Planning is at the heart of every construction project, but often the master schedule does not reflect the reality on site. As a project manager, it is extremely important that you bring your project plan to life, moving all team communication and collaboration into a dynamic, real-time environment.
This way, the schedule is updated with data directly from the website and you no longer need to chase people with phone calls, emails or text messages. This is the first step to consistently ensuring your team contributes to the schedule, whether you are on site or not.
And that's not all! Allowing all stakeholders to work on the same program will keep everyone aligned and make it easier for them to meet their commitments, as well as take responsibility for resolving any bottlenecks that may arise along the way.
This is how you bring peace of mind to your projects, protect your margins and avoid commercial complaints.
However, to connect everyone on your team around a shared, live version of the program, you need to have the right tools. Many project managers tend to rely on WhatsApp, Messenger, text messages, or even emails and Excel spreadsheets to communicate progress and share updates.
The problem is that these tools were not designed for construction teams and, as a result, are unable to provide a link to individual tasks in the schedule. So you soon spend hours trying to figure out the context of the updates you receive and what their consequences are for your tasks.
The result? Misalignment around project milestones, limited visibility into what is happening on site, and disruption to site activities because issues are not escalated quickly enough.
The 3 tips for putting planning at the center of your projects
Regardless of the size, budget or deadline of a project, one thing is always certain. It all starts with a strong culture around planning. Only then will the different project stakeholders always remain aligned so that value-adding tasks can continue and close in accordance with the commitments made each week.
This is what makes the difference between a construction team that is doing well and a team that is doing great.
To help you bring the same proactive approach to planning to your projects, below are three important secrets you should always keep in mind:
1. Make your plan available to everyone
As a project manager, you should always think of the schedule as the heart of your project. One of your main responsibilities is to maintain regular project momentum. It's like participating in a race. If you want to be successful, you need to find the right balance and avoid going too fast or too slow.
For this to happen in projects with many repetitive processes (hospitals, road works, apartment blocks), you need to break your program into smaller, manageable tasks that consistently add value.
This way, you will be able to accurately plan your next steps, maintain better control of your project and avoid delays. If you plan your tasks in days, any delays that may appear will likely also result in a delay of a few days.
Therefore, rather than trying to plan the entire project in advance from start to finish, it is better to implement 3-6 week advance programs and tie them into the master schedule. This way, you will have more flexibility in defining upcoming milestones and can align your teams around them much more easily.
But here comes the real challenge. Many project managers quickly become lost in a sea of disconnected information because they are using the wrong tools to connect their different timelines.
They have their master schedule in paper format, detailed programs stuck in MS Project, countless website updates on WhatsApp and Messenger, outdated reports in Excel, and document approvals lost in email conversations.
Working across all these apps makes it impossible to keep up with what's happening in the field. That's why you need to move all project data and communications to the cloud, just like you did with your documents about a decade ago.
If you connect your teams around a centralized, live version of the program, you also connect your data and your workflows. These are key components for building trust among your teams, becoming more proactive in resolving or even better at preventing unforeseen events and, in short, building better.
2. Get visibility and clarity into where your project really stands
Imagine there is a group of blindfolded scientists who are going to inspect an elephant for the first time. They have never seen one before in their lives, so they will try to understand what it is like just by touching it. The problem is that all scientists have their eyes covered and will be able to inspect the elephant in a specific location without being able to exchange data and communicate their findings to others.
Soon, they begin to disagree because each of them gets a different and at the same time distorted image of what an elephant looks like. The one who inspects its tail thinks the elephant is like a snake, the one who touches its leg believes the elephant is like a tree and the third person who inspects its ears thinks it looks like a fan. Unless they get the full picture and stop working in silos, they will never be able to present a reliable and accurate version of the truth.
Does this sound familiar? This is exactly what it's like to work on a construction schedule that isn't shared in a real-time, collaborative environment. The program remains locked in MS Project or Excel, making it impossible for project managers and construction managers to align with the rest of the team. No one can be sure that the version of the schedule they have in their hands reflects reality. They are getting frustrated sending emails trying to find out where they are. Like blindfolded scientists inspecting an elephant. Meanwhile, the project manager and site foreman are overwhelmed trying to collect multiple documents and updates from different sources to update their plan. However, even after spending 40% of their day on this, they still cannot be completely sure whether the tasks they prioritized bring value or whether the promises they heard from the team about completing an activity are reliable.
That's why moving your project information to the cloud is so essential. This will help you connect the dots and keep all team members on the same page.
But anyone who believes that you can rely on tools like WhatsApp, Excel and MS Project for this is wrong. As good as they are, these solutions were not created for team communication in construction.
Instead, you might want to follow the example of Raul Hernandez, vice president of business development at residential construction company Grupo Provivienda, who was able to reduce the time to build a home from 310 days to 60 days later:
- moving his plan to the cloud (the same thing he had already done with his drawings).
- no longer sends emails to validate the latest version of the program.
- replacing MS Project and Excel because they were not fit for purpose.
Additionally, because your team now works on the same program and is fully aligned, it has become easier for team members to fulfill their commitments and take responsibility for resolving any constraints that may arise. Raul finally has peace of mind that reliable workflows have been implemented and everyone is working on the same version of the schedule.
“Before, it took us 310 days to build a house. It was due to downtime between activities. Now the same house is built in 60 days. What changed for us was connecting teams through a live program. If your program is not updated frequently, on-site problems become worse because they were not communicated quickly to the right person,” explains Raul.
3. Make sure your team contributes to the schedule whether you are on site or not
How often do you check your smartphone during the day to send a message, take a photo or just read the news? An average smartphone user does this a few times an hour. Why then is there so much resistance from people on the ground when there is a suggestion to bring smartphones into the field for progress schedule tracking and progress schedule reporting?
People on site should be able to pick up the phone and contribute real-time updates to a shared location in the cloud, where all stakeholders can easily respond, add their comments or take action to prevent or overcome an embarrassment.
This is what connectivity in construction is all about when the discussion revolves around planning. It's about bringing the site and people together and combining the physical with the virtual. In other words, connecting field updates and photos taken on site with progress reports in a single location open to all relevant parties. Afterwards, this central location will be used to share progress, flag issues, and react to bottlenecks in a timely manner.
This is something forward-thinking industry players like VolkerFitzpatrick, who we mentioned earlier, are already actively doing:
“Our program is updated at the site level. This means that the operational supervisor provides us with the site information. So we took photos; we receive updates. This allows the team to take on more responsibility and gives us visibility across the entire site team,” highlights Matt Ghinn of VolkerFitzpatrick.
So, in the end, it's about having your eyes on the location at all times, without necessarily having to be there physically. This is how you can stay consistently connected with your teams and support the delivery of value-adding activities to ensure the successful completion of your project.
Keep your teams aligned around milestones!
By now, you should have a clear understanding of what you need to do to bring your schedule to life and safeguard margins on your repetitive projects. If you want to take the next step and discover which tools can help you implement this new approach in your projects.
