Matt May's Blog

  If you don't know what it's like to be a construction manager, there may be more responsibilities than you think. As discussed in this article, a construction manager's job is not very consistent. At least in the sense that you don't do the exact same procedure every single day. There are so many different things to get done at different times during a construction project that you are bound to be doing different tasks each day of the week. Not only do you have plenty of tasks to complete, there are all different types of tasks. For example, you could have a meeting one day with stakeholders, and the next day you are meeting with the construction project owner. In the article, the author describes several ways a project manager stays busy each day: preparing and submitting budgets, hiring and managing staff, negotiating contracts, being present at meetings, ensuring the company's compliance with laws, ensuring the site workers safety, and so on.  There are many sk...

  Retention in the construction industry can become a big issue if there are problems with management. This article highlights the importance in the responsibility of a construction manager to keep their staff motivated. It shows different methods of rewarding site workers and providing incentives to keep them content with their job. According to the author, recognizing a person's hard work is one of the most important factors of maintaining a job site's peak productivity. Each person has a different story, a different background, and different goals. It is important to establish a connection with each worker, no matter how insignificant their role may seem. In order to run a successful job site, you must maintain a strong, collaborative team. Each person must feel pride in fulfilling their specific role in order to keep the project's momentum. One key to being the best construction site manager possible is listening to your employees. Whether it be discussing last night...

Construction teams have a massive amount of influence on whether a firefighter may live or die. This article mostly discusses the importance of being aware of how materials may affect a fire if one were to break out in a building; more specifically why wood framed high-rise buildings can be the most dangerous for firefighters. As a volunteer firefighter, I take firefighter life safety very seriously. As the author says in the second paragraph, a fire in a wood frame building killed two New York firefighters when it collapsed. This is because a wood frame is much weaker than other materials such as steel when put up against high heat atmospheres, making it much more prone to falling apart if a fire were to break out.  Not only is the type of construction vital to firefighters if a fire were to break out, it may be even more vital to workers and residents who are inside at the time of the blaze. The examples the author brings up shows several real life scenarios of how a fire could q...

  With the construction industry changing every day, how do supervisors keep up? As technology advances, there are more and more changes in many fields of work to implement the newest innovative pieces of equipment. This has had a huge impact on the construction management field and every day there are exciting new changes that make the way we work much, much easier. The main issues this article focuses on are changes in Project Management Software, Field Productivity, Time Tracking, Communication, and Computer Imaging Tools. These innovations can be quite important to the field because it streamlines production, which in turn pays of by reducing the burden of time restraints.  One innovation of the construction management field is the introduction of Building Information Modeling, or BIM. Rather than the old fashion way of using blueprints and pens, BIM has created an outlet for three dimensional data input. This allows the user to see how a building will be built before movi...