The Change Agents, LLC (TCA) is an enterprise that succeeds at Significantly Revealing Hidden Profits within its client companies. Of its two divisions, one focuses on Industry and Office Process companies and the other is exclusively geared toward Construction Leadership. The services provided by each division deliver Measurable Improved Productivity.
Through TCA’s unique strategic methodology, clients discover where to mine for Hidden Profits within their companies. Once trained in the technique, which includes behavior modification, the clients can look forward to Sustainability as the stakeholders become the miners. However, rather than solely identifying current opportunities and defining them in a one-time static report, TCA’s goal is to enlighten the stakeholders by developing the tools they need to begin a legacy of continuous improvement.
Our approach is to create a new standard of client self-awareness, one generated by our franchise strategy and named “Progressive Sustainability”. In years to come, the synergy of the client’s earlier discoveries for change opportunities will grow exponentially, continually delivering higher productivity/hidden profits.
Our “Flagship” goal within the Construction Leadership division is to change the 160-year-old method of Construction Delivery. The traditional model of Design – Bid – Build (D-B-B) must give way to a new paradigm shift referred to as “Collaborative Project Deployment” (CpD). Through its relentless leadership, TCA foresees more and more projects that will realize higher ROI through superior on-time quality. Our mantra is “The Future Is Here Now”.
Our approach to competitive bidding is through the creation of a collaborative team composed of only expertly qualified Trades. That team, through its combined expertise, discovers new methods of sharing resources through Trade to Trade cooperation and communication.
By changing the traditional landscape of non-affiliated separate Trades into a powerful collaborative team, a “perfect engine” is created. It eliminates most, if not all, of the traditional project delivery (D-B-B) method, which is the Prime Cause for adversarial relationships among non-affiliated Trades, Design Professionals and General Contractors. It is a well known fact that finger pointing, as a result of missed expectations (promises), often occurs at the point where the hand-off of scope takes place, which can lead to expensive legal solutions.
TCA has discovered that this flawed model of project delivery has penetrated so deeply for so long that both project management and the workforce show clear signs of “behavioral conditioning”. Today’s project managers and the workforce believe they must accept this wasteful, costly way of doing business because “it will never change”. To counter this mistaken belief, TCA utilizes highly effective team builders and partnership alliances to transform isolated Trades into an amalgam of friendly, collaborating co-workers.
This collaboration process resides on “both sides of the ball”. It is found first at the Owner/Designer/Engineering/Financial levels, where the focus must be on avoiding constructability issues that would deliver a design that does not meet the expectations or budget of the Owner. And the key to avoiding such constructability issues lies in the specialty trade contractors being able to provide “open book” information, so that waste and extra expense due to controversial or incomplete design is eliminated right at the start.
Part of this collaboration at the design phase is where the brokering of each Trade’s obstacles receives support from the other Trades. This spirit of cooperation is what drives the mechanism to create the most competitive and deliverable bid, a bid that always keeps in mind that the Owner’s greatest fear is whether or not the prevailing bidder can be relied upon to finish the project, regardless of whatever extra time is needed.
In addition, the critical metrics forecasted to be achievable during erection (e.g., estimated labor hours, required specialty equipment or made to order engineering) will have been considered during the collaborative bid preparation. These benchmarks are then transmitted to the Execution Collective made up of the Workforce and Project Management, who will become far more efficient due to the Lean Concepts that were employed by the Design Team’s collaboration, and specifically included in its forecasting of the project’s Rhythm of Construction.
Above all, TCA firmly delivers the message that effective management can only exist through real-time productivity measurement. Both the Design and Execution collaborative teams must agree on the metrics, how and where the score will be kept for an accessible view of real-time information.
Jay Berkowitz
Jay Berkowitz, the founder of TCA, has over 30 years of experience in strategic, financial and operational leadership as a senior management and operations executive. After substantive research, he has been able to determine why Industry and Office Processes that use the tenets of Lean Sigma concepts have enjoyed tremendous improvements in productivity, but the Construction Industry has not.
Why not? One of the prime reasons, Jay perceived, was that sustainable higher productivity through workforce empowerment is easier to achieve for a single company. But such workforce empowerment and cohesion is more difficult to attain in the construction industry, which is faced with the challenge of non-affiliated trades, whose allegiance is all too often to themselves and not to Owners or traditional Design Teams.
Due to the many Trades and Third Party Experts that attempt, each in their own way and for their own benefit, to meet the expectations of the Owner, delays and costly waste are the result. In an industry steeped in traditional methods but not in values such as collaboration for the good of all, sustainable productivity is all too elusive.
In modern times, Construction has become less about economics and profitability through Design and Construction and more about Gamesmanship and Risk Management. This mentality is “pure waste” because as the industry’s expertise has shifted to subversive strategies such as withholding knowledge to promote change orders or unrealistic low bidding that forces the GC to become the Trades foreman, all constituents are tempted to “take their eyes off the ball and look behind them” rather than doing right at the start.
The solution to these problems lies in the Collaborative Project Deployment (CpD) concepts unique to TCA. Those concepts are founded on the recognition that behavioral modification is the first step in melting the resistance toward change. Management has to be convinced that change is possible with the ultimate end being the empowerment of the workers, who know best how to perform and coordinate the work. When everyone is on the same page, magical things begin to happen and sustainable productivity becomes a reality and not a dream.
Jay has recently entered into a partnership alliance with Assessment Technologies Group, a nationally recognized authority in the science based assessment industry. Their team of experts, led by recognized Ph.D. level authorities, is dedicated to enhancing workplace performance through the application of employee selection and development. Whereas TCA influences project process, ATG deals directly with the human factor.
The combined efforts of TCA and ATG bring our clients to the future now! The reliability of ATG’s scientifically-validated assessments of Workforce Behavior, Specialty Trade Contractor Leadership and Project Management will provide insight to accurately forecast the success rate of meeting milestone schedules. The key difference will be that this forecasted success identification occurs at the beginning of the project, when alternate planning can take place if the indicators are unacceptable, instead of moving forward only to revert back to controlled chaos later.
The bottom line is: well, YOUR bottom line! The road to sustainable profits that TCA advocates is full of insights and new ideas. And while there is no magical crystal ball involved, embracing the concepts we espouse will produce sustainable profits for your business, seemingly out of thin air.