The pages came back looking like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Redlines everywhere. Errors scattered across every submittal.

At the time, I was working as a Quality Control Supervisor. We were a new company, still learning standards and construction styles as we went. Everything moved fast. Projects were high-paced and rushed. Clients needed our submittals asap so they could pass them along to architects and general contractors.

This project was especially messy. Too many assumptions. Missing information. Poor follow-up. RFIs still pending. And in the middle of all that, we rushed the submittal.

We lost the client.

The Real Problem Wasn’t the Mistake

Here’s what most people get wrong about precision: clients can forgive a lack of knowledge about their internal processes. They can get behind mistakes that come from incomplete information.

What breaks the relationship is sending the same mistake back for a second or third time.

The client had already told us what to fix. We didn’t fix it. Or we only applied the solution partially throughout the project.

The team was prioritizing speed over quality. Stress was high. Lots of overtime hours. Eyes get tired. Hands get sloppy. Details get missed.

But that’s not the core issue.

Quality Control Had Become a Crutch

Our review process looked clean on paper. Team leaders reviewed the work, then it went straight to QC. Simple.

Except we were finding errors that should have been caught by the drafting team. Mistakes that shouldn’t have made it to final review.

The drafting team knew someone else would catch their mistakes. So they stopped checking their own work as carefully.

When those marked-up pages came back, my brain immediately responded with anxiety and frustration. Hard work gets clouded by mistakes. But blame gets you nowhere.

We needed to understand the root causes. Why were we rushing? Was the project estimated correctly? Did we get held up by lack of information? Did we skip steps trying to deliver fast? Did we have the right team on this job?

You Can’t Improve What You Don’t Measure

We built a system where each role has clarity about what they own. What items they need to check at each stage of review. No one can hide behind somebody else’s responsibility.

Then we started pulling metrics.

We counted types of mistakes and tracked what was most common in our service. Drawing references kept showing up. They occurred because of a poorly structured workflow.

People were jumping from item to item instead of following a clean, straight path of work. That behavior causes you to miss things.

Most people would say multitasking and jumping between tasks is just the reality of drafting work. But it’s actually the enemy of quality.

Proof Changes Behavior

People are not willing to change behavior unless you can prove your way is better.

We started showcasing and rewarding team members who followed the right way. People who embodied the quality we wanted to produce.

After the ball gets dropped, morale goes down. You need to keep the team focused on solutions and next steps. Help them understand this is not the last project. More will come. Work will carry on.

The important thing is learning how to avoid these situations.

We lost a client because we didn’t own our work. Now everybody does. Responsibilities within projects became clearer.

That Jackson Pollock disaster taught us something valuable: precision isn’t about perfection. It’s about accountability at every stage. It’s about building systems that catches mistakes before clients do.

And it’s about recognizing that speed without quality is just expensive.

Nicolae Céspedes

Director of Operation