In construction, repetitive projects include tunnels, bridges, highways, railways, housing developments, high-rise commercial buildings, and the like. These projects require crews and construction crews to repeat similar work in multiple areas of the project, moving from one location to another. All of this repetitive work relies on the constant schedule of your project plan so that, no matter what, your project moves at a regular pace. This is one of your main responsibilities as a project manager: maintaining project momentum.
Focusing on the project schedule allows you to break the project plan into smaller tasks to maximize your team's work continuity and minimize work interruptions. By doing this, you improve your teams' overall productivity by:
- Reducing idle time or downtime during your constant site moves
- Optimize the benefits of feedback and learning curve effects
Creating a Practical Schedule for Repetitive Construction Projects
How do you actually create a practical repeating schedule that would be the heart of your project? There are many planning and scheduling templates available, but where do you start? Here's a simple guide to get you started.
- Break your construction plan into smaller jobs
- Identify repetitive and non-repetitive activities
- Recognize flexibility in scheduling repetitive activities with similar durations
- Identify scheduling restrictions involved in each activity and provide practicality to comply with them (work continuity between teams, team availability, restrictions on work logic)
Considering these four points, you would be able to calculate:
- The scheduled start of your project
- Your expected end dates for each activity (in each repeating unit)
- The total duration of the project
- Expected outage days
How do you incorporate all this new information into your project? The key is to have an active, centralized program where you can connect all of your project data and workflows. By dividing your overall program into smaller parts, you can fit all of these smaller activities and create a logical workflow for them in the same environment. By having all these jobs there, you can identify which ones are repetitive and non-repetitive and then assign them to your team accordingly. Everyone on the team can access the same information as everyone else and track the progress of tasks and work before or after theirs. On an individual level, site staff (and the entire construction team) can see all task updates and take responsibility for their work. And if delays occur, they can update the next team, avoiding unnecessary downtime for other groups. This gives all of your teams the flexibility to complete other work on their to-do list. Therefore, for any restrictions, costly problems can be avoided such as unnecessary crew members showing up on site, idle time and downtime resulting from untimely updates, etc.
In the cloud, away from pen and paper
This modern working model contrasts enormously with what we are currently used to in our traditional construction culture. The current project schedule we have is doomed to delays and cost overruns. We are still stuck working with master schedules on paper document forms and with our weekly and daily programs and schedules in MS Project. Schedule updates are done via text, WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, etc. Reports are sent in Excel spreadsheets via email or manual processing. Many information gaps are also lost in unrecorded calls.
It is impossible to have repetitive scheduling and a constant project rhythm when all project data is spread across manual documents, different software, and multiple applications. If you can't keep up with everything that's happening on site, you'll never have that steady rhythm for your construction project. It is essential that you move all of your project data and your team's communication to the cloud.
To illustrate the benefit of this, see how Raul Hernandez of Grupo Provivienda connected his construction team around a centralized, active program and immediately reduced typical construction time from 310 days to 60 days.
What changed was connecting the teams through a live program that helped us avoid downtime between activities. If your program is not updated frequently, on-site problems become worse because they were not communicated quickly to the right person,” says Raul.
Plan ahead but implement weekly
Plan your project in advance, but break your program into smaller chunks through weekly or 3-6 week forecasts. This allows flexibility in aligning your teams and defining upcoming milestones. Connecting these short weekly schedules to your master schedule allows activities to be scheduled where downtime or idleness is minimized or even eliminated entirely. Scheduling repetitive work also ensures continuity of work from one activity to another. Connecting all of this to your central plan in real time leads to updates and feedback that maximize the productivity of each individual team and minimize unnecessary movement of team members after work begins.
This style of planning gives you, as the project manager, the idea of which activities to prioritize and how to properly and effectively schedule activities based on the most up-to-date schedule. You can synchronize your team and optimize productivity based on the ideal team size and a natural, logical rhythm.
Check your own pulse
If you want to optimize your planning and integrate repetitive work scheduling into your own project, you should focus on how you can minimize your project duration and maximize your team's work continuity. You must know how to bring together all your project data into a single source so you can generate the best and most practical schedule for repetitive and non-repetitive construction work.
