Paperwork

[BJE80]

Has anyone else noticed a substantial increase in the amount of required paperwork these days with their jobs? I work for a pipeline construction contractor and the amount of paperwork required, submittals, daily documentation is getting to point of being ridiculous. This is especially true with feel good paperwork that doesn't have any real world value. It is either helping something justify their job or making someone feel good that there is a submittal to put in their file.
I suspect this is mainly due to less people being hands on and lawyers’ suggesting this is all a good idea to protect someone’s butt.
Is this happening everywhere or is it just me?

 

[McLovin]

It's bad, I agree. We are charging the GC for Project Management time on every change order. If they're going to delegate all of the work they should be doing to the subs, they can pay for it.

 

[j-bird]

All I will say is that you want to take about paperwork.

I work for a tier one automotive supplier of exhaust systems and we supply stuff to all over the globe (North and south america, Europe and Asia) and from everything from hybrids, to 18 wheelers, to motorcycles, to tractors! Every manufacturer has it's own way of doing things, their own forms and then we obviously have the governmental regulatory process involved as well. Then toss in the fact that we have our own facilities scattered all over the world and can you say global SNAFU! All anybody seems to care about is some number on some stupid form!!!!! Is it Friday yet?

 

[OkieKubota]

I went from having 3 reports due by the first of every month to one entity to having 3 reports due every week and all on different days. 1 on Monday, 1 on Thursday and 1 on Friday and they all go to different entities... I also have 2 new ones that are due the end of every month so now alot of my time is spent constantly doing some sort of report...

 

[j-bird]

Not to spin this in a different direction, but how many of us record more information now regarding our hunting and habitat work than we did in the past? I know I do. I didn't start recording anything as far as my deer taken is concerned until about 2010. Not sure the data really tells me anything, but I keep it. It does help keep things from running together as time passes.

 

[Bowsnbucks]

Paperwork and meetings. How anyone gets things done efficiently is a mystery.

 

[BJE80]

These are the type of guys that are the driving force of forcing more paperwork and documentation.


"It is about the money!!!!!"

 

[wiscwhip]

We have meetings about when to schedule meetings. No lie! :rolleyes: I had a job I bid a few months back and I received the award, the GC sends us a 137 page contract document for 19,000 lbs of steel?o_O :eek: I was like WTF? I took this to our CEO and we did a contact review and decided to redline the whole document. We called them and basically told them to cut us a PO for the steel with our contract terms as if they were going to Home Depot to buy the supplies off the shelf or we were going to walk. The guy admitted that this contract was for large skyscraper projects that had multiple million dollar suppliers involved(which in that situation would have been understandable), not a few door and window lintels, some support steel and a few hundred feet of wall mount handrail for a tiny building at the VA. Sheesh! Pretty sure they had more money in throw away plywood and planks than the steel we supplied.:rolleyes:

 

[chummer]

Yup, thank the lawyers. If i do a commercial snow conract it is 1 page. If the company has their lawyer do it, it will be 50 pages plus several copies for different people. It gets worse every year as more people sue trying to hit the lawyer lottery.

 

[Bill]

What ticked me off the most when I was running a business was my own Lawyer telling me it was cheaper to settle than go to,court on many occasions.

We had a friggin woman chasing a production manager around trying to stab him with a screw driver that sued for wrongful termination and race card discrimination. $5K out of court, $30k plus to be right. You can only pay on the principal of being right so many times.

 

[wiscwhip]

It's bad, I agree. We are charging the GC for Project Management time on every change order. If they're going to delegate all of the work they should be doing to the subs, they can pay for it.

We do this^^^as well.

 

[wiscwhip]

Well it's a good thing your Pro Staff affiliations show how much you like bars!;):D

 

[wiscwhip]

Is that due to medical or legal reasons?;) If it's medical, the partaking is probably still ok, it's the "in moderation" part that's hard!

 

[j-bird]

Just remember AA is for quitters!

 

[tooln]

Meetings and paper work SUCK. I too have been in meeting and that were about when to have the meeting and everyone was there. When I found out what it was about I told the boss this is STUPID I got better things to be doing got up and walked out. He wanted to write me up I told him have at it and the union would love this grievance. The paper work is getting just plain foolish. We use to have fire watch's if we were welding in the plant or had the torch out. This wasn't a bad idea, but now they change the form to 2 pages, turned a 2 hour spot check into a 3 hour ordeal. It's to the point some jobs take longer to do the paper work than the work. Pretty soon I'm going to request secretaries for my mechanics.

 

[BuckSutherland]

 

[SD51555]

Outside the legal things, there's tons of paperwork for any companies that are buying up consulting ideas that talk strict accountability. Here's a view of my typical week.

-Monday: Have a conference call to talk about what we should do this week.
-Tuesday: Have a conference call with your team to discuss what we should do this week.
-Wednesday: Sh*t happens, nobody does what we said we were going to do because we're told to immediately do something else with a 30 hr deadline.
-Thursday: Fill out preliminary spreadsheet for 8am call tomorrow to talk about what we were going to do this week.
-Friday: 8am call to discuss our failure to execute this week.
5pm, fill out report highlighting all the things we failed to execute so they can be rolled up to HQ and rolled out on Monday for things we should do next week.

All of this is born out of a lack of trust or lack of confidence in the folks that have been hired to do that job. It was a lot easier when we were assigned a single fiscal year goal, and tasked with hitting it. Now the execution guide for bathroom breaks is reaching 40+ pages (k I may be exaggerating there). In all seriousness, I spend less than one day per week actually doing my job. The rest is talking about it and cleaning up problems.