Written by LetsBuild
Last updated October 18, 2023
Time and Money! Time and Money! It’s all about Time and Money!
Them lot doing the design??? They wouldn’t, in their worst nightmares, consider coming up with a Project Plan for their pre-start input! As we know, the design stage of a project can drag on for months and months. Surely their process would be a lot faster if they knew someone could look at a Project Programme and tell them they were running late and threatened to kick them up their rear-ends?
Of course we builders are perfect and wouldn’t dream of any actual construction work getting underway on a site without us having our Project Plan, compiled after discussion with all the sub-contractors input, would we? No, of course we wouldn’t! Lol and ha-ha!!!
Sadly, what so often happens is that a build programme was submitted along with the Tender that got the contract. That wasn’t done by us “builders”, but by them lot in the office! Their version probably shows about 20 Tasks when we want to see 20,000 of them!
Start on site and nobody really has any idea about who should be doing what, when and where. When someone wants to actually do something useful what we find is that nobody has actually checked is procurement periods for materials, so that is going to be a cause of Delay!
The problem is usually that there is nobody actually on site with the spare time, the skills or the experience to be able to produce a decent, detailed Project Plan – which I usually choose to label a “Detailed Programme to Completion” which then leaves nobody in doubt about what it is! Without having one, though, work just plods along, priority being decided by the mood the subby’s ganger-man happens to be in that day!
Find here: 10 reasons why mobile apps are unavoidable in construction project management
All that messing about goes out of the window if there is a decent, comprehensive Project Plan for the construction phase! Everyone knows what they should be doing and materials are available for them, because they have been ordered and delivered to site in good time. Check progress against the Plan – which will show the Critical Path, too – on at least a weekly basis, kicking butts if any Task is running behind time, and everything will flow along nicely!
This routine inspection even has another beneficial benefit as an off-throw! Because the skilled trades know someone is going to be looking at their work regularly, they get a bit fussy themselves. They usually make good any work defects on a “De-snag as you go” basis simply, without telling anyone, so they look good!
So what do we get from our Project Plan – my “Detailed Programme to Completion”? It is an almost fool proof way of completing on time, to standards and to budget! Not a bad return on the cost of coming up with that Programme!
