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.
To make this happen on projects that have a lot of repetition (hospitals, roadworks, apartment blocks), you need to break your program into smaller, manageable tasks.
This way, you can plan your next steps accurately, maintain better control over your project, and avoid delays before they expand disproportionately. If you plan your tasks in days, any delays that may appear will likely also result in a delay of a few days. However, if you estimate your timeline in months, the delays you will face will also be in months.
Large blocks of tasks can negatively impact the pacing of your project and result in prolonged delays. 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 get lost in a sea of disconnected data 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schedule in paper format, detailed programs stuck in MS Project, countless website updates on WhatsApp and Messenger, outdated reports in Excel, and document approvals lost in email conversations. And don't even mention the endless phone calls and information that gets lost there.
However, project managers are not to blame for this chaotic situation. 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 already did with your documents.
If you connect your teams around a centralized, live version of the program, you also connect your data and your workflows. This is how Raul Hernandez, from Grupo Provivienda, managed to reduce the time it took to build a house from 310 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.
