1 Million Point Evaluation for Contractor Operations

How effective is your whole system from strategic market choices through project exit? This simple evaluation exercise with your team will help you align then eliminate your key bottlenecks and constraint.

D. Brown Management Profile Picture
D. Brown Management
June 2, 2024 3 minute read
business management strategy Talent
Share

 

 

"A system is never the sum of its parts. It is the product of their interaction." - Russell Ackoff

 

This is not meant to be a deep analysis, just a simple exercise to help you see how each of your team members sees the company. You can use it to help develop and align the team as well as improve your operations. 

For each of these six factors, have them evaluate the company on a 0-10 scale and include their reasons why including examples or data where applicable. 

  1. Strategic Market Choices: Are we positioned in market sectors that give us the best chance of winning? Prep work includes this article and video on strategy vs. planning.
  2. Marketing & Business Development: Are we developing enough opportunities aligned with our strategic choices, capabilities, and capacity that allow us to be selective and meet our business plan? The Truth About Business Development and The Sales Funnel.
  3. Opportunity Evaluation:  Are we evaluating our opportunities rigorously to maximize our returns and minimize our risks?
  4. Cost & Quantity Estimating: Are we accurately estimating the costs and quantities based on scope, conditions, and capabilities (#6)?
  5. Market Pricing / Contract Negotiations: Are we setting external pricing for the project and negotiating the contractual terms to optimize returns?
  6. Ops Execution (Project Delivery): Are we executing our projects as estimated (#4)? See The Seven Basic Project Team Objectives.

Remember that these all work together as a system. The outcome is not a sum of the scores (max 60) but rather a product of how they all work together (max 1,000,000). 

This is why it is relatively easy for well-performing contractors to consistently achieve 2-3X industry benchmarks in terms of safety, growth, profit, and cash.

 

Please contact us to learn more about how to use this simple subjective evaluation with your team. We will share anything we've learned that will help build stronger contractors and their teams. 

An experienced but unbiased third party can be valuable for both setting up this exercise and facilitating the follow-up discussions with the team. This allows the leader to backup and deeply "observe" how their team is thinking, communicating, and interacting with each other. 

 

 

Related Training
Accountability Prerequisites
Accountability in a job role is critical for contractors to grow. Accountability without clarity, capability, and capacity only leads to stress, lower performance, and higher risk over time.
Related Article
Leadership Combinations and States of Market Growth
There is a beautiful tension in leadership teams that is required for growth. That tension shifts with different stages of a market's growth and must be integrated with the contractor's stage of growth as a company.
Related Article
Four Levels of Integration and Optimization
Operational excellence must be a major component of every contractor’s strategy and baked into their daily behaviors. Optimizing at each of the four major layers requires different levels of thinking, technology, and time span.
Related Article