Aren’t you curious about how project planning works? Project planning is a department that involves preparing plans on how to complete a project within a given time frame, usually with properly defined stages, and with known resources. In this article, we will be looking at various aspects of realistic construction project management.
Why is Construction Project Management Planning important?
Construction planning helps in setting goals well ahead and giving a defined direction to the project. Ideally, planning should create a platform where various departments who have involved in the project should come together. Also, productive discussions on how to go about the projects should take place.
The four most important pillars of any construction project are time, scope, cost, and quality.
You must find equilibrium among these four constituents during the planning phase. You must identify and reduce project-specific risks. Also, you must prioritize activities, arrangements for delivering desired results at the desired time. A well-planned project performs better than any spontaneous execution of construction.
Setting a plan is easy! But executing a realistic plan expecting all uncertainties and still sticking to time, cost, quality, the scope is a big thing. Schedule overrun is a major concern in construction projects all over. Every plan becomes realistic when there is room for managing variability and workflow. Also, it’s easier when the plan considers the dependency of various activities.
Once a project reaches the construction stage, preparing the master plan is of paramount importance. A master plan is a schedule that consists of major milestones and the finishing date of the project. It is prepared considering the scope, project-specific parameters, productivity numbers, etc. And this plan serves as a reference throughout the completion of the project.
Push and Pull Planning
It is a traditional practice that organizations go for a top-down planning (push) system. There is definitely a huge gap between push and pull systems of planning. In push planning, an external force is given to projects to stick to the centrally prepared timeline. It is irrespective of the condition prevailing in various sites. It is more like focusing on a plan without giving due respect to whether the downstream process is ready to process them.
A pull system is a more organic way of planning. The information is collected from the site engineers/supervisors. They are the ‘last planners’ for the preparation of the look-ahead plan or the weekly work plan.
In pull systems, small negotiations and site-specific considerations are made to manage the workflow. Information is pulled from the site to create more effective and realistic plans. These efficient weekly work plan cumulatively benefits the prior fixed milestone plan.
E.g. Consider a milestone target of completing internal and external plastering by the end of this month. If the site is expecting rain by the end of the month, you must prioritize external plastering and complete it before the rainy days begin. It is important to discuss and prioritize the activities with the site engineers/supervisors. In this example, we could observe that a slight change in the short-term plan made it more effective with the already set milestone plan being adhered to.
Sometimes, splitting a single activity to happen at different times rather than planning it all together may become a solution. It is purely situation-specific. The importance of baby steps and minutest planning could be seen in pull planning.
In short, every construction plan must have this short interval-detailed plan. It must have its roots in milestone plans thus filling the gap between the centrally and locally prepared plans. It not only enhances efficiency but also makes the team feel a sense of achievement. This will reflect in the successive weeks and altogether impacts the master plan positively.
You can progressively minimize the overall schedule slippage. You must continuously analyze the cause for delays and implement process improvements to overcome irrecoverable delays (if any). This way, you will be able to set more realistic plans.
Thus, you can create a new trend of sticking to a plan which is rarely seen in construction projects.
Do you have anything to add about construction project management? Please mention this in the comments section.