The construction site is where money is being made or lost. As a project manager or construction supervisor, you must always have a detailed view of everything that is happening there. This is the only way to keep up with changes and react to critical issues in time to keep your project momentum stable.
Construction research shows that if you can deliver small tasks at least 80% on time and with quality, you will eventually be able to deliver the entire project on time and without going over budget.
That's why, if you're a project manager, it's your responsibility to break the master plan into smaller, manageable chunks so you can create and maintain a regular rhythm for your project.
How can you achieve this? Making the program available to your teams in the cloud using a single source of truth. Many project managers structure team communication in applications that are not designed for construction.
Their program is on a big paper chart, their plans detailed in the MS project, document approvals in various email threads, random updates appear on WhatsApp, reports in Excel and that important thing they can't remember in a phone call with a guy whose name they forget. Therefore, it is impossible to keep track of what is happening on site because data is worthless when it is not linked correctly.
Read more: I use MS Project. Why would I want to use anything else?
Raul Hernandez, vice president of business development at Grupo Provivienda understands this well. After connecting his local teams with each other and with project information in a single cloud data source, he was able to reduce the time needed to build a house from 330 to 60 days and save up to 15% more on production costs (per example, material inventory).
“What changed was a live program that helped us avoid downtime between activities,” explains Raul A. Hernandez Sosa.
At the same time, Matt Ghinn, Project Director at VolkerFitzpatrick, strongly believed that planning is king. If he delivers on time, he will stay within budget. In other words, he had to complete as many tasks as possible within a certain period of time.
Thus, he increased on-site completion from 60% to 85% and went from 5 weeks late to 3 months on schedule. How did he do it? Implementing 3 secrets:
- migrate the calendar to the cloud, as you had already done with your documents.
- replacing WhatsApp, Excel and MS Project which were delaying their projects.
- giving all your teams access to the same schedule to avoid tedious emails, phone calls or texts.
“We are not calling, we are not using WhatsApp groups, we are not sending emails. The program is live, it’s there, and all the data from the site is captured,” says Matt Ghinn.
If you also believe that planning is essential and want to reap the same benefits as Matt, download our free e-book here.
