Construction Planning And Scheduling 4th Edition
Demetrius Dade
Construction planning and scheduling are key aspects in integrating all your construction activities and phases needed to complete a given construction project at a given budget and time frame. Although having individual functions, planning and scheduling are inseparable when it comes to successful project management.
Construction planning essentially covers the choosing of relevant policies, procedures, and processes to achieve your project goals. Construction scheduling adapts your construction project action plans for scope, time, cost, and quality into a functioning calendar. This process of adaptation of the project specifications including requirements for resources (labour, equipment, materials, etc.), communications, risks, and procurement into an operational workflow system is critical for your project team.
Proper construction planning and scheduling are important in ensuring that your construction project gets completed on time and within budget. A thoroughly planned construction schedule not only outlines the pace of your work but it dictates how your work gets done. It also helps define your processes, methods, and sequences for when materials are put in place.
Preparing your construction schedule meticulously and ahead of time maximises your efficiency and productivity. As your construction schedule allows you to improve your quality control measures, it is effortless to sequence work and to ensure you have the correct quality and quantity of materials used in each step.
Materials and resources procurement is on track as you can use your schedule to purchase the right materials exactly when you need them. Safety performance is improved as you use your schedule to track which worker is on site and make sure that protection guidelines are properly followed.
Having a reliable construction schedule also allows you to allocate your time better among all your project stakeholders, which helps them plan their activities better. By getting total control of your project, you reduce unpleasant surprises, making it easy to avoid cost overruns and delays.
Construction planning is essential in managing and executing your construction projects as it involves selecting the technology, defining the work tasks, estimating the required resources and extent of individual tasks, and identifying possible interactions and workflows among different activities.
An efficient construction plan is fundamental in setting your budget and schedule for the entire work needed. Creating and developing a construction plan is a highly challenging and critical task in construction management.
You have to develop the technical aspects and on top of that, you have to make organisational decisions about relationships between project stakeholders and even the subcontractors you will have to include.
The classic approach to developing a construction plan, which is the basis for modern construction planning, is based on the 1998 published book, Project Management for Construction by Chris Hendrickson. The common development strategy is to adopt a primary emphasis on either cost control or on schedule control.
Construction planning may be cost or expense oriented, or schedule oriented. With cost-oriented project planning, there is a distinction between costs incurred directly in the performance of an activity and indirectly for the accomplishment of the project. Indirect costs may include borrowed expenses for project financing and overhead items. For schedule oriented planning, the emphasis is on the schedule of project activities over time, and this is considered critical.
The planning is focused on ensuring that proper precedences among activities are followed and maintained and that scheduling of resources is done in an efficient manner. This results in critical path scheduling procedures (the maintenance of seamless workflows) and job shop scheduling processes (the efficient use of resources over time). Whichever your construction planning is centred on, effective delivery, schedule, and budget is always intertwined and are both major concerns.
1. Choosing which technology and construction methods to utilise. Your choice of the right technology and construction methods are critical aspects in the success of your project execution. Your decision whether to make concrete structures on site or order pre-fabricated ones will directly affect the cost and duration of tasks involved in the construction process. Finding the right digital solution for your project will be decisive for how productive your team is as it will directly affect the time it takes for the various activities to be completed and the flow from one activity to another by cutting down on unnecessary administrative tasks.
2. Defining work tasks and activities. Because construction planning determines your construction scheduling, defining various work tasks is vital in framing the schedule of your construction activities. In that way, you can estimate the resources needed and timetable the required sequences and critical paths among tasks. Defining appropriate work tasks is tedious but a necessity in applying formal scheduling processes and in standardising specific tasks. Once tasks are defined correctly, a hierarchy of activities emerge which can be visualised like this example of activities in a roadway project plan:
3. Defining relationships and critical flow among activities. After work activities are defined, you can now specify the relationships among them. Precedence relations between tasks and activities mean that activities must happen in particular sequences. Numerous natural sequences exist for construction activities due to requirements for structural integrity, regulations, and other technical requirements.
4. Estimating activity durations. Remember, each work activity is associated with time duration and these durations are the bases for preparing the schedule. All formal scheduling relies on duration estimates as well as the defined precedence relations. A realistic estimation coupled with historical records of particular tasks and activities is critical in avoiding delays.
5. Estimating resource requirements for work activities. Besides precedence relations and time durations, resource requirements are also estimated for each activity. By correctly estimating resource requirements per activity based on their comprehensive definitions, particular resource requirements for the entirety of the project can be also defined while avoiding issues with resource allocation and procurement problems.
6. Establishing a coding system. Having a coding system for each of the identified activities allows for better integration of organisation efforts and better information flow. A coding system allows you to standardise definitions and categories of items and activities between projects and among project stakeholders. Coding systems also make it easy to retrieve historical data of cost, productivity, and duration of your activities. Couple this with a construction management software that keeps all your data in a central location makes your coding system even more efficient.
These steps are needed to develop a proper construction plan and allow you to transform your plan into a schedule. Construction planning is not limited to the period after you have been awarded a contract. It should be an essential and continuous activity even during your facility design.
To be successful with your construction projects, careful planning is needed to create a schedule that will allow you to deliver your projects on time and within budget. Both construction planning and scheduling take a lot of time to create and implement but the time you will save during the actual work will be more than the time you spent creating your plan and schedule.
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4D scheduling combines a 3D model and a project schedule. You can directly link activity bars on a Gantt chart to corresponding elements of a 3D model using SYNCHRO 4D. Create graphic representations to understand time-based processes, foresee conflicts, and study potential solutions.
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