Construction and Scheduling: a love/hate relationship?
I was consulting for a client a few years back and one of the client’s associate told me in the middle of a meeting:
” Construction schedules are useless, we always fall behind…”
My answer to his provocative line was:
“Like washing your hands, it’s useless, they always end-up dirty…, but still, you keep doing it…”
Scheduling a construction job or a project is a starting point. A schedule is not set in stone, apart from the delivery date. A schedule has to evolve and be adjusted depending on the different project phases, work progress and outside factors.
A General Schedule
My first step with a client will be to clearly understand their goals and time constraints and then work with them to achieve them. At this initial stage, a General Schedule, with deadlines, a few key tasks, and relevant milestones, is usually more than enough to validate a project timeline and it’s feasibility. Some tasks have a set duration and cannot be reduced in time (permitting, administrative filings, authorizations, hazardous materials removal, etc.) whereas others are dependent on consultants, contractors, and deal with available ressources (manpower or financial). A General Schedule or Enveloppe set global goals.
Detailed Scheduling
The next step of scheduling usually requires a little bit more work and cannot be developed without input from the active participants in the project: Architect, Engineers, consultants and contractors. That’s where I like to dive into details and understand a client’s internal approval process, a consultant’s way of doing work (inputs and outputs) or a contractor’s financial needs for orders and procurement lead times. Some things cannot be compressed, even if you have the ressources. For example, it takes 9 months for a women to have a baby, if you have 9 women having babies, it will still take 9 months…
This is how detailed schedules are most efficiently built, using participants input. It is illusory to try to build a fully detailed schedule on your own… It ressembles dictatorship and makes more difficult for participants to adhere to it.
I usually like to separate Design Schedules from the work schedules, as the first part usually falls under the Architects and Engineers responsibility whereas the second under the General Contractor or subcontractor’s responsibility.
Tracking progress and reporting
Once the detailed schedule has received approvals from all parties, it is my job to track progress, report to all involved parties in a transparent manner, alert about delays and propose actions that will keep the project on track.
It is usually a combination of correct ressources allocation, timeline adjustments within the General Schedule and accurate reporting.
About “washing your hands” and being flexible
That’s where the part about “washing your hands” take all it’s meaning. A schedule needs to be flexible and updated when necessary. It should not be set in stone and should reflect the reality of the job site and address all the difficulties that might arise. You are late on a specific task and it is delaying others in your project: usually that means that the schedule needs updating and a new approach to the problem. Updating your schedule regularly with new versions means that you address problems when they arise and not at the last minute. I like to avoid time bombs… and I believe so do you.
But your schedule is only as reliable as the ressources, consultants, finances and contractors that you have at your disposal and cannot replace non-performing partners or lack of financial ressources deployed in a timely fashion. It is a powerful weapon when disputes and claim arise: it serves as a collective memory tool and helps pinpoint responsibilities.
Only by being flexible (and sometimes it requires being very flexible) and by correctly and accurately updating a schedule can a project achieve its goals and be comfortably ahead of schedule every time.