Acknowledgments

A book like this is assembled out of other people's hard-won knowledge, and most of it was earned the expensive way.

To the superintendents. Nearly everything useful in Parts II, IV, and V came originally from someone standing on a slab at 6:15 in the morning explaining, with more patience than the situation warranted, why the thing I had just proposed would not work. If this book has a center of gravity, it is the general superintendent's point of view — the person who has to make the plan real with actual human beings, in actual weather, on an actual Tuesday.

To the estimators and schedulers. The two disciplines that get the least glory and set the outcome of the project before anyone turns a shovel. Chapters 12, 13, and 14 exist because estimators and schedulers spent hours showing me arithmetic I should already have known, and never once made me feel stupid about it.

To the subcontractors. Section 19.9 — the chapter written from the other side of the table — is the one I most want subcontractors to read and tell me where I got it wrong. The best general contractors are the ones who understand that the twenty companies on their site have their own payrolls, their own backlogs, their own cash-flow problems, and a completely rational view of where your job sits on their priority list.

To the safety professionals. The argument this book makes about safety — that it is a property of the production system rather than a rulebook, and that a schedule decision is a safety decision — is not original. It comes from decades of work by safety practitioners and researchers who have been saying it patiently while the industry slowly caught up. The scaffold near-miss that runs through these pages, and specifically its uncomfortable third finding, is the argument in miniature.

To the owners, architects, and engineers who let a contractor sit in the room during design and argue about constructability. Everything in Chapter 11 depends on that door being open, and the projects where it was open went measurably better than the ones where it was not.

To the institutions that publish the shared infrastructure of this industry — OSHA, the International Code Council, the Construction Specifications Institute, ACI, AISC, ASTM, NFPA, ASHRAE, the AIA, ConsensusDocs, EJCDC, DBIA, AGC, ABC, CMAA, AACE International, the Lean Construction Institute, the USGBC, NIOSH, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This book teaches around their work and points readers to it constantly. Where this book is vague and those documents are precise, go read those documents.

To the researchers and authors whose textbooks defined this field, and whose organizing choices this book both borrows from and argues with. A free book gets to take risks that a commercial textbook cannot, and it should be honest that it is standing on forty years of published work in order to do so.

To every reader who finds an error. This book is open source specifically so that the people who know a jurisdiction, a market, a trade, or a regulation better than the text does can fix it. A correction is a contribution. So is a note that says "in my state, that deadline is different, and here is the citation."

On the people in this book

Ray Alvarez, Margo Deacon, Dani Okonkwo, Tomás Reyes, Wei Chen, Bea Salgado, Jamal Foster, Grace Lindqvist, Owen Baptiste, Lorena Vasquez, Nadia Haddad, Curtis Boone, Priyanka Sethi, Dale Whitcomb, Ruth Caldwell, Hank Duffy, Sofia Marchetti, Devlin Achebe, Frank Petrosyan, Amara Boateng, Del Ferraro, Ingrid Sørensen, Colton Reyes, and Emiliano Serrano are all invented. So are Kestrel Construction Group, Meridian Health System, Halvorsen + Pike Architects, Ironbridge Steel, Cardinal Mechanical, Halcyon Electric, Tessa Bright Homes, and every other company named in these pages. So are the Northgate Outpatient Pavilion, Rivermont Elementary School #12, the Cottonwood Creek Bridge Replacement, Harbor Ridge, and the Willow Street Community Center.

They are composites — assembled from patterns that recur across many real projects, given consistent names and consistent numbers so that a reader can follow one story across forty-two chapters and trust that a $47,500,000 guaranteed maximum price is still $47,500,000 four hundred pages later. None of them describes any actual company, project, or person, and no resemblance to a real party is intended.

The mistakes in this book, however, are entirely real, and most of them were mine.

This book is released under CC BY-SA 4.0. Use it in your course. Translate it. Print it. Improve it and pass it on.