Construction Planning and Scheduling: Why Your Organization’s Project Controls Fail
How do you control construction schedules, reports from the professional team, and your own high-level business intelligence?
Understanding the true status of a project under construction today is not only a challenge, the lack of it is becoming a cost burden for developers/clients/project sponsors. Today we constantly see three levels of poor control emerge in development organizations or project-intensive institutions that ultimately lead to significant and unforeseen losses.
Contractors (Level 1)
Due to the lack of standards in terms of construction schedules, the following often occurs:
(a) contractors routinely submit shoddy construction schedules that are wholly inadequate for good planning, measurement and control of progress or;
(b) contractors are so familiar with expensive scheduling software that they provide very complicated schedules. These contractors are in complete control, and teams have no choice but to rely on this information, often at their own risk, when they begin submitting time extension requests.
Imagine an industry where we force the contractor to create their own bill of quantities and quote for work in the absence of a standard measurement system. Contractors would simply create their own exchanges and make their own underlying assumptions about what is and is not included in their fees. Imagine the chaos! And yet, this is exactly how the industry currently deals with time. We place this obligation in the lap of the contractor in the absence of standards for how a schedule should be compiled and what underlying assumptions may be made by all parties looking at a schedule.
Professional Teams (Tier 2)
On the other hand, most professionals on a project are highly trained within their particular trades and very rarely have the necessary up-to-date experience or time to review and manage a contractor’s schedule and establish an adequate controls infrastructure. It doesn’t matter if a contractor submits a poor schedule or a very complex one, the result is the same:
(a) The team is unclear on exactly what the contractor is communicating in their updated schedule, nor can they meaningfully understand their 100-page progress reports.
(b) The team trusts the contractor who slowly spreads their information. You can manipulate and mask it however you see fit. Teams sit with little information on which to make decisions or measure true variance, often leading to disputes or the sudden realization of project failure, which often occurs when it is too late to take corrective action.
Intensive Project Developer/Institution (Tier 3)
In terms of developing organizations, the following is true for your project control function:
(a) Some rely heavily on their respective professional teams to provide them with proper reporting and project controls. Although some of these teams may be highly skilled, for the most part there is a lack of standardized control across teams and each project team has their own unique predefined reporting systems based on their company standard.
(b) Other institutions get state-of-the-art control systems at a higher level in their company for excessive fees. Often these systems never fulfill their intended function because they cannot function effectively without the proper control systems in place at the Tiers 2 and 1 mentioned above.
holistic approach
The solution is what our colleagues in the medical fraternity called a “holistic approach.” A doctor who performs surgery on a severely broken leg, for example, only takes care of part of the “medical care” he will receive. Medical care as a holistic system requires post-operative care, rehabilitation treatment by a physio, etc. You cannot attend physiotherapy in isolation and expect your fracture to heal. Nor can we expect good results just by having surgery and trying to go home on one leg soon after.
Project control is the same. For institutions seeking to have better control, construction schedules better decision making, more time to take corrective action, adhere to good corporate governance principles, audit performance, have fewer disputes, and reduce development cost, they have to implement measures and systems at all three levels.
This requires experience at all three levels and that is why most organizations do not implement adequate systems for project control.