#7: Here is a Silver Bullet that can be Used by Contractors and Owners Too

Could you be overlooking a fundamental construction management process?

Remember, we’re not looking for exciting strategies here; we are looking for profound strategies that make on-time on-budget outcomes routine, and even automatic, for our PM/CM teams, vendors, subcontractors and clients. And that is exactly what this process does.

I’m talking about leading smooth projects, retaining employees, and building strong subcontractor/vendor relationships. I am talking about gaining business credibility and the exponential repeat business that comes with it.

Over the last 22 years, as a superintendent/project manager/project controls consultant, I have seen a single project management course of action recover more projects, than all the rest combined. It works on10M projects. It works on multi-billion dollar projects. This practice is used most successfully to leverage effectiveness and support productivity.

Update, validate, and archive the Master CPM Schedule weekly!

I am not talking about making a detached look-ahead schedule in Excel. I am talking about updating and validating the master schedule and extracting a 3-4 week look-ahead schedules weekly. If you do, you will set off a chain reaction of events that will affect every facet of your project.

Can you imagine your scheduled activities, never being more than a couple of days off? Can you imagine seeing red flags pop up along your critical and near critical paths, within a couple of days (instead of several weeks) of when a disruption event happens?  Can you say proactive construction management? That is what I am talking about. Weekly valid updates extracted from the CPM Master Schedule are at the heart of proactive construction management.

To produce an update weekly means that your superintendent will be gathering data almost continually, which means, he’ll always be in the schedule.  He will be using the schedule to manage this week’s work and to plan next week’s work. And once he starts doing that, it won’t take long for everyone else on the project to do the same.

Everyone wants a valid map to lead them across the finish line.  But usually the map (schedule) is not accurate; it’s discounted and disregarded by the trades and even by the CM team. When the schedule turns valid, you will find that the trades will start to call-in with schedule updates and refinements.  And when you encourage this, you will notice that the CPM schedule will be central to the dialog on-site … which is how it should be. It will become the record and reason for project pace.

2 Challenges to weekly CPM Schedule updates:

The first challenge is that some PM teams resist frequent schedule updates. They see an accurate schedule as a stick that will be used (figuratively) to beat them with. They believe that if they can postpone the update just for another week or two, that they can accelerate the progress on-site and recover lost time.  A week later, they will want another week.

9 Bad Signs

Recovery does not happen that way on complex projects. In fact, that approach to construction management is what causes projects to lag in the first place. It always goes back to Too Green – Too Few. What goes along with it are:

1. Detached weekly schedule updates
2. Divergence of the project and the master schedule
3. Master schedule updated monthly and minimally to enable pay applications
4. Every month more activities becoming critical
5. Projects ending with a hair scramble to get across the finish line
6. Smoking construction management staffs
7. Smoking subcontractor relationships
8. Smoking client relationships
9. Eroding profit margins for all stakeholders

No, recovery does not happen that way. Recovery happens by modeling a recovery plan (in the schedule) with input from key stakeholders. Recovery happens by executing the plan (schedule) in design offices, fabrication shops, and onsite.  Having an accurate schedule is the first step.  The most valuable superintendents realize the power of a valid (weekly updated) construction schedule.

The best way to circumvent schedule update procrastination is to make the update process a requirement. Put the weekly update process at the core of the construction management process, and at the core of your corporate project management culture. It must start at the top. Assigning the scheduling tasks to an independent entity is a strategy that savvy builders are catching onto. Bringing in a strong and competent scheduler that is charged with the responsibility to publish a valid CPM schedule update weekly, has comprehensive positive effects on a project … and on a CM team too.

4 Steps to Updating the CPM Schedule

The second challenge to weekly updates is having a scheduler that is competent enough to perform a valid schedule update efficiently. That involves the scheduler:

1. Producing update sheets, these are just a view of the master schedule (active activities only), with blank columns added for the superintendent to fill in actual start, actual finish, and percent complete dates. The superintendent fills in the actual data and returns the form.
2. Entering data into the schedule.
3. Moving the data date, re-calculating the schedule, and checks for anomalies.
4. Performing logic & change management maintenance

This process can be accomplished in 2-4 hours for a typical 15-30M project. The cost of doing weekly updates is actually less than the cost of doing monthly updates. You have to account for the differences between reactive and proactive construction management – and their bottom line consequences. Meaning, that monthly updating undermines the PM team’s ability to use the schedule to manage the project.

If your scheduler is taking two or three times as long to complete schedule updates, consider finding a new scheduler.

It’s only a Schedule

I held a PM position for a GC 5 years ago. The company had been around for almost 100 years. I overheard the owner say: It’s only a schedule. He went on to belittle the scheduling trade. It occurred to me right there and then, that misunderstanding, may well have been behind the fact that the company’s revenues had been on a steady decline for the last several decades.

It’s not as easy to model and mirror complex construction management approaches as many play it off to be. If scheduling were so easy – trades would not mock the schedules – CM teams would be using schedules (instead of to-do lists) to manage daily, weekly, and monthly work on-site. That however is the exception, not the norm. If it were so easy, the scheduling trade would not exist. Scheduling would just be another PM task. The fact that many builders treat it as such, like I said above, may well be a clue into their declining revenues trend.

The fact is that there are schedulers out there that can do it. They have both; the software expertise, and the extensive construction trade and management experience required.

True, their numbers are so small that you may have never met such a scheduler. They have developed their skill-sets over the course of their careers – not in a 3 day seminars. There is a significant difference between knowing how to perform basic scheduling functions and being a scheduler, able to design, develop, and maintain a schedule for a complex construction project.

A junior scheduler does not stand a chance of building and maintaining a schedule that will actually be used  to manage a complex project. Additionally, the junior scheduler is plagued by a PM team imposing their will on the schedule design and maintenance processes. Many times the PM team is their own worst enemy … like the fox guarding the hen house. If you know more for having read this post, please share it with a friend. If you are on twitter, please retweet this post.