Many project managers who work on repetitive projects tell us they must devote up to 50% of their weekly time to administratively demanding planning-related duties. To upgrade their program, which is stuck on MS Project, users must wade through innumerable WhatsApp notifications, emails, or phone calls. It doesn’t take long for them to become mired in a pile of unimportant labor that doesn’t advance their tasks.
But what does “providing value” actually entail? As explained in the Last Planner System (LPS) technique as well, an activity is only deemed to provide value to a project if it meets three specific requirements:
The client consents to pay for this service.
Right away, the activity is carried out as intended.
The movement impacts the finished product’s fit, functionality, or form.
The issue is that project managers and their teams frequently fail to consider these requirements, which allows for waste. Waste in a building project is simply an action that doesn’t adhere to the three standards mentioned earlier. That might be:
needless moving of equipment and supplies from one location to another.
Materials deteriorating in the inventory due to improper storage or premature ordering.
Pauses in work on the job site
un-needed movement (that could even be spending too much time walking up and down from the site to other facilities like the cantine, for instance).
They are doing more work than the customer has requested.
It is necessary to perform additional duties and activities first.
Defects lead to rework and increased costs.
As you can see, many activities don’t advance a project and are regrettably still accepted as the standard, causing delays, financial claims, and a pervasive blame culture.
Here are three queries you want to ask yourself before working on your master plan constantly and short-term lookaheads to prevent becoming caught in this spiral:
Have I taken zoning into account when planning?
The failure to incorporate zoning into their planning is one of the most often yet fundamental errors made by project managers, especially in initiatives that involve a lot of repetition. Consider the situation where you are in charge of a multi-family housing project that requires the construction of numerous distinct yet identical units. Or that you’re engaged in a significant healthcare project.
In either case, there are some requirements you must meet and a list of duties you must carry out for each unit/room. You cannot, however, work on everything at once. For the subsequent stakeholders to complete their tasks, subcontractors must be able to enter each zone (i.e., room or apartment) at the appropriate time and move on to the following location at the proper time.
It would help if you incorporated zoning into your short-term planning to make that happen while preventing pandemonium. You must then be able to update your subcontractors on your progress in a real-time, shareable location in the cloud. If not, you run the danger of some of your partners losing track of where the project is at eventually. Simply put, they won’t be able to determine when it is their turn to arrive on-site and begin working. And this is how you can quickly find yourself battling delays and inefficient workflows.
Have I made it evident to my team when a task is “done”?
One of the primary causes of delays and downtime on a project is often waiting for other subcontractors or team members to finish their tasks. How are you going to avoid that? By deciding what constitutes “done work” so the subsequent activity can begin.
Aligning the expectations of all team members and preventing errors require a clear, standardized set of guidelines and procedures on when work should be completed. When should a handoff be deemed effective? Alternatively, when and where should the next material order arrive on site?
These inquiries may appear straightforward in theory, but they can cause significant margin-threatening delays, downtime, or commercial claims on a building site. It is why having a single, central, and live picture of the short-term planning is essential for project managers and everyone else participating in a project. People will quickly become entangled in a never-ending game of firefighting if they keep walking around the site holding the information up on their heads or in disjointed formats (print-outs, PDFs, Excel spreadsheets), unaware of what they are doing helps or not.
Therefore, recognizing when work should be defined as “done” and notifying the appropriate parties of its completion can significantly impact a cloud-based collaborative environment. Otherwise, you risk creating silos and getting a skewed view of the project’s progress due to your inability or unwillingness to standardize and integrate your schedules and stakeholders. In other words, you will experience increases in delays, conflicts, and lack of peace of mind every day.
Am I paying enough attention to my planning?
Another area where many project managers have room for improvement is their lack of attention to a construction project’s planning. The sole exception to this rule can be uncontrollable outside factors like terrible weather.
Nevertheless, planning shouldn’t end there. Most issues on the job site can be resolved with better foresight and preparation regarding orders, deliveries, selections, drawings, and personnel planning.
Problems typically occur when work on-site is not planned with the appropriate parties or preparation work is realized too late, resulting in last-minute work and blunders.
For instance, the late arrival of prefab components may be why your project is behind schedule. If so, you should collect everyone concerned (engineers, suppliers, etc.) and work together to identify the problem’s fundamental cause and a workable solution to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. It is how you may provide a proactive approach to project planning and constraint removal so unanticipated events don’t lead to disaster.
Do I have a solid planning culture?
As a project manager, one of your primary duties is establishing and keeping a consistent rhythm for your project. It would help if you deliberately organized work into small portions. According to recent research, you are more likely to complete small projects on time and within budget if you can do at least 80% of them without sacrificing quality.
Consequently, make short-term plans and start depending on regularly updated 3-6 week lookaheads rather than trying to schedule everything in detail from beginning to end or concentrating on the milestones you want to hit.
Connecting your team around a shared, live version of the application and constantly updating them on the future milestones (with those being no more than a month away) and dependencies between activities are good places to start with this strategy. Doing so can keep everyone moving in the same direction and keep your project’s progress progressing at a good clip.
The Last Planner System approach is a fantastic tool for fostering greater participation and teamwork on-site. As the teams get closer to doing the actual work, it will help you plan all value-adding activities in more detail. The LPS technique incorporates the “pull planning” values in that only work that can and will be performed following the plan is promised.
Since the LPS system is ultimately a team sport requiring active participation from all team members to maintain the reliability of the promises made, it is not a competition between individuals.
Is my equipment designed with construction in mind?
If you want to increase project productivity and ensure that your lookaheads are completed, that is the million-dollar question.
Project managers frequently assume that the tools they employ are appropriate for the task and designed to facilitate collaboration among various teams on their building projects. The reality is often very different.
Particularly regarding applications not designed for construction teams, including MS Project, WhatsApp, Email, and Excel. These tools may be excellent for different situations, but they cannot provide you with the site visibility you want. Analytically speaking:
They don’t offer a downloadable, “live” view of the project from the site.
They don’t connect the info given through them to the main schedule. People find it challenging to understand the overall state of affairs, the status of various activities, what is coming up next, and who is in charge of what.
The reporting procedure is hampered by the dispersion of information across numerous platforms.
They don’t support internal and external stakeholder collaboration, making connecting all of the teams on the field much harder.
It becomes immediately apparent that employing the incorrect tools might seriously affect your 3-6 week lookaheads. Your teams’ decision-making is delayed and dysfunctional because they lack real-time project information and understanding of who is responsible for what.
So be sure to ask yourself this the next time you are on the job site. If not, you’ll quickly lose control of the situation and have no visibility into your project.
