TZL 1457 (web)

BUSINESS NEWS BALFOUR BEATTY, AS PART OF CRC JOINT VENTURE, SUCCESSFULLY PLACES FIRST BEAMS TO SUPPORT BRIDGE WIDENING ON TXDOT’S OAK HILL PARKWAY PROJECT Balfour Beatty, as part of Colorado River Constructors joint venture team, achieves a major milestone during the delivery of Texas Department of Transportation’s $674 million Oak Hill Parkway project. The project team successfully set the first bridge beams that support widening activities east of US 290 and SH 71 “Y” interchange in Austin, Texas. To achieve the milestone in one night, crews used trucks to transport 10 bridge beams through the roadway barrier onto the wide shoulder of the US 290 mainlanes where crane operators then lifted and set the beams on bearing pads atop of previously constructed columns and caps. The successful placement of the bridge beams supports upcoming widening operations over Old Fredericksburg Road which include installing permanent metal decking, forming bridge overhangs and setting rebar for future bridge decks and barriers. “The start of bridge widening activities

over Old Fredericksburg Road and Monterey Oaks Boulevard signifies significant progress on TxDOT’s Oak Hill Parkway project,” said John Rempe, PE, Balfour Beatty executive vice president and region manager of Civils operations in the Southwest. “I commend our bridge crews for their collaboration in safely performing this operation that serves as a step forward in alleviating traffic congestion and improving long-term mobility along US 290 and SH 71 in Austin.” Since breaking ground on the project last summer, the CRC joint venture team completed its first major traffic shift west of Circle Drive and is preparing for its second major traffic shift where the first permanent frontage roads will come online at the west end of the Oak Hill Parkway corridor. The crew continues to work on the construction of more than 10 different retaining walls along the project’s corridor which are a mix of soil nail walls, cast-in-place walls and drilled shaft sound walls. The delivery of more than 10 bridge structures is also underway where team members have completed drilled shafts, columns, caps, abutments, and now bridge beams.

Additionally, due to the project’s location, large trenching and milling machines are being used during excavation work. Almost 400,000 cubic yards have been excavated to date, of an estimated 2 million cubic yards, to complete the project. Once complete, the Oak Hill Parkway project will reconstruct and widen US 290 from the east end of Circle Drive to Loop 1 and SH 71 from US 290 to Silvermine Drive. The newly designed roadway will consist of constructing two to three mainlanes as well as adding two to three frontage-road lanes in each direction. An overpass for the US 290 main lanes over William Cannon Drive will also be built, along with direct-connect flyovers between US 290 and SH 71. Additional project components include bicycle and pedestrian accommodations along the entire corridor, cross-street intersection improvements, U-turn lanes, upstream water detention, storm water detention and water quality treatment ponds. The Oak Hill Parkway project is scheduled for completion in 2026.

so many different places an employee can charge their time psychologically legitimizes all of that unbillable time. That, in my estimation, leads to more of it (non-billable time) instead of less of it. And no one who owns a firm in this business wants that. “Stop kidding yourself about the necessity of and accuracy of the accounting for the money you are spending for all of your non-billable activities, and see what effect this change has on the amount of time your people spend doing them!” Therefore, I question the wisdom of having so many non- billable project, time, and activity categories. My advice to management is cut these lists way down to the absolute bare minimum you absolutely need to operate. Stop kidding yourself about the necessity of and accuracy of the accounting for the money you are spending for all of your non-billable activities, and see what effect this change has on the amount of time your people spend doing them! Mark Zweig is Zweig Group’s chairman and founder. Contact him at mzweig@zweiggroup.com.

MARK ZWEIG, from page 11

categories and codes for everything else under the sun. There could be a dozen codes for different types of training alone, i.e., CADD training, other technical software training, project management training, business development training, and so on. There could be codes for chores such as filing, developing graphic standards, maintaining standard details, and more. There could be codes for recruiting or setting up a physical office. There may be codes for a large variety of marketing activities such as business development phone calls, business development emails, business development meetings, fee proposal writing, qualification document preparation, presentations, maintenance of the CRM database, and others. I have seen some firms that had as many as 50 or even more non-billable project or task codes. The problem with having all of these different non-billable project or task codes is twofold. One, it creates all kinds of complication and difficulty for those entering their time. They can’t figure all of it out and shift gears so often during the day that it is nearly impossible to say exactly how much time they spent on any of these activities, so they just guess and throw a number in. That makes all of the data that comes out of the system look like it’s accurate when it isn’t. Decisions get made based on that information and the information is wrong so it can lead to bad decision making. The other problem that is not often considered is that having

THE ZWEIG LETTER SEPTEMBER 19, 2022, ISSUE 1457

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