In construction, there is an ironic relationship between quality and safety, and speed and schedule. While much effort is devoted to completing projects on schedule, ensuring quality and safety often benefits from a pause for more planning that sometimes even requires that work be slowed down to avoid accidents and rework.

What signals can help a project team recognize that best path to high-quality, injury- and incident-free construction calls for additional thinking, coordination and clarifications about the design? What signals can help a project team recognize when safety-critical activities should be postponed in favor of better planning, equipment and different staff? Is research available to provide guidance for this counterintuitive slowing of the rush to completion?

ENR's panel of experts will share its insights about the way management and safety science has evolved on this topic.

	Dr. Matthew Hallowell is a president’s teaching scholar and endowed professor of construction engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has earned a Bachler of Science, Master of Science and Ph.D. in civil engineering. Before his academic, he worked in construction as a laborer, project engineer and quality inspector. Dr. Hallowell specializes in construction safety research. He has pioneered leading indicators, hazard recognition programs, safety risk assessment and precursor analysis. For his research, he has received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Construction Industry Institute Outstanding Researcher Award.
	Carl Johansen is a quality management subject matter expert (SME). He holds a BSIT and MSTM in electromechanical technology, six sigma and lean management from Central Connecticut State University. During Johansen’s graduate studies, he worked as a manufacturing engineer in the fast-paced manufacturing sector at an industrial storage company in Connecticut. After graduate school, he moved to the architectural hardware facet of the sector and continued to perform manufacturing engineer duties. After his time in the manufacturing industry, Johansen moved to Con Edison, joining the energy and utility sector in Manhattan, New York, where he is the section manager of Utility Shared Services Quality Management Dept. and program manager for the company-wide certification of its environmental management system to ISO 14001. For the past five years, he has been applying the quality management principles he learned in college and honed in the manufacturing industry to the energy and utility sector.
	Kristopher Thorne has been the company’s chief operations officer since July 2016. He joined Limbach in 1988 and most recently served as chief operations officer of Limbach’s union subsidiary business. In that role, he oversaw aspects of Limbach’s construction operations, with primary responsibilities including oversight of risk management, sharing of best practices and development of operational talent. Thorne is an accomplished senior executive with proven success, extensive experience and expertise in all aspects of the mechanical contracting/service industry. Prior to assuming the responsibilities of Limbach’s COO, he led the Michigan business unit as the senior vice president and branch manager since 2007. Thorne holds a Bachelor of Science in business services from University of Toledo and a Bachelor of Science in energy management from Ferris State University.

Procore Technologies, Inc. provides cloud-based construction software to clients across the globe. Using its award-winning suite of project management tools, thousands of Procore users manage all types of construction projects including industrial plants, office buildings & more. www.procore.com