these guys into this trailer, single wide trailer I remember.

And they’d been building these facilities since before I was born, some [00:08:00] of them. And uh, so here I was telling a pipeline or, Hey, next week you gotta dig a trench and then make sure you bed the pipe. And it was just, these guys were looking at me with blank stairs. I, I remember it was off of I 70 and we, we lived west of the site in Grand Junction.

We’d go through this real windy valley kind of, you know, heading towards Denver. And I just kept wanting to just keep driving all the way to Texas and just go back home. It was a really gr it was one of those, it just wasn’t fun. But out of that experience I was thinking, okay, I’m not really helping the project by doing these three week look aheads, these guys without me here, they’re gonna build this compressor station, they’re gonna lay this pipeline.

They know that order. It all has to go in. They don’t have to have me tell them you need piles before you hit the foundations. Um, so what can I do? And then I. I’d created my first progress system. I thought, [00:09:00] okay, let’s get under this schedule and start to tell these guys something that they might not know.

We are committed to completing this compressor station on this date and we’re backing up where we’re at now. And instead of you need to lay your eight inch gas line next week, it’s, Hey Paul, uh, whatever his name was, I know you’re running a Microsoft Project schedule for your guys. I support that, but right now you’re installing a hundred feet of pipe a day, but we have this committed date.

You need to re really be putting in 200 feet of pipe a day. Can we talk about how we can maybe do that? And I just did that throughout the whole site. But the first time I set that system up, it was a massive, what I call bow wave now. And is you’re doing say 1% a week and you need to do [00:10:00] 2% or 3%. And it was just a really shocking view of the project.

And, um, but at the same time I was getting that schedule, I built audited by the corporate Chevron guy and I was getting some bad marks ’cause I didn’t follow the, the best practices I guess at the time. Now I, I can, my schedules get the highest scores because I know how to play the game. But back then I probably didn’t know it as well.

I. So here they were, they’re firing up literally the corporate jet to go have an emergency site meeting after I showed them the progress picture of this job and talk about what to do about it. While I was getting a pretty, pretty, tough writeup on my schedule. So that was kind of the, the two things that were happening at once.

The old, I don’t call it old, you need a schedule but you need to understand your audience for that schedule. But if you don’t have that underlying progress picture, [00:11:00] that’s what really gets the leadership engaged. If you can back up your milestones to progress. And so that’s what, that was probably the first time that really got into, I call it, we call it now, the vital four.

It’s your average pace when you get up, not at a micro level, but at a level high enough to where you’re looking at, say, a, a full well pad in that case for the compressor station. You don’t bring in 50 civil guys and next week you go down to 22. Then you go up to 50. You kind of follow a flow where you’re ramping up these trades at a, you get to that level, usually the unit level or the module level, and then you start to.

To put the progress picture together. And and you don’t really need a schedule to give that schedule assurance. That’s one of the, [00:12:00] so I got a little off track. So that’s your, your average pace. You can, you pull back, you gotta pull back a few weeks. Five, three to five weeks.

Orion Matthews: Mm-hmm.

Travis Arlitt: A lot of times people have that good day in their head, but that’s not reality.

And like in college, if you miss one of your four exams you have a risk of not passing. And that’s a lot, that’s a lot the same way with production. So you have a good rolling average, you decide, and then you redistribute to the plan date. So you’re not looking at a plan variance. The plan is now a date and a set of progress that’s required to meet that date.

And if your average pace is less than what’s required, then you’re pushing a bow wave. You have schedule compression. So that’s the third metric is that compression factor. And then you have an impact where if you let that progress, that end date move out, you equalize [00:13:00] that next week required with your current pace.

And so that’s what we, we call a deterministic forecast. So it’s quite different than probabilistic because that leader can now see. Okay, I see the bow wave, I see the, the equalized where we’re heading at our current pace, and that, that really gets their attention. And then they do things like fire up that corporate jet and fly to Colorado to have an emergency meeting where if you’re gonna do a probabilistic or a schedule quality score, eh, you’re, you may not have the jet.

Orion Matthews: All right, I’m gonna try and repeat this back to you, but I, I am a super simple person that, um, yep. So let me give this a shot. Let’s say that your plan let’s go to like a different metaphor here, but if you have a race car and you know, you’re going around a [00:14:00] track or whatever, and you have all these little micro moves you’re doing to move around cars, blah, blah, blah, and you gotta make like 50 laps you know, you might have a whole plan in your head about how you’re gonna dodge in and do all these things.

There’s all this complicated stuff. We could call that, like the schedule, but when, but you’re like the RRP M guy where you’re like, uh, this is your velocity right now. And if you maintain this velocity, which is how fast you’ve been going around these tracks, you’re gonna lose. Mm-hmm. Like, you gotta go around 50 times.

And so we know there’s all this other complicated crap, but we’re gonna, you know, for now what we’re gonna look at is for the last five laps, you have gone this slow. And mm-hmm. Uh, you know, I don’t know why, or there’s all these maneuvers and stuff and that, and that schedule sometimes gets in the way of that, whereas you can just say like, look, your velocity’s not cutting it.

Um mm-hmm. And because of that, you’re not gonna make that final lap on time at this speed. And that kind of enables a different conversation. [00:15:00] It gets you out of like a lot of those, like weaving and dodging and all the complicated stuff that goes with having a massive tree of activities and interdependent activities and really just cuts to the chase of like, how, what is your speed?

And that’s that wave concept you’re talking about, about like a bow wave. Does that, is that kind of, I mean, it’s a terrible approximation, but No, it’s perfect. That’s kind of a bit of the,

Travis Arlitt: what

Orion Matthews: we’re talking

Travis Arlitt: about. Let’s unpack it just a little bit further. And so, so one, one way to describe what we’re talking about here, when you say planning and scheduling can mean a thousand, we had five different planners on the that this refinery job and all of us had different roles.

It was, so, it’s such a loaded term. We’re talking about strategic planning here, not tactical planning. So tactical is what you said, that cars doing. Its thing around the other cars.

Orion Matthews: Mm-hmm.

Travis Arlitt: So what happens at a strategic level [00:16:00] the minute. So instead of, normally if you’re thinking of it in project terms, you would say, okay, Mr.

Race car driver, you’re 10 laps in. And you, we thought before we started the race that you would be at 12 laps in. And so then they do some SPI calc, divide the 10 by the 12 and, and all the, you know, then the race car driver gets a bit confused. Whereas if you just tell them your average pace is 170 miles an hour, but we need to pick it up to 1 75, that’s a lot simpler and more actionable.

And then you could show them, if you keep going at one 70, you’re gonna be dead last because it’s gonna take you x amount of time. And what’s also another component that you don’t pick up when you’re just doing variances, and this is critical, as soon as you, your bow wave becomes [00:17:00] unequal it’s not a, a linear, it’s not a linear process.

If you have a fixed end date,

Orion Matthews: right,

Travis Arlitt: you have every period that goes by, you have less periods to spread it by and more volume. That’s, and it, it can, you’re not on top of that. It’s gonna build under you and you’re not gonna be aware of it. And then it’s gonna be a two or three x bow wave. But if you can get your team sensitive to it and get that race car driver sensitive that.

Lap two, it’s one 70 was our goal. You’re doing 1 69 0.8, and then he can maybe have that target in his head. And uh, and now it’s not one 70 anymore race car driver because we’ve been doing 1 68, 69 0.8. It’s one 70.2. And you keep, keep them and keep the project dialed in from the beginning at that, that real sensitive balance of your [00:18:00] strategic speed.

Orion Matthews: Well, and just to go tap on one other thing you mentioned, which is sort of like this, I don’t know if it’s a disconnect, but you were sort of talking about reporting at different levels within an organization. And I’m curious about your thoughts on this. ’cause as a data person, I, um, I have this theory that’s totally unbaked about

Travis Arlitt: Yeah.

Orion Matthews: That, I think that there’s something like quantum physics and like general relativity going on when you go through an organization where it’s like everything works at this level, but as you try to roll it up, like the whole, the models break, right? So it’s almost like if you’re at the ground level working a project and there’s an executive at the very, very top and they’re like, here’s what I want.

I want every hour on someone’s time sheet and every last activity at the bottom needs to roll up into some sort of, uh, dashboard for me. And, and I find that. A lot of times, I mean, that can be done sometimes, but a lot of times you get this [00:19:00] weird phase transition effect that happens at different levels of the organization and you’re trying to like manage these like problems related to just rolling it up.

And it almost sounds like you’ve discovered something along those lines where it’s like, let the tool set work for who it works for, but it’s almost like you’re, you’re plugging that executive layer, but you’re sort of bridging it down to mm-hmm. Um, to what’s happening in the field and skipping the roll up part of that, that can mm-hmm.

Be can get in the way of, of a conversation to actually just get some action done on a project.

Travis Arlitt: Yep. Yeah, it’s, uh, we’re gently poking the established order here, so, you know, we’re not, that’s just what we’re doing and I’m the one I’d like for everybody to maybe think about the idea of rolling up a level five all the way to the level one and back down has never worked that great for me.

You, you enter this kind of no, no man’s land of that level three, to me, level three is [00:20:00] almost a no man’s land. And that’s our, that’s our benchmark. And I, I found that that doesn’t do much good for the field guys, and it’s really hard to report to the executive team. And, um, and then it’s also a, a skillset because I remember when I was working for that for URS, that really cool project.

Controls director Wayne. He said, it’s always funny to me when these guys and gals come in and they always branch off into planning and schedule or cost. It’s almost very, so it’s a very clear branching of just the mentality. And, um, a good strategic planner thinks very naturally at a higher level and the asset, same individual to take a detailed, to go detailed with field execution and then roll up to higher level.

It, it’s a skill. It’s just a gap there. [00:21:00] And, um, and so there was a talk I heard once, and the guy I think of this often, he said, the truth is rarely in the middle. He said, it’s always lying at the extremes. And I think that that’s a principle that could work within capital projects where you report, you do your, your detailed work for the people that really need to understand that.

And then you translate that. Of course you, that’s all data you use, but you don’t, it’s not a rolling up or down in my general experience or what I’ve found that works

Orion Matthews: well. So if it’s not up or down, maybe there’s like side to side. We’re, we’re like deep into the metaphors here, but uh, there’s sort of like forecasting and then there’s sort of like.

What really happened. And then there’s so there’s like progress planning, forecasting. It, it seems like a lot of progress curves, you know, they have here’s where you were, here’s the future. This is [00:22:00] what we hope, this is a best guess. How do you actually get a realistic picture on your forecast?

Then it, it sounds like what you’re saying is don’t wor don’t worry about what you plan to do instead look at what you have done and roll it forward. Is that right?

Travis Arlitt: Yeah, that’s, that’s the fundamental building block of everything I’ve done on projects that have moved the needle from a strategic standpoint.

You take that plan variance, that normal chart that we’re looking at and we’re, we’re anchoring to that plan. But like Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. And so what really is happening under the surface of that plan where you’ve created this static picture and you’re punching in your actuals and you’re measuring the variances, and that’s effective, but it really doesn’t show the whole story.

And so what you can [00:23:00] do is take that picture. And on, uh, there’s a, it is a free app called Go at Go Forward day one, model.com. You can take that static chart. And so you’ve done all this work. It might be a thousand or 10,000 activities that have created, that’s created a plan, profile so that all you do is if you want to get people’s attention and you’re behind plan, and that variance just isn’t doing it.

You te you just keep two, two components from that entire s-curve or whatever you want to call it, histogram. You take your actuals by period and you take that profile in front of the sad state and you have to know what’s remaining, which you would. And so you sum up those remaining bars in your plan, and let’s say the remaining bars sum up to a hundred thousand, but you have 150,000 remaining so that you just take that however many [00:24:00] periods you have.

It’s, let’s just say 20 periods or 50 periods. To keep it simple, you have a year left and you need to add 50,000 units onto that plan. You just add, um, a thousand hours to each of those, and you just grow that up and you compare that to your actual pace. And now you’re going to see if you’re pushing a bowel wave or not using the same exact data, but.

You, you look at everything from a go forward basis and you don’t necessarily looking,

Orion Matthews: you don’t go

Travis Arlitt: backwards back to the plan can be a little bit lagging and it, it doesn’t drive urgency, it doesn’t drive action. I mean, that’s the whole point of what we’re doing is to cause the leaders to understand that there could be a problem.

And if you’re doing a go forward redistribution, I’d expect that you’re gaining minimum three months, probably six to nine months on [00:25:00] those key decisions. I mean, I,

Orion Matthews: so is that where day one came from, thinking about like day one is like you throw out the past and you’re just looking forward in a way.

Travis Arlitt: Yeah.

Orion Matthews: Is

Travis Arlitt: that

Orion Matthews: Unconstrained?

Travis Arlitt: I was, I was in Batam Indonesia at just having breakfast at, they’ve got a really nice five star Marriott that we stayed at. And um, I was down there just watching the sunrise. I think I, I was watching a podcast with Jeff Bezos and Lex Friedman and Jeff Bezos was talking about, and I didn’t know what, I was working with a consultant.

I didn’t know what they call this model. I’d come up with some names and none of ’em really sounded that great. And then Jeff Bezos said. When you get into a day two mentality, it leads to stasis, it leads to death, and you begin a slow decline downwards. He said you always had to keep a day one mentality.

And I thought that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re you’re standing in that status [00:26:00] state and you’re looking, every status state is a fresh day one because if you’re under or over that, that redistribution iss gonna change. It’s always changing. It’s fluid. And if you don’t capture that fluidity and you’re looking at more of a static day two type plan, you’re gonna get bit on those decisions because you’re gonna have to make ’em after that plane is deviated enough in a day two world where they’re gonna be expensive to make, they’re gonna surprise you.

And that day one fresh mentality keeps you really locked into those bow waves, that production discrepancy in your, your, you’re, you’re, I don’t, you’re like in the Beautiful Mind movies, he said he’s going into the governing dynamics of physics or you know, what he was doing. I always look at the schedule, [00:27:00] but the governing dynamics of all that logic is a progress picture.

And you gotta get under and into that progress picture if you’re gonna get ahead of those tough decisions.

Orion Matthews: Alright, so let’s say. Just to kind of continue your thought here. Let’s just say I’m, I’m in charge of progress for a multi-billion dollar project. I’m listening to this podcast and I’m like, Travis has some good points, but first of all, like, I’m very busy, so I’m gonna, obviously, like, I guess there’s a couple components.

One is you’re talking about a mindset shift, and so that mindset shift has to permeate people above you. If you’re this progress planner and it, and so let’s say that you’re listening, you’re like, I got it. I get the day one model, I like it. I’m gonna do that, but I’m also gonna probably run my own thing in parallel.

How do you make the case? How, what do you tell that person? Is it like, do it on the next project or is there a way to incorporate this into your sort of practice [00:28:00] in a, in a sort of, i, I don’t wanna use the word easy, but like in a realistic way. Mm-hmm. Like how do you get pe, how do you do that? And then how do you sell it to other people and like help change their perspective?

Travis Arlitt: Yeah. You have to do your core job extremely well. You have to have that under wraps and only then can you dip your toe and start experimenting and stuff That’s beyond that core job function that people brought you on to, to handle. And, um, I, the first time in, in Malaysia is a module yard.

And, um, the. My job was quantity surveyor. So assurance for Chevron that these modules and the progress. So it was kind of a natural, it was the only position that the business team hadn’t filled. And so it, you know, we all did and it’s, it was a site role. And, um, but if you’re in the position [00:29:00] of the planner and you, what I used on that job was Primavera level of effort activities.

I call it my fertilizer spreader. And so I just asked the contractor to provide me progress of all the major components you have to keep it at a manageable level. So that’s the first step. And it depends on what you have access to if you’re on the owner side or the, the contractor side and who your audience is.

If you’re on the owner side and you’re not getting any data, you’re gonna have to, I’ve never been one to just sit on the bench. You gotta grab drawings and go do field walks and takeoffs. That’s the worst case scenario. But you can usually tease out quite a bit of data from what you’re getting. Of course if you’re on the contractor side, you have all the data in the world, but you just, you get it out of the nuts and bolts.

So that takes a lot of time to manage that level. [00:30:00] But if you take it to this pipe spool level, the seal piece level, the piece of equipment, your instrument index, your cable schedule, and I pretty much covered it, you don’t have to go ’cause your, your pipe spools cover your insulation and your heat trace cable schedule has all your power and fiber and all that, the different cables you’re gonna have instrument, electrical instrument index has your instruments and then seal pieces would would’ve your fireproofing and on a major industrial job, the equipment, and then you have buildings, hvac, I mean, all that stuff can just be componentized.

And so you’ve kind of covered it on a major industrial job and then you just, you just earn that progress back. But, so yeah, you do your, your day job really well and then you might do a redistribution and [00:31:00] show, use a primavera level of effort. If you don’t have, a, if you’re really a true resource loaded P six schedule, if you’re keeping it updated, it’ll show that bow wave if you just report it out appropriately and you’re not just.

Pulling in your actual, so you can start there,

Orion Matthews: but then how do you, okay, so let’s say I did that, Travis, and I’m like, okay, I’ve got this P six printout that then I put in Excel to make it look pretty, whatever. I’ve got a PowerPoint and I’m going into a meeting with the project director. How do I sell the, what do I tell them about this new thing that I’m doing?

Like how do you explain what you are doing to people that aren’t familiar with these concepts? Like what’s the where do you get that mindset shift with your boss?

Travis Arlitt: It’s something I’m still learning to do, to be honest. I was talking with a gentleman last week and I thought, I thought we had covered day one model and the whole idea of it months ago and [00:32:00] we hadn’t.

I had made some assumptions and I, so the, what, what I did was what worked I had on that app, uh, you can see the, um, I think it’s how it works, but there’s three charts. So we just scrolled up and down these three charts for 30 minutes and it sunk in. So you would have to take them from where they’re at, what they’re used to seeing.

Here’s your variance chart. You can see where 10% behind plan. We know this isn’t good. Contractor saying, we’re gonna pull that line up. That’s what they always say, love them. But that’s the story. It’s very easy to say in a meeting, especially if the progress chart’s two or three inches tall. You can just point and say, yeah, we’re, we’ve got some things going on.

Story, story, story. Because of this, we’re going to, by the time this project’s done, we’re gonna pull that line up.

Orion Matthews: Yep.

Travis Arlitt: And you tell that to the [00:33:00] project director and you have a relationship. This is all relationships. And then, um, you say, but we take this data. If you look at it in a different way, the contractor needs to do 50% more progress next week just to achieve the plan date that they say they’re gonna meet.

And that’s exactly what that chart showed. And then, then there’s not much talking anymore that you can do. Then you gotta call people in and say, let’s, and they might not agree with it. And then you just, now you can start talking, okay, you don’t agree with the 50% increase. What wrong here? What Now you can say, okay, we’re gonna sum up these bars.

Damn it. That’s our remaining budget. He’s right. This is our profile. We gotta have some time for ramping down. We have a holiday coming up. So this is a profile. These are our actuals. There’s not a lot you can talk about at that point. That’s gonna be story [00:34:00] based. It’s gonna be action based because it’s so in your face.

And so that’s a. And it, and you don’t have the plan in there. And one comment I think is very key is that I’ve just recently come to think about is I told this to the project director and he said, well, my board’s not gonna let me ditch the plan. And that’s not what we’re doing. We’re just, the plan is now reframed.

So Mr. Project director, we’ve been framing the plan as this variance to this static monument. We’re gonna reframe it to this date. It’s still the same plan, but now we’re gonna look forward from the sad state and see what we have to achieve to make the date. That’s maybe an alternative view of the plan that we ought to add into our normal stuff.

’cause there’s a massive momentum and you know, you have to, [00:35:00] I’m learning more how to communicate. You have to communicate from what, what is a known and kind of branch out. But, uh, like on that, that, that module yard, when I showed that director, how I communicated it once I, I call it the magic six weeks, you create a system if you don’t have any progress and you just get the pace.

So you’re getting the speedometer revved up and then you do your redistribution. I used the level of effort bars and so when I showed the, my business manager who ran it through, he’s like. Let’s go talk to the director, Mike. I put this AO size plot, overall pipe insulation, and they’re just all pushing major bow waves.

I didn’t have the sophistication to flatten them, but you, you knew there was trouble. And I said, if you do the math, we’re gonna do train one modules. Some of these were the size of a football field. We’re gonna move those off and do train two modules for this [00:36:00] LNG. And that bow wave showed that, that that just wasn’t gonna work.

We had a 10,000 line item activity schedule, we had dozens of progress charts. We knew things weren’t right, we had variances. But it wasn’t until that director saw that in your face view of you need to 50, do two times the production you’re doing to meet our plan. That he could clearly see that that train two module program was in dire straits.

I remember him pulling in the Bechtel leadership for two or three weeks and they were just pointing these charts and it wasn’t, uh, it was very direct conversation. And then they, they punted. They said, okay, we’re gonna move about 20,000 tons of modules to a different yard down the road. So we’re gonna get some major train two modules outta here so we can focus on train one and we’re not gonna impact this train two.

But they, I always say they [00:37:00] would’ve made that decision eventually. They were probably even talking about doing that. But when you see it, the urgency gets amped up tenfold. And that’s what you need. You need to, it’s uncomfortable and you don’t just go spewing it to the world. That’s a big, you gotta keep the confidence of the people that you need to keep the confidence of, but it’s your job as a planner to have an uncomfortable conversation with that person that you need to have with, and not, not everybody, that one guy or gal, that chain of command that needs to pull a lever and needs to pull it fast.

And they may not have any real understanding of what that means.

Orion Matthews: Yeah, I like that. Having uncomfortable conversations. And you said it’s the six week magic, was that right?

Travis Arlitt: Yeah. You know, the, you can’t tell how fast a project, it’s one of these, you know, major projects.

Orion Matthews: Mm-hmm. [00:38:00]

Travis Arlitt: It has a pulse and a pace to it.

So you’re looking at a project for say, two or three weeks. You’re only gonna be able to get, if you have three periods, I found three isn’t enough. So you want a rolling average, you want to get six weeks, gives you a really solid pace of a typical year and a half, two and a half, three year industrial size project when it’s up and running.

That’s a, you want to get some good history and that that six weeks is how you do it. That’s how I’ve done it.

Orion Matthews: Kind of along these lines, ’cause we’re talking about progress, but there’s

Different ways to measure progress, right? Like, when you’re in the field, my favorite way is definitely not to do it based on like cost, where you’re just like, everything’s a fixed price job and we’ll just kind of like measure the relative size of every [00:39:00] job.

And when we pay out the contractors, you know, then that is our progress and we’ll just forecast forward whatever is remaining in the budget. Like that’s kind of what it’s gonna be. And we’ll plan to pay these people when, at these dates. And that’s the variance, right? So you have sort of like cost based, you have unit accounting, and then I think you, you always end up with some sort of mix oftentimes it seems.

But I am, I don’t know anything about this. Maybe you can share what you see as like the ways of actually measuring progress and preferences on rules of credit and things like that.

Travis Arlitt: I was on that Corps of Engineers job and, uh. It was an EVMS government, EVMS. And I remember thinking, man, these guys are, I did not like the idea of measuring progress with cost is how the government does it.

And uh, it just doesn’t, if you want to know when a project’s gonna complete and where your progress pinch points are, you should probably [00:40:00] keep cost out of the mix. That’s my opinion. And so how I do it is, uh, I keep about 40 to 50 unit rates in my pocket and I’ve shared ’em on LinkedIn. If anybody wants them.

Usually what they call the Gulf, Gulf Coast norms kind of gets you in the ballpark and it’s just how many work hours you go down to the direct work hour, that’s your, that’ll get you a really solid progress picture. And so it’s say 25 work hours per cubic yard of concrete. And you might, you might say 25 for a, for a spread footer or big monolithic bore and maybe 30 or 35 for a pier.

’cause there’s more work to do that. And you have these ranges, large bore pipe, small bore pipe, exotic pipe, GRE pipe, normal carbon piece of [00:41:00] equipment, how many work hours per ton. And so you just quantify the job in that level. And I. So that way, and I, on that Colorado job, I didn’t know how to do this. I mean, that, I called my project controls manager in Houston in ’cause he, this is a tip I’d like to, just to throw in the middle of all this, that this was in 2008.

I was in the Houston office and I needed, I had just gotten done with a little cabinet shop experiment. And, uh, I was, I was eager, I was really glad to be back in the work. And, um, my controls manager, I mean, this was bustling work. This is, the office was, full work, was everywhere. And he couldn’t find anybody to go to the job site.

I heard him talking for a while and he complained to me maybe. And eventually I got up the courage. I said, Donnie, [00:42:00] I’d love to go to Colorado. If you can’t find anybody else. They’re paying $214 and 50 cents a day per diem, 50 hours a week on my normal 40. And I, I thought it was a gold mine and why didn’t anybody else want this?

But, so within a few weeks I was heading to Colorado. But, uh, and that then the, the bottom fell out pretty much shortly after I got there. And all the people in the office, their, their jobs were far less secure than if you were supporting a field assignment. So that aside, I called Donnie from. Colorado and he said, it’s work hours, Travis, you gotta roll.

I said, how do you get steel to talk to pipe, to talk to equipment? He said, you just assigned that unit rate. And so now you may not need a unit rate if all you’re looking at is one commodity, say concrete, at that point, you can roll up how many yards of mud you’ve actually poured, how many tons of rebar you’ve actually tied, how many square foot of [00:43:00] forms you’ve set and stripped, but embeds.

But if you’re gonna get that group of work to talk to your whole project and roll it up and down, then you have to use that common denominator of work hours. And um, and then your major components have a unit rate and then you’re earning back progress. And that’s kind of the, I just saw a post on LinkedIn this morning about how important it is to, to keep completions in that progress mix.

So in that Colorado job, my very first system, it was very uncomfortable. It, it, it hit 90 to 5% and just stuck there for

Orion Matthews: yeah,

Travis Arlitt: three to six months. And I didn’t know what I did wrong and what I did wrong was I followed everybody’s advice. You get all your credit up front and 10% on [00:44:00] that final sign off sheet.

That doesn’t work. That even the big guys I know their rules of credit, they’re all weighted in the same way. And you have to buck that trend and you have to, I don’t die on many hills. I usually adapt to whatever the contractors’ best practices are, and we fit within that. But one that I will throw up a little bit of resistance on is I would like to keep 30% of the, the progress bucket for that final sign off of that torque sheet or that check sheet or that final walk.

And then people, they’re incentivized to complete in the, um, your work in progress, the lean manufacturing, the lean crowd, the construction guys, the production have, they, they read books about work in progress and that kills your project more than you would ever imagine it would. [00:45:00] And so if you keep an incentive on completing these smaller components, you keep your work in progress down and then your, then your progress system just kind of finishes normally.

So that’s kind of the keys. You roll it by work hour, you keep it by the major component level that you can actually quantify ton A piece of steel has so much tons. How many tons of steel hours per ton is it to install that? Tertiary ladders and platforms have a much higher rate than a, a beam, a primary beam, or then in the middle there you have your secondary supports for pipe, et cetera.

But, um, so yeah, that’s your system if you can get to that system, project predictability is in your pocket and there are varying degrees of success that you’re gonna have getting the data you need. But if you can get to that level you’re gonna be able to make it boring, [00:46:00] predictable.

Orion Matthews: So let me play it back for you from my sort of 1 0 1 brain.

Travis Arlitt: Mm-hmm.

Orion Matthews: Um, I am gonna build, uh, let’s say I’m building a house and I have a bunch of lumber that I need and concrete has to be poured. Like those are the main pieces or something. Yeah. And maybe electrical stuff has to go in. Let’s leave at that. So I’m gonna calculate out, I have this much lumber whatever, a thousand units of lumber coming in, or X amount of pallets.

And then I also need to pour this much concrete. Um, so those are like my X and Y variables. And then you also overlay the number of hours total man hours you have like available capacity wise. To get a run rate on that. Is that right? So you’re sort of like, okay. And then you take the averages from your LinkedIn or other places and you say, all right, well this is how quickly people are gonna be laying down [00:47:00] lumber to build houses.

Should be,

Travis Arlitt: yep.

Orion Matthews: X amount per day or per hour, whatever. And this is the total manpower that you have at your, on your project. Like, here’s the manpower plan. Uh, and then you sort of do the math there with the averages to kind of figure out like, okay, well they’re laying it at this. I’m at this point.

And then the way I’m gonna record progress is by looking at like, here’s the historical average for this region and here is like where, how we’re doing and where we need to come up to. And then it also kind of enables the conversation. So your lumber guy, you’re like, this is how much we need to move, this is what we’ve seen in other regions.

And then sort of apply the same thing to your concrete person. And then at some point you roll it all up with like a lowest common denominator, like you use math to kind of roll all these things together to get you sort of a progress percent. Is that roughly

Travis Arlitt: Yep.

Orion Matthews: What you’re talking about

Travis Arlitt: there? Yeah.

Before you start a project, I found that [00:48:00] historical data can get you in the ballpark, or it might be totally off. I’ve projects are unique beasts, especially these big ones. And, uh. But in the case of the house, you take a good estimate, you take a stab at it before anything’s done. So it’s gonna take you 25 work hours per cubic yard.

And that includes your rebar mat and your pouring and your finishing and your stripping. And you get, and if you have, um, say a hundred cubic yards in that house foundation, so you’re through 2,500 cubic hours to do that poor, you’ve got the, you grade it, you form it, you get 20% of that. You tie the rebar, do all your embeds, your anchor bolts, that’s another 40%.

And you don’t get much when you pour. ’cause if you think about it’s just a one day event, then you get a little bit to strip. [00:49:00] And so now you’re earning that back and you might say, okay, 2,500 hours, Mr. Concrete guy you have 30 days to do this. And then you can start to say, okay, can, you’re gonna need, I don’t know the math off the top of my head, but let’s say it’s 10 people.

Can you get 10 people here? And so now you got, you got your start of the plan. Now as soon as they start to execute or deliver that, then, and, and then for your, you’d say two by fours, like you’re saying 1,002 by fours. 10 foot two by fours, it’s gonna take you five hours per two by four to cut it and get it framed up.

And so there’s your 5,000 hours, and now the concrete and the, the lumber istalk each other. Maybe they’re off to the side putting together trusses or walls, getting ’em ready while the concrete’s going. And so you can understand how the whole thing’s rolling up. [00:50:00] But if they get started, and let’s say there’s four foundations, so you can start to see how it’s going on a aggregate basis and their, and this is where performance index is incredibly important because you’re never gonna get that that mo that new, uh, a project’s like a brand new car.

You don’t know how fast the thing’s gonna go. And people might think you do, but I’ve seen projects and even contractors in the same part of the world on the same project have vastly different unit rates. It just happens. And so that’s another thing about the day one mentality is you gotta you’re 30% into your concrete.

You poured the, you’ve tied rebar here and you’re getting a good gauge of how many people, what your production is. Let’s say it’s, you’re doing better in one, but you’re doing worse than the other.[00:51:00]

You gotta factor that into your, go forward at all times and say, okay, Mr. Concrete guy, we thought we’re gonna need 10, but we’re a little bit into this. We’re starting to push a bow wave. And I’m saying, at your current productivity you might need 15. Can you get 15? And no, we don’t need 15. Okay, let’s talk it through.

And now you’ve got all the data to talk it through. And maybe he’s right or she’s right, or maybe the data’s exactly spot on and you, you have a intelligent conversation at the, and you’re not just saying, oh, you’re four days behind plan, you know, go faster. It’s far more specific than that. And so, so you keep track of that performance factor and density is something you want to consider.

And we talk, I think we put density in too much of a con context. ’cause I’ve seen good performance from people, especially here in Asia. [00:52:00] You, it’s shocking how many people can, uh, get work done in a density calc that would completely blow any metric you’re trying to use out of the water. I mean, we, I was a integration planner for a Bigfoot tension lake platform and I remember watching the videos of the hull in South Korea and it’s like ants.

So you gotta be a little bit like, don’t base your plan off a density. It’s one good gauge. But, um, the most important thing, and that’s why, if you are only looking at that plan and not looking at how this particular project and this particular environment is actually doing this contractor even, and pushing that forward with a, a solid what if scenario, and what if we continue with our current productivity?

That’s a huge one. Then you’re gonna get caught behind the curve. You’re, you’re gonna get in that, [00:53:00] that day two mentality.

Orion Matthews: Well let, okay, let’s talk about that behind the curve. So I think I’ve seen stats that say 98% of all projects are off schedule or off budget. Mm-hmm. Um, you’re sort of the you might be the person I’ve talked to that has the most grounded view of what’s really happening reality wise for projects.

But why this sort of like, what am I trying to say? Why is schedule optimism so persistent in our space? Why is progress misrepresented so often? What’s going on? Is it cultural? Is it systems? Like you’ve been on the owner side for decades? Like what do you think is the root causes that

Travis Arlitt: the root cause?

I try not to be too, [00:54:00] I don’t want to throw rocks or anything. Okay. So let me try not to throw rocks. But a big root cause is it’s,

it’s fairly easy to misrepresent what’s going on with when you’re looking at a 10,000 line item schedule and that nobody quite understands. But that’s your pro, that’s your basis for everything. I’ve been the guy behind the box and I can make that schedule tell you whatever you want it to. And generally, if I’m with a contractor, I’m gonna make it suit the contract.

And so you have the contractor who, it’s all there, that book Freakonomics the whole premise of the book in the beginning, like you open the book and it says, incentives are the corner cornerstone to modern society. And so of course it, it boils down to incentives. And [00:55:00] if a contractor doesn’t have the incentive to, to really get transparent, I mean, if I was for the contractor and I showed data in this redistributed manner, the same data that we are giving the client, but I’m making it more direct, they’d probably show me the door.

And so you gotta, you gotta handle this directness with a little care. But, um, it’s just extremely easy to, to talk about stories and even from the owner’s side unless there’s a regime change, which happens all the time, that’s your window of time to really pop in some realism. ’cause they’re ex they want it.

But if they’re, they’ve been running this job for a year and say, you come in, it’s ne not necessarily in their best interest for you to show a two x bow wave because they’ve been, they’ve had their hand on the wheel for a year and they didn’t see this yet. And so, [00:56:00] so it’s just, there’s a lot at stake both, and a lot of times, and I’ve been there where you get behind, everybody knows we’re behind from the top down, there’s a good chance something’s gonna happen that’s, you can pin a lot of stuff on.

And so the incentive to, to come clean early is less because, oh, we had this procurement issue and look what, look at what it did to us. You know? And so you know that that’s happening. And these projects have all kinds of moving parts and you can disproportionately to have a sa sacrificial problem. And so it’s, I just, I don’t know if it’s an Eagle scout in me or what, but I just can’t help myself no matter what the incentive is.

If I’m not reporting the, the absolute truth as I can see it to the, the person in charge of the decisions, I [00:57:00] won’t sleep well at night. So I, you gotta love that part of it. But, um, yeah, the incentives and people can unfortunately get in a bad situations whenever you really expose something that nobody has seen before.

And, uh, so the higher closer you are to the, who needs that product, the closer you’re to who’s got the financial benefit, that’s where they don’t care quite so much about the story and all that. Yeah, it’s I just heard a story a few weeks ago. There was a major consulting firm on a major project, brought in a schedule assurance company.

They worked for a month on the schedule, tying up all the loose ends, making it quality, doing the Monte Carlo simulation, came up [00:58:00] with a date. A week and a half after they left, gave the owner this date, the project director came clean and he said, sorry guys, that’s not it. We’re actually a year and a half past that date, past your P 90.

And everybody had egg on their face because you’re not in the governing dynamics. You’re, you’re in the logic and stuff. And any, anybody can make that tell whatever story they want. So the, I don’t know what caused that director to come clean. Maybe he just knew his time was up and it, people were gonna find out eventually something.

But, uh, there’s a lot of, I don’t know if that answered the question, but, ’cause it’s pretty, and a lot of times these teams get dealt a bad hand from the beginning. Most of the time, let’s say that date, like as a scheduler, nobody’s ever said, Hey, Travis, uh, put this schedule together and tell me when we’re gonna [00:59:00] finish this job.

It’s always, we’re gonna finish this job at this point. And you’re, you’re building the plan around that. And that’s okay. And, but that’s why I always go down to the progress picture because that’s, I got tired of I having people tell me they’re gonna catch up. And that, and I, as soon as I got into that, I said, okay, catch up.

That, that means. On that pile of driving job, you’ve been driving 14 piles on average per day per rig. You thought it’s 20, but look at your rolling average and they look at it and you can’t dispute. You need to do 20 per rig per day to make your plan. So tell me how we’re gonna catch that up. And it’s, it’s no longer a variance.

It’s very direct and we’re in charge of billions of dollars. You gotta take it some sort of a personal responsibility and present that data in the most direct way that you know how. And that’s kind of how I [01:00:00] look at it. But that’s just personally how I look at it.

Orion Matthews: Play that back for you. What I heard you say there is game theory related stuff, which is that yeah, incentives drive everything.

Uh, leave it to an economist that wrote a book about it to go back to incentives being the core of reality. But they have a good point. And then when you look at these mega projects, billions of dollars. So you have individual incentives careers, you have owner side incentives, financial, you have contractors, financial incentives.

You have, probably a myriad of other, like incentives that are competing into this soup. And it’s very difficult to navigate it. And maybe the way I would think about it is it’s like, if somebody gives me advice about how to survive high school, I’m not gonna tell ’em, like, well go to this group and tell ’em one story and be [01:01:00] this way to them, and then go to another group and like do that.

And just like, whatever anyone wants to hear, just tell ’em that. And you’re gonna do great in high school. People are gonna love you. And, uh mm-hmm. That’s not true, right? Like, that’s a, that’s a recipe for later disasters. Like, and I think maybe that’s part of that is that humans don’t like conflict and they want to succeed.

And so you have all these like, misaligned incentives and then you have probably you know, I like the saying assume positive intent. So I think even when you have all these positive intents at play you still can end up with that toxic outcome because people want, wanna avoid conflict and those little micro avoidances bubble up and, and before you know it, like you have to bring a story to someone.

That really is a very unfortunate situation where people are gonna lose jobs or there’s gonna be real impact. And humans don’t. Like to face that. And so it’s kind of [01:02:00] like in high school if you were like talking to all these other groups, lying about things and kind of weaving all these things, which lots of kids end up doing.

’cause it’s a very natural strategy, survival,

That can come crashing down on you at some point. And so I think that’s like, maybe that happens with projects. ’cause projects are groups of people. And so it’s like those social dynamics and situations just sort of aggregate into an eventual like reality shift that has to occur.

And then, like you said, it’s like someone brings the story at the perfect time to slay the problem. That’s actually all a lie. It’s just a totem for like all this other stuff that happened that you don’t wanna deal with and you just ha but in order to share the story mm-hmm. It’s like you have to have a ritual to blame something and, and vanquish the foe.

Travis Arlitt: Yep.

Orion Matthews: Yeah. Anyway, that’s kind of what I heard from you.

Travis Arlitt: That’s, that’s accurate. And it’s, uh, the, yeah, there’s something I had, but it is difficult. Oh, [01:03:00] what I was gonna say was, um, kind of my message when I’m delivering some of this is, or just that reality. It’s there whether you’re acknowledging it or not.

And eventually it’s gonna get you, so you are infinitely better acknowledging it early. I mean, not even close to orders of magnitude better because you can just face it. Everybody gets on the same page. That’s kind of my, I’m a little optimistic, I guess, that if everybody got on that page, that kind of the, the redistributed view, the, the production based view of the project and understood what’s going on from the contractors to the subs to the to owner, we would have far better outcomes because you can address problems earlier, far earlier.

And, um, it was funny, I was chatting with a [01:04:00] 40 year Chevron guy who’s that took him 10 years to get from a planning, scheduling, normal project controls may end up more of a production view of things. So that kind of gave me a little, a little resilience in my heart. Okay. It’s just gonna take time for, to get this idea out.

But, but he said. They found that train two of an LNG, when you’re doing say two trains, you’d expect train two is gonna go by faster because you got it all worked out. He said it’s the opposite. He thinks it’s because people know that there’s no train three after it, you know? And so they’re just, they want to keep the job going.

They may not know, might not, not even know it consciously, but there’s a lot of dynamics going on, on projects that are hard to pin down.

Orion Matthews: So do you think that AI might change this for us? I mean, if you think about the dispassionate observer of reality, is that [01:05:00] potentially a, a, a way that AI could change the game or what, what do you see kind of coming up from a technology perspective?

Travis Arlitt: I’ve changed my views and even the last month on that as far as what it can do to help planning and scheduling. I used to,

Orion Matthews: wow,

Travis Arlitt: I was kind of, kind of a,

not necessarily for it, but it can really do a lot of the heavy lifting. The problem that I can see is for a project leader to take a decisive step that could be a career, career problem for him or her. If it’s not the correct one, they need to have. A really clear picture of why and what and defendable.

I mean, I just as an example, [01:06:00] through di distribution and showing and what a potential carryover picture could look like, a director signed a $5 million incentive bonus on a project, and it was a right move. It liquidated 50, $60 million worth of work. But I remember at the end of the job, a year and a half later, we were having to dig up the back backup to that why he, why we, why he did that.

And it wasn’t a good or bad, it was just part of the process. And so, I mean, I use ai, if somebody took it away from me, I’d, I’d hunt them to the end of the earth to find, to get it back. I’ve used it with day one model that, that app on the web, I built a web app based on an Excel version and a few prompts.

It was just like a miracle. I even had it help me with schedules. And, uh, but you gotta, you always gotta get back to the defensible, it just can’t [01:07:00] be a black box output. So you, you either get to where you really, really trust this AI and the analysis it’s giving you because there’s no way you’re gonna be able to get into the head of the.

The, it’s got such an advanced reasoning skill that, you know, that’s kind of where my head’s at it is. It can do a lot of heavy lifting for us, and we should use it as much as we can to do that heavy lifting. But

Orion Matthews: what happens

Travis Arlitt: that you need to understand what’s coming out of it. Yeah.

Orion Matthews: But you said the last month you’ve changed, like what happened because GPT five four just came out Claude as well.

I mean, there’s been some really big model shifts. Yeah. Open claw. Like were these the things, like what was your moment where you sort of had a bit of a change?

Travis Arlitt: I’m tasked on this. Yeah, the models have just gotten [01:08:00] crazy better. I try to do some coding work and I’m not a, I mean, I’m not even close.

I, I’ve used a developer to do day one model, but we decided to kind of let it sit where it’s at and because it’s expensive and we’ll, as we get customers and revenue, then we’ll start to improve it. I’m the chief product officer and I saw so much I wanted to do, so I just decided, okay. Hey, Claude. What can we do with this?

Oh, we can do this. Just upload the code here. Okay. I’ve done this 400 times now. Prompt by written 50, 60,000 words of prompts and really understood how it works from a, using that code base. But beyond that, you can, so developing this execution schedule, you have a lot of documents and you can do an API.

So you’re [01:09:00] sectioning off the data privacy issue. So you don’t have to worry about that with Claude. And you probably know more about this than I do. But, but the, uh, so you create your own little workspace and you can feed, instead of sifting through these bid docs and picking out the calendars and the, all the stuff, you can say, Hey, okay, this is everything I know on the project.

This is a level one I built. This is a straw man. I have, this is what, what Bob down the road did on the project schedule. I’m gonna feed you these 12 documents. Give me a good list of activities. And this is a work breakdown I see for this schedule. Gimme a good list of activities. We don’t wanna miss anything in these bid documents and gets you that instead of spending days and weeks.

You get a very, very distilled view of the plan. So that’s, that’s what’s changed. I, I actually used it and so you have, I don’t, I’ve met [01:10:00] Alan Ska once within plan. Really Cool guy and there

Orion Matthews: Oh yeah.

Travis Arlitt: For a while I was like, uh, you know, you can’t do, like I said, I was anti, not anti I guess, but just I didn’t see, but now I’m starting to see, okay, these guys can really help do a lot of the heavy lifting.

You have the nodes and link. I’ve never met him, but he’s just come up with something that looks pretty cool to help do a lot of the schedule grunt work. And so, and you’re not having to take a lot in faith because, okay, Claud, you said we need to do X component on this platform. Show me in the contract what page that was.

Boom, boom, boom. And so you can do the research and you can get down to the, down to the, the good first pass. I, I completely backed into a, and this is another exercise I did, I used all three models at the time to, I found [01:11:00] a, a replication of a combined cycle power plant. And I had the models help me dial in the, the quantities and they, and so I, I created a progress picture.

From model shots in kilowatt or megawatt, uh, output from these models. And I was able to get what I was a pretty good, uh, schedule going from a model shot. So anyway, there’s a lot of power there. There’s still have to show those key decision makers that fundamental level about what you’re talking about and not necessarily rely on that output.

But there’s a lot of advantages to the distilling of data.

Orion Matthews: That’s a powerful story. I, you know, that, that last note you made that’s something I think about a lot. You know, there’s that four quadrants. Like, you know what, you know, you know what you don’t know, and then you [01:12:00] don’t know what you know, and you don’t know what you don’t know.

And it’s always like, okay, if you focus on the whole, don’t know what you don’t know. That’s the classic. I’m, I am, uh, nine years old and I absolutely know how to load a dishwasher. Then they put the like wrong soap in or whatever, right? They didn’t know what they didn’t know. And I find with a, with ai, I think there’s something to those quadrants and where it acts as a force multiplier.

It’s like, if you don’t know what you don’t know, I’m not sold yet. That AI is gonna be your a hundred x multiplier. It might give you a little bit of a boost. It’s good at, you know, but it’s mm-hmm. Might, might kind of maybe help you avoid some errors, but it might also lead you down the wrong path.

’cause you. So you don’t want someone doing surgery on you that doesn’t know how to do surgery using ai. I think. And then it’s sort of like that those other two where it’s like, if you know what, you know, AI is like a thousand x productivity. And then if you know what you don’t know, it’s also a huge lift.

So if you’re like, I don’t understand this, I know that I’m [01:13:00] not good enough at this space, but now you can have a much more informed conversation about what you’re looking at and it will work with you. And and you can kind of like speed that up. So it seems like that’s part of what you were saying there is a cautious warning, right?

It’s like, it’s really like an accelerant, but you do still have to know what you’re talking about.

Travis Arlitt: Yeah. If I would’ve taken that first pass at that schedule I’m building, it would be a, they would, the project team would look at me like, are you an idiot? Because it, it just, you have to know what you’re doing.

When you’re using ai. You can’t come at it. And like when I was doing that combined cycle power plant this has definitely got 50,000 tons of steel in the pipe rack. And that’s, are you sure? That seems like a lot of steel. You know, you have to have, uh, yeah. Oh, you’re, you know, you’re absolutely right.

It’s actually 5,000 tons. I was off by 10 and that happened a lot. And so you definitely have to keep on your toes. It can sound extremely confident for stuff. And uh, if you take that [01:14:00] confidence. Without knowing the fundamentals you’re gonna get bit for sure.

Orion Matthews: Well, so we’ve talked a lot about the day one model and ai now, thank you for that.

Before we shift a little bit to talk about some advice for like junior folks, I’m curious if you could give an example of like how much money have you saved? Don’t name names, but like how much have you saved projects? Like what are some success stories that you know, ’cause we’re talking billions of dollars and you’ve been implementing sort of your methodology for a long time now.

What kind of ROI are we talking about for that you’ve seen personally on these projects?

Travis Arlitt: It can be really stunning. There was, there’s a project that they’re the non-operating partner and their operating partner was telling, had a assurance company [01:15:00] come in on the schedule and give them the P 90, P 10 ranges and they said, we’re in, we’re on track here.

Then that non-operating partner wanted to assure that assurance and so using the day one approach and the redistribution, I showed that bow wave of three x on this one because you can tease out trends too when you’re looking at progress data. And you can say, look at this trend. It’s very clear. This is what they’ve been doing.

Okay, here’s a P 90, let’s say it’s just to keep it simple. In January when you flatten out this bow wave, you can see how it’s done, right? Yeah. You’re actually gonna finish this project in October, 10 months after the P 90 and the project team balked at it. I found out, I found this stuff out later, but the commercial team, because they could see that direct link, they said, okay, yeah, [01:16:00] we gotta supply this product to this facility and we’ve gotta cover that gap if there’s a gap.

And they did. They bought the product at Spot Price and I found out it saved them $200 million.

Orion Matthews: Wow.

Travis Arlitt: And they were gonna completely blow past that window because they weren’t quite sure what was going on. Wow. That’s a, that’s a commercial decision. That was, I only found out fairly recently how much it was.

I, I kind of estimated 50 million, but I didn’t know it was that much. You got a, when I was with that, just from a contract perspective, these, when we were driving those levees, it was a five mile long levee in New Orleans, post-Katrina. It’s piles, you know, that’s your driving force and. We had six rigs, three rigs per heading.

It was a really cool concept these guys created [01:17:00] with this, they call it a, a batter as a frame instead of just hanging a pile off the rig as a framework. And they could run both rigs on the same side of the levee. Everything was a lot cleaner, but they got off to a slow start. They thought they were fine.

But what happens when you get off to a slow start, and this is another adage you gotta keep in mind as a planner, is early starts matter. Because what happens if you miss those starts, you start to get that compression. And so these guys kind of did their back of the math calculation when they got going.

They saw that they were getting 21, 22 piles per rig, but, and I couldn’t get their attention. But once I showed them that math that we’ve been talking about and that that 14 was your average and you’re gonna be two months late on your, and so you’re, you’re gonna get 10 million in liquidated damages, which for that project was [01:18:00] devastating.

They hired a subcontractor once they saw it in that manner and like with weeks to spare. So they, that’s one that’s a success story where they’re gonna again, blow past that window where that hiring of the sub could have saved him with, uh.

When you’re flattening out a bow wave, if you have a lot of projects have a, you have to get the pro module, especially that site’s expecting it. You might have barges in line ships, heavy lift vessels that you just can’t, change. So you gotta get the module out of, it’s halfway done, sorry, ship loose.

The rest of it, it’s going to the site. And so if you’re looking at carryover, especially if you’re in this part of the world and it’s going to a very expensive part, you’re paying $7 an hour here, and it’s gonna be $250 an hour there, you can really show a impact. And this director had not [01:19:00] signed an a craft incentive bonus and said everybody wanted him to sign it was $5 million.

As soon as he saw that carryover bow wave and that flattening and, okay, I can’t argue with this guy, we’re gonna have 300,000 hours spill up to this area of the world that we’re not ready for. And then plus it’s gonna cost us $60 million. Well, yeah, let’s sign this. And he signed it that week and they’d been trying to push us and it was denied.

I mean, it was like a dead issue. And they were frustrated, but they couldn’t sway his brain based on variances. And so, and then the, the module yard, like I said, if what’s. What’s a few months on a module yard worth? It’s, you know, it’s, uh, substantial. Yeah. Uh, I mean on an LNG train. So yeah, I, I’d encourage anybody on a project, if you have the, the ear of the decision maker and you [01:20:00] have the data, if you dabble in this redistribution off to the side and you can show them a different view, it shakes people into action.

And, uh, you might have some of these wins that I’ve had and I hope you do

Orion Matthews: well. So how would let, shifting up a little bit, let’s say I’m a student or a career shifter, I just heard you say, Hey, I saving 200 million bucks. You’re obviously a very skilled project planner, worked on the owner side, like been in the trenches, all those things.

What advice would you give to someone that’s early career, um, that wants to kind of get to, to, to your level?

Travis Arlitt: For one, know what you want, that no card is important, so get really clear about what do you want out of your career and [01:21:00] what kinda lights you up a bit. And, uh, but if, if it lights you up to be on the owner’s side and that’s what you would like to do, then.

You gotta get the attention of the owner in a way that is politically you, you don’t want to hurt the people that are paying you. So if you, you but you have to, I guess the biggest advice would be to get, obviously out of the office. A lot of being mobile is, it’s extremely important to say yes.

So if there’s an opportunity and somebody wants you to, to go, you may not fall in love with it right away. It may not be where you want to go. I’m a sailor. I love wind, I love water. Malaysia has no wind and no sailing. And so it’s, it can be a little bit of a, [01:22:00] I mean, not every move you’re gonna make is gonna be sunshine and roses in these, like I said, I wanted to drive out of that Colorado job.

I mean, it is visceral. Like, do I have to take this exit again? But outta that was born, was born the, the impact, the ideas that have carried with me. So, so for one, if it’s hard, don’t, don’t leave, go through the hard and have an idea of what you want. And I. Just try to get the most accurate answer of the truth out to the people that can make a difference.

And you’ll, you’ll start to make a name for yourself and find out what you’re really good at, what you come, what, how to manage your once. And the idea was we’re gonna bolster your weaknesses. And I’m not, this isn’t binary. I’m [01:23:00] not saying don’t ever work on anything that that’s a weakness.

Obviously I’m taking communication and speaking classes but you need to find out what you’re really good at and just trip quadruple down on that. And so whatever is in the project world that you love, that comes as natural as breathing, go all in on that and you’re probably gonna do pretty good.

Orion Matthews: That’s good advice, particularly with ai. If AI’s a force multiplier right then

Travis Arlitt: yeah,

Orion Matthews: be far better to multiply your activities on something you love.

Travis Arlitt: I’ve got an idea with AI that’s kind of fresh and I think your most valuable skill with, in the world of AI is your ability to imagine and create. And so you need to create, you can’t be a busy body in the new world.

You could, you need to, I get up an hour early every morning and just, I’m quiet and that. [01:24:00] There’s a book trans Surfing Reality. He calls it a Knocking at the Door of Heaven and listening to the Stars, Russell. But if you’re quiet and you, you’re, you imagine that your project, your work and ideas are gonna come to you that are, that would never come from ai.

And so, and then you use, use AI to execute wildly on those ideas. But you have to not be a meeting man or woman meeting to meeting, to meeting. I’ve been, I’ve fallen into that trap. You gotta have time to think. And as a planner, especially if you’re not carving out time to really soak in what’s happening like that module yard, the most important thing I did on that yard wasn’t counting pipe spools, although I did that every week.

It was one day I went and sat in the shade of a fence in this massive yard, and I just watched this module for almost two hours and I thought, okay, these guys are not taking the [01:25:00] schedule out there and telling ’em that they need to put pipe here on level three. They’re, they’re just doing the work. They probably have a plan, but it’s far more granular.

So how do I tell the project team when this module’s gonna get done? And that’s, that’s one of, one of those buttons clicked. It wasn’t because I was in a meeting and busy, it was because I was sitting under the shade watching and thinking that. That the idea of the progress system. And that’s the real picture of this module.

So let me just show that to the decision maker. So you gotta have time to think. That’s in the world of ai, time to think and like I was telling my business partner that two hour walk in the woods might be more valuable than two months of actively working. If you can come up with an idea. And the wonderful thing about AI is you can execute so fast now.

Orion Matthews: Yeah. This gets in. I, okay, I wanna hit you with this, Travis. I’m curious what you think, but uh, I have a complaint about time [01:26:00] sheets and time writing in general related to what you just said, which is that I think they’re a lie when it comes to knowledge workers. I think time sheets are a complete lie because they assume that time is fungible.

I don’t think you can sum up those hours. So if I sum up the Travis Shade in the tree moment and I just add it to whatever random meeting you had over there, and then I like, those don’t sum, they have No, they don’t. They’re vastly different. And that’s why I’ve always thought that time accounting for knowledge work in particular, but maybe for a lot of things is fundamentally flawed.

And there’s been a push over the last decade or two to really, like SAP, all these systems. They’ve really pushed down this time writing concept. And I think it’s actually hurting. Businesses and shifting people’s perspective in the wrong direction. Like, people get these numbers that summed up brilliant ideas with random meetings and other stupid things, time coded into different [01:27:00] categories.

But I fundamentally question whether you can actually even have a category that sums things when they’re not, when they’re, they’re orthogonal things, they’re not, you can’t, they’re on different number lines, man. If that makes any sense.

Travis Arlitt: Okay. Or Ryan if, uh, if somebody’s listening this far where they’re gonna hear the truth.

Something that I don’t, I’m, I’m actually uncomfortable to talk about. I don’t put this on LinkedIn, but I viscerally disliked that time writing. And, okay, take that Wheatstone project. Here I am halfway around the world getting paid more money than I’ve ever made. And I set that system up a little work to set it up.

After that, the contractor did the updating. I had the system. I worked probably 30 minutes a week, 45 minutes a week max, and I shifted the entire trajectory of that, that [01:28:00] whole a train of one of the biggest l and GI mean, I wasn’t the only one. Yeah. Obviously there’s other people, but that little component was worth two or three months of strategy.

On that refinery project, again, the contractor did the work they’re doing stuff they’re already doing. But yeah the knowledge work is not a linear, and we’re not digging ditches here. You can come up with some project saving insight in 15 minutes that’s gonna save that job. That, or a system that’s very easy and low maintenance to update, but it’s keeping everybody on their toes.

And you just have to be comfortable with not working so hard and thinking that your worth is coming from the work. That’s hard to do. You have to little, have a little confidence in your, your skillset and your ideas because if you are uncomfortable with that, you’re gonna work yourself to the bone.

You’re gonna go from meeting to [01:29:00] meeting and jump around and you’re not gonna get those insights and you’re gonna treat your time like you’re saying, like a time writer. And you’re going to just totally suck the lifeblood out of what your, your real value. It’s horrible and hopefully one of these days we’re going to figure out a way around it.

Orion Matthews: And maybe that’s where like scheduling time for yourself to think is probably where, like you were saying, that’s where the magic happens. And it’s also requires self-assurance that your thoughts are valuable. So maybe that’s a little bit of advice that people should have faith in themselves to. Give them that time because the, because they probably are more brilliant than they realize

Travis Arlitt: they are.

And we all are, because we all have access to, to this. If you just give yourself stillness, you’re gonna have access to these, to an infinite world of knowledge that will surprise you. But you have to be still and you can’t be bumping around [01:30:00] meeting to meeting. I think project meetings have completely gone overboard and, uh, yeah.

Orion Matthews: Yeah. Well, you know, as we wrap up, like do you have any books, podcasts people you follow that you, that kind of helped influence your thinking on stuff? You mentioned reality, trans surfing. Mm-hmm. That sounds like an interesting book.

Travis Arlitt: Yeah. That, that’s the idea of the essence of where you want to go and, uh, keeping that in your mind.

And, uh, it’s been really enlightening to me. But, you know, I wrote some down here, the Alchemist is always a great read for people to kind of understand the journey of just there’s a lot of wisdom within The Alchemist by Paul Colo. And then I just finished a book called The Alter Ego Effect about how it’s.

You can channel, if you find a, say, a project person or somebody that you [01:31:00] really want to emulate, you can do what a lot of sports figures do and just have an alter ego that you channel into your work. And it’s, it can create long-term benefits and, you know, kickstart your development. That’s one.

And, uh, yeah, that’s, that’s it. I, I’ve listened to a Rand Books the, the Fountain Head. Okay, that’s a good one. Okay, let’s stop there.

Orion Matthews: Fountain

Travis Arlitt: Head, I knew nothing about, I knew nothing about a Rand, and I heard Mark Cuban say one of his top most influential books, Iron ran the Fountainhead. And so I think we all should read that and think of ourselves.

I mean, I’m definitely know Howard Rourke, okay. Who’s the completely independent architect who committees be damned. He’s gonna do whatever he wants because he knows in his gut that’s what he’s, and if he can’t do that, if he can’t [01:32:00] express his art and the way that he wants, he just backs out and he’ll, he’ll go homeless, he’ll go work in the Granite Quarry before he builds a, a massive skyscraper at, from a committee.

And then you have Peter Keating who does the complete will of the masses. And there’s, those are the two polar opposites. And so hopefully I’m not a Peter Keating and I wish I was more of a Howard work, but, but that might give people the ideas of, okay, when you read that, you get inspired to take a little more boldness and unique ideas.

So that’s a really good book, but it’s long. You gotta listen to it while you’re flying or driving or commuting.

Orion Matthews: Cool. Those are you’ve added to my list. I, I got a couple on there that I need to check out. Thanks for thanks for that. Brenda, what about professional associations? Do you follow any of those And,

Travis Arlitt: you know, uh, we have the a a C, obviously the, [01:33:00] um, I’ve set form past the EVP exam and the PSP exam.

I’ve let ’em lapse partly because for a while there I was speaking out against SPS and, you know, I’ve kind of calmed down my rhetoric and from coaching for my business partner, Travis, you should, you don’t need to be against this. You need to be for the truth and the redistribution. You don’t have to be against this stuff.

So he has a very valid point, but I thought, because I don’t necessarily practice a lot of those and, but yeah, I got off on a tangent. A CI, I’ve spoken at a few of their meetings and gone to a few of their. At their meetings and they have wonderful publications on forensic schedule analysis. If you ever get into the a claim situation and you have to go off of a, you know, the, the established order, you can fall back on that.

Orion Matthews: Yeah. They have some pretty good, the recommended practices at A A CE [01:34:00] are pretty well

Travis Arlitt: Yeah.

Orion Matthews: Uh, built out. If you just don’t have any context for something, it’s a great reference. Can be helpful.

Travis Arlitt: Yeah, I can get you started.

Orion Matthews: Can get you started.

Travis Arlitt: I’m a little more Howard work. I’m not a joiner, so not really much into the, that kind of stuff so much.

Orion Matthews: Yeah. I, I, I, uh, I’m probably somewhere in the middle. I lo I really appreciate that ISO and a a CE have put down pen to paper on a bunch of this stuff, but I am such a contrarian, like I do find myself

Travis Arlitt: Yeah.

Orion Matthews: Oftentimes, you know, wanting to, wanting to add to it and, uh, yeah, there’s but, uh, someone’s gotta do it.

Someone’s gotta take the hit and, and at least publish something and then, uh,

Travis Arlitt: it takes guts to do that,

Orion Matthews: to

Travis Arlitt: publish stuff and practice and, take some hits for it. So, appreciate it and all that.

Orion Matthews: Well, before we close out, can I, um, can I ask if people wanna connect with you, um, or they wanna learn more about day one model you know, someone wants to work with you, [01:35:00] call you in on a project.

Like how would they do that?

Travis Arlitt: You can, uh, just find me on LinkedIn, Travis Arlet. That’s my, I think, my only social media outlet right now. And, um, go to www.dayonemodel.comorgotoforgoforward.day one model.com, and you can get that free app and look at some examples and kind of get your head around the idea of forward redistribution and, uh, convert one of your own charts into that, that, that view in 30 minutes or so.

And, uh, yeah, just always trying to keep LinkedIn a little fresh and posting these ideas.

Orion Matthews: Cool. Well, Travis, thank you so much for taking time to come on. We had a great chat. I really enjoyed learning about the day one model. I like the frame execution, realism, uh, sharing your owner’s perspective. Just really appreciate you coming on board, [01:36:00] giving us a look at how to get closer to reality.

Thank you.

Travis Arlitt: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’ve, I’m incredibly glad that you reached out.

Orion Matthews: Awesome. Well, if anyone wants to learn more about Travis down below in the comments, we will be dropping his links information. And of course, you can always go to the major project podcast.com to check out and learn more.

Travis Arlitt: Thank you