Planning is at the heart of every construction project but all too often, the master schedule doesn鈥檛 reflect the reality on site. As a project manager, it is extremely important that you bring your project plan to life by moving all team communication and collaboration in a real-time dynamic environment.
In that way, the schedule gets updated with data straight from the site and you no longer have to chase people with phone calls, emails or text messages. This is the first step for consistently ensuring that your team contributes to the schedule whether you are on site or not.
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And that鈥檚 not all! Enabling all stakeholders to work on the same programme will keep everyone aligned and make it easier for them to hold their commitments as well as take ownership for resolving any constraints that might come in the way.
This is how you bring peace of mind back to your projects, protect your margins and keep commercial claims away.
However, to connect everyone in your team around a shared, live version of the programme 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 aren’t built for construction teams and, as a result, are unable to provide a link to individual tasks in the schedule. So you soon find yourself spending hours trying to figure out the context of the updates you receive and what their consequences are for your tasks.
The result? Misalignment around the project鈥檚 milestones, limited visibility of what鈥檚 happening on site and interruption of site activities because problems aren鈥檛 escalated fast enough.
The 3 tips for placing planning at the centre of your projects
Regardless of the size, budget or time frame of a project, one thing is always sure. Everything starts from a strong culture around planning. Only then, will the different stakeholders of the project remain aligned at all times so that value-adding tasks can proceed and close according to the commitments made each week.
This is what makes the difference between a construction team that is doing just okay from a team that is doing great.
To help you bring the same proactive approach around planning to your projects, we present below three key secrets that 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 heartbeat of your project. One of your top responsibilities is to keep your project鈥檚 rhythm at a regular pace. It鈥檚 like running a race. If you want to succeed, you need to find the right balance and avoid going too fast or too slow.
To make that happen in projects with many repetitive processes (hospitals, roadwork, apartment blocks), you have to break down your programme into smaller manageable tasks that consistently add value.
Like that, you will be able to plan your next steps with precision, maintain better control over your project and prevent delays. If you plan your tasks in days then any delay that might appear will most probably also result in a delay of a few days.
So instead of trying to plan ahead for the entire project from start to finish, it is better to roll out 3-6 week lookahead programmes and link them to the master schedule. In that way, you will have more flexibility when defining the next milestones and you will be able to align your teams around them much easier.