Seeing the Mountain - Levels of Detail

You will find a clear path to the top of the mountain faster as you build your ability to situationally vary the resolution you see the world in.

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This applies to the construction of a project, the building of a contracting business and to life in general.

Leadership Tools: Seeing the Mountain. Top Down or Bottom Up?

Whether you see the “Big Picture” or the “Operational Minutia” matters little.  It is the ability to rapidly zoom in and out as the situation dictates that makes the difference.  

Looking at Mount Everest as an example.  From basecamp one level and radius the mountain is about 428 billion cubic yards of material.  That would require CAT-740’s dumping material at a 1 minute cycle time around the clock for 25,000 years!  

If you built a point cloud at a 1 square foot resolution out of sand it would take 70 cubic yards.  For reference this picture is less than 0.001% of that resolution.  

It is typically better to start developing your mental model as a bigger picture even if it is fuzzy.  You may be trying to climb the wrong mountain and it is much better to see that before starting to fill in the details.




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Managing changes effectively means that you need clear visibility across all projects. While the workflow will vary by project, the key progress milestones in your internal process will remain fixed.
Levels of the Value Stream
For contractors to unlock maximum value during business development, preconstruction and project execution it is critical to understand the broader value stream of the project beyond their scope. 10 levels of granularity in the construction value stream:
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Most Systems Development teams start with someone doing report writing or other forms of data extraction and integration, such as creating a dashboard or streamlining through imports.