project management
RB Pool & Spa (Monroeville, PA) has fully integrated job-costing and job-progress management into a…
As watershapers, we all have one common goal in mind: We don't ever want our concrete pools, spas, fountains or waterfeatures - whatever it is we've just finished building - to move at any time, in any way at all. This is true no matter the physical or geological circumstances. On a slope, on the flat, elevated above a parking garage or set on rock or in sand or clay, wherever we're working, we follow
One of the things we value most in our fountain projects is that no two of them are ever the same. I can make that same statement about our custom pool projects, of course, but it's a matter of degree: Where uniqueness from pool to pool is about selecting just the right possibilities among shapes, elevations and materials, for instance, from fountain to fountain it's about inventing and adapting technology and pushing accepted limits to make ideas work. The fountain under discussion in this article is a perfect illustration of that distinction. Making it happen was about
‘Perception is reality,’ observed Brian Van Bower at the head of his Aqua Culture column for August 2003. ‘Regardless of whether that’s right or wrong, you are judged by appearances.’ ‘If your own appearances mean ugly-looking vehicles, sloppy-looking employees, shabby offices and job sites that look like disaster areas, you will inevitably be judged with that image by the clients who have hired you and by anyone else exposed to
‘Although my business now focuses on design and consulting,’ declared Brian Van Bower near the top of his Aqua Culture column of June 2003, ‘I spent enough years as a contractor to be able to evaluate what goes on between contractor and clients.’ ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘in my role as designer, clients often turn to me with comments about their contractors – and they’re not shy about complaining or in telling me about what makes them happy. And it works the other way, too, because contractors, knowing that I have experience as a contractor myself, will often turn to me as someone who can
In any large-scale watershaping project, managing the logistics has a way of becoming the most important task of all. In the case under discussion here, that might even be an understatement when you weigh all of the complicating factors. First, the job site was located in central Colombia, in the foothills of South America's Andes mountain range. Second, that locale is essentially a tropical rainforest, and when it wasn't pouring by the bucketful, it was crushingly hot and humid. Third, ours is a North American company that works with its own products and has no distribution in Colombia. And there's more: To get the job done, we knew we
