Description

Projects don't blow up in one big moment. They drift. The master schedule says one thing, the job site is doing another, and nobody finds out until somebody walks into the Monday meeting and starts shouting.

This week I sat down with Carlos Carvalho of Aphex, calling in from London. Carlos started out with Costain on Crossrail (the Elizabeth Line) and HS2. He found the same old spreadsheets running some of the biggest jobs in the world. So he and his founding team built a planning tool for the people actually building the job, not the people reporting on it.

We get into:

• Why a spreadsheet is where a plan goes to die
• Keeping the master schedule and the daily field plan from drifting apart
• Catching delays the next day instead of weeks later
• Talking into your phone instead of typing up a daily report at the end of a long shift
• Landing a $6 billion job as your third customer, and the hair it cost him
• Why data won't replace experience, and why no decision is sometimes worse than a bad one

Carlos is moving his family to Toronto in January to build out Aphex in North America. He showed his wife the city in July at 35 degrees. January is looking more like minus 25. Good luck, brother. Texas is always an option.

Real People, Real Work, Real Talk.