Woodworking Network: As those of us who’ve been sucked into a social media vortex can well attest, thinking that we know how we’re spending our time isn’t the same as actually knowing. Sure, it’s a bit alarming when it turns out that those 15 minutes spent on Instagram were actually two hours, but it’s downright scary when it turns out that the one hour you thought you’d devoted to finishing work was actually four.
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Bidding is such a bizarre field in our industry to me. It feels as though no one has the time ever to “do it right” everyone just has a system that they have developed and works for them. This article touches on that a little bit as it describes tools for how too better improve and optimize ones bid. That being said I think in theatre and the Entertainment industry we simply don’t have the time to get out a bid that is always dead accurate for clients or designers. We tend to break things into larger chunks then maybe we should and we don’t build in any true buffers except for when we “have a feeling” that something is too light or heavy. I know at CMU and other places I’ve worked this sort of historical data is really essential to the process as there’s no way of accurately gaging the future without understanding the past and the current capacity of the shop.
In our world at the school of drama, bidding isn’t the issue, but budgeting is, both time and money. We’re here to practice the process, so if we make mistakes, we’re not going to go under as an organization. I like the idea of having baseline tasks that can be timed for the budgeting process. Unfortunately the problem in our industry is that we’re okay at a lot of things meaning that we’re not as streamlined at everything because we don’t do all of the processes all of the time. The other challenge of doing a study on the amount of time it takes us to do things is that you’d have to have a person for that. Ben was telling us about a project tracking system that they have at TAIT and that may be worthwhile to look into. If there was a professional or home-brewed tracking system, then you could learn times as tasks were completed and moved off of the floor based on a punch-in, punch-out system.
This article veered a little too close to Amazon track your every move territory for me. While I think its smart to look at ways to save time like better organization of tool rooms or premade labels, I think we should be more lenient with the time it takes to build things. There is nothing more demoralizing than having a great day at work, building something simple like a flat and chatting with your coworkers and then suddenly have your supervisor come onto the floor upset you’re enjoying yourself at work and aren’t working at maximum efficiency at all times. I remember one load in, we had to come in early to get more time without LX, and I chugged my coffee, but it hadn’t kicked in yet, and the TD got upset with me because I was walking slowly on stage as I tried to figure out what to do. It’s so frustrating that in our capitalistic, competitive society that we have to underbid to get the job, and then work our workers to the ground to get jobs in our unreasonable time. If we all just overbid, and then surprised the client by coming under budget wouldn’t we all be happier?
I absolutely agree with both Mattox and Owen on this one, there is definitely more that we can be doing in our workflow to optimize our budgeting process (which does have its similarities to commercial bidding). Last fall during the &1MT class, I remember sticking around after the discussion with the guests and David where we talked about the lack of reflection in our office after-the-fact. In my time here, I have no idea whether my initial estimates for shows have gone over or under, which doesn't help future budgeting sessions. As the article states, "you must begin with good information to generate accurate bids". Without us having a full understanding of how things actually pan out in our process, we won't be able to improve upon it. I've got several ideas floating around in my head right now about ways to implement linked documents or even databases to track all the information we process, which seems to be one method this article outlines. I've looked at some project management software, but many of them are pricey and really don't cater specifically to our industry. I believe Andrew O'Keefe may have even attempted this while he was here using Access. The problem, of course, is that we aren't really the target audience for many of these software packages. Microsoft project is nice for large-scale project management, but also requires significant prep work to be useful. I think our office could get away with using well-structured sheets/excel documents and MAYBE some relational database tools, but that's a task for the future project manager...
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