You're a project manager for an electrical services firm, and you receive a call from a distraught plant electrical engineer. He said the main production building lost power due to a switchgear fire, and he wants you to help him assess the damage and figure out the fix. He said the fire crew was just finishing up, and it would be nice if you could come now.
Because this is a regular customer, you dropped what you were doing to get out there. You brought an electrician with you. While some smoke and flame did enter the switchgear at the service entrance, the real problem involved a splice in one of the service conductors.
This was the conclusion of the foreman of the electric utility, who had responded upon being notified. He held up the parts to prove it.
“Who splices a service conductor?” your customer asked. But there it was. Not only was an illegal splice made, but the splice was also not even properly made. Extensive arcing at this splice had a cascading effect, resulting in the current situation. The utility does not run the service conductors, and they said those would need to be replaced by the customer.
The utility crew performed some basic tests on the service transformers, and everything seemed fine. They took oil samples, noting that further work may be needed, but they could authorize power restoration once the customer has addressed all issues in the punchlist provided by the utility.
With this customer's situation being critical, your boss authorized you to prioritize this project. That would mean pulling people from other projects; another project manager would smooth things over with those customers and help you with the mobilization efforts.
The plant electrical engineer was pleasantly surprised to hear you'd have a crew onsite the next day and that you had already arranged with the utility to buy a spool of 500 MCM from them (none of your local distributors had this in stock).
The first day, your crew started the “demo” work. This involved removing the old 500 MCM cable that was run overhead. Just before noon, the utility delivered the spool of 500 MCM cable and even set it up on a cable pulling rig for you.
While your crew was having lunch, the plant manager came out to see how things were progressing. He noticed nobody was working, so he immediately wanted to know why everyone was sitting around. You explained that it was lunch time.
You then explained the phases of the job. Today would focus on removal and clean-up from the service transformers to the service switchgear. Four electricians are, in parallel, cleaning the feeder panels and performing some basic testing as they go. The whole idea is to prep the job for the big cable pull while reducing any unexpected lead times due to damage from the fire.
The plant manager said he could clearly see you had understaffed this project, and he would have the entire maintenance crew working on it right away. When you told him that would not be a good idea, he said he'd hire another firm if you either didn't get more people or use his people.
How do you respond to that kind of threat?
He's totally discounting the extreme effort you put forth and now he's pressuring you to crowd the project with people, making it dangerous and actually slowing work down.
The plant manager is in an emotional place. His plant is down, which hurts his performance metrics, and he wants it back up but feels powerless to do anything about it. So that's your starting point.
Acknowledge that it's important to get the plant running as soon and as safely as possible. Point out that this whole incident resulted from some kind of rush job on the service conductors and that we don't want to install a failure waiting to happen. Show him how you are proceeding and summarize what you've done. Then tell him the hardest part will be pulling those fat 500 MCM conductors.
“But that's where you can help,” you tell him, “and you can tell your boss you rolled up your own sleeves.”
Take him to the spool and have him lift the end of that heavy cable. “Can you help us with this?”
He'll probably last 15 minutes on that cable pull, but the very fact that he can look forward to doing something to “speed up” this work should keep him off your back.
