Your project’s schedule is the point where the project’s strategy meets project execution. The scheduling environment is very complex. To start with, we have key stakeholders like project owners, consultants, contractors, sub-contractors, and suppliers. Very often they have conflicting interests in many aspects of the project especially related to time, cost, and scope. The complexity is compounded by other factors like different scheduling tools, hybrid project life cycles, diversity in progress measurements to cite a few.

This article focuses on the key aspects the scheduler of construction projects must consider creating schedules that capture the strategic aspects apart from the activity sequences to develop effective schedules that support the project’s execution strategy.

1. Alignment to Project Execution Strategy

The construction project schedule flow must be in alignment with the project’s life cycle. With leading project management thought leaders like the Project Management Institute, advocating the co-existence of agile along with predictive approaches, it is quite likely that within the same schedule, there can be windows of agile, predictive, and hybrid existing together.

In construction projects, another emerging concept is the Advanced Work Packaging (AWP) whose cornerstones are the construction work packages, engineering work packages, and the Procurement work packages followed by the Installation work packages. In a project which follows AWP, establishing dependencies among these work packages is key to success. In a nutshell, the schedule flow must be in alignment with the project’s execution strategy.

2. Leveraging Contractual Conditions  

A good construction project schedule must not only reflect the contractual obligations pertaining to time, cost, and scope but also must be able to facilitate the achievement of the billing milestones without delays and disputes. Hence a thorough understanding of the essence of the contract is mandatory for the scheduler before the start of scheduling of construction projects.

3. Optimizing Cashflow

Good construction project schedules must reflect the alignment between the billing milestones and the payment milestones. This will help in managing the cash flow of construction projects better.

4. Progress Monitoring & Controlling

Project progress monitoring & control requirements, especially the rules of credit definition and their rollup from the activity level to the project level. The establishment of the logic for progress roll-up within the schedule is mandatory for accurate and timely progress monitoring and control. This sounds very simple which is far from reality because different phases in the project life cycle demand different methods of rules of credit for progress update and monitoring.

5. Communications requirements

A good construction project schedule must also facilitate communication requirements and access rights to ensure the right info to the right people at the right time. As most of the scheduling tools can prompt the team members for action, that aspect also must be considered, which is critical for proactive project management.

6. Schedule risk proofing

However good a schedule looks good on a tool, if it is not implementable, then it is of no use. Identifying scheduling risks before or while preparing the schedules of construction projects will help to reduce rework arising during schedule constructability reviews. This calls for a collaborative effort between the scheduler and the technical experts throughout the scheduling phase of the construction projects.

7. Scheduling tools selection, integration

Have you encountered situations where you had to wait for a long time to get the project progress information, and when you got it was all either wrong, or it was not what you wanted?

Till Point#6 we were discussing schedule data quality and organization. Now a little bit about the selection of scheduling tools.

Proper selection of the scheduling tools is another major factor when it comes to construction project management. In an environment of multiple stakeholders like the owners, consultants, contractors, sub-contractors, and suppliers working together concurrently on the project, from different locations, choosing compatible scheduling tools is important for project success. Some of the key aspects to be considered while deciding on the project’s scheduling tools strategy are;

• Compatibility for seamless top-down and bottom-up analysis of project progress
• Ease, accuracy, and timeliness of project progress data updates
• Ease of integration with other systems like the BIM, ERP, Payroll, Finance, etc
• Cost of ownership

Unless it is contractually implied, the chances of usage diverse scheduling tools ranging from spreadsheets to sophisticated ones within the same project cannot be ruled out. Standardizing them for a single project can be both expensive and time-consuming.

Another smart alternative approach would be to establish a project management information system that can;

• Extract data from diverse scheduling applications
• Automate the key project workflows with pre-defined rules of credit which will eliminate  manual progress updates
• Update back the project progress data of the diverse scheduling tools

This approach will help to reduce the number of licenses of the master scheduling tools by restricting the licenses to a limited few who are in charge of scheduling, and at the same time provide real-time project progress information to the diverse spectrum of project stakeholders whose interest is only in the real-time progress information.

Conclusion

The construction project schedule is where the project strategy meets the project execution. Since the present-day project strategies are complex, encapsulating the project execution strategy within the schedule is critical for the project’s success. The key seven points to enhance the effectiveness of construction project schedules are:

• Execution strategy capture into the schedule
• Adherence and leveraging of contractual clauses
• Alignment of the billing and payment milestones for better cash flow management
• Facilitating real-time progress monitoring
• Scheduling data integrity and security
• Schedule risk proofing
• Scheduling tools selection & integration