Thursday, January 3, 2013

+Project Information Management

In 2009 Groninger Custom Homes was nationally recognized at the Custom Builder Symposium with a Business Excellence Award from Residential Design & Build Magazine for its JobNotes project management system. The system was used long before smart phones and the cloud, to manage the information and processes of a successful custom home building company.

Our first project superintendent was a great builder in his own right. He managed the entire process on his projects with little hand-holding from the office staff. It wasn't until we hired our second super that we realized what a gem we had in our first; and how lacking our processes were for managing information flow between the office and field. We discovered that we were keeping information that our new supervisor needed in nine different places. Hence the evolution of the JobNotes system.

We weren't in the dinosaur age. We did have dial-up internet email and Palm Pilot PDA's. We consolidated our project information into four categories that we still recommend using today.

  • JobCost
  • JobFiles
  • JobNotes
  • JobSchedule

Our processes have continued to evolve along with the technology available. We still use these four separate components but they are now linked and accessible via “The Cloud”. We use the ResConServ format to track task codes across all four categories. Now all of the information is kept on a personalized website that we create for each of our customers. You can request permission to view everything on the Groninger Homes website at GroningerHomes.com.