Construction project management is often shrouded in acronyms and rules. But CPM and assigning resources in specific ways are the details of managing construction projects. When you take a wider view of project management, you need to zoom out to see the big picture.
Here are five strategies to make the big picture an integral part of project planning:
1. Know what success means
Project success is often hard to pin down at project start. That’s because construction projects often begin with a vague set of success metrics. That uncertainty opens the door to planning based on a shifting scope, and the scope changes affect what the owner will consider as successful.
Other factors like cost rear their heads. In the development stage of projects, owners and architects work with imaginary numbers as they explore the size and scope. The cost issue comes up a lot when the project is either a renovation or a demolition with new construction. The hidden aspects of the project can easily swell costs even with a reasonably thorough discovery.
How does the owner imagine the project will look? How will it perform, and how will it fulfill future use when the current use is obsolete? What’s the expected quality for each activity?
2. Know what compromises success
If a project is deemed unsuccessful because it doesn’t meet the owner’s vision, it raises many questions for project construction management. Besides knowing the success factors, you should also know the compromising factors. Many times, these factors are simply the opposite of the success factors. Other times, however, they are less obvious.
A project that runs over on budget and time might still be successful if it meets the owner’s needs and vision. Every owner has a contingency budget that can be used to defray extra costs that arise from unknowns. So it’s not a project failure if they have to use the contingency, at least, unless they view it that way.
Some naïve owners will hope against all odds the project will get finished in half the time for half the budget. It’s not the contractor’s fault if that doesn’t happen. But to the owner, it is. So, owners can compromise success just as easily as contractors.
Contractors must understand the complete picture of what constitutes success and what factors can compromise success.
3. Prepare the team
From the contractor’s view, the team usually includes their own employees and their specialty contractors’ employees. Other team members could include fabricators and engineers. But the contractor also has team members on the owner’s side. These are often third parties tasked with managing the owner’s portion of project responsibilities. These are also workers from the contractor’s team, even though they have no control over them.
A crucial aspect of teams is the skills and experience the individuals bring to the project. Project construction management is more complex than ever because of the wide array of materials and methods in use today.
When you assemble a team, you need to do it with a keen eye on the project requirements. In particular, your line managers, for instance, superintendents and crew leaders, need the right amount of experience and skill for the project. Sometimes, owners might ask for a team member to have a credential like a certificate in project management. Other times, they might need more advanced credentials in project construction management.
All team members need to understand the project almost as well as the prime contractor. From selecting the subs, fabricators and engineers to briefing owner reps, insurance reps, bank reps and others on the methods, materials and mockups, the contractor must prepare everyone to understand what makes up success. Otherwise, the contractor and owner are at odds when things don’t turn out as the owner imagined.
4. Prepare the system
Every construction project has systems and processes. Although the contract spells out the requirements, it’s often up to the parties to the contract to work out how to meet these requirements. Project manager construction tools used to be pens, pencils and paper. Nowadays, using those on all but the simplest of projects sets up failure.
Now, more than ever before, construction managers need a cloud-based project management system. Going digital for project management means you harness computing power and speed. Having the system in the cloud means the documentation, drawings and everything else needed for the project is quickly available to whoever needs them, whenever they need them. With a single source of truth, the project’s stakeholders are always working with the latest information.
5. Manage risks
Every project needs a risk list. On the list, you put the risks and their likelihood of happening. You also include mitigation to prevent them. For the risks you cannot insure for or prevent, you prepare plans A and B. You need to take a very hard-line approach to risks and not let wishful thinking overcome your common sense and how well you’ve planned for the risks.
Consider scope creep, for example. At the project’s start, everybody is optimistic and in the honeymoon phase. But in this fog of optimism, it’s easy to make assumptions you shouldn’t make. Scope creep arises from a couple of scenarios: The owner didn’t have a well-thought-out plan or hidden variables cropped up. Both of those causes are born in the project’s formulation stages. Poor planning and poor discovery fuel scope creep and headaches for project construction management.
With scope creep on your risk list right at the beginning, you are more likely to follow up on all those design items that leave you with questions. It causes you to go deep during discovery, so you find the hidden variables. Since you have scope creep on the list, you will also assign an appropriate number to your contingency based on how likely you think it is that the scope will have changes. Your risk list keeps you realistically pessimistic.
Finally, every successful effort at project construction management requires evaluation. If you don’t go back and confirm your tactics are working, then you’re no further ahead. Without that confirmation, you also are not uncovering different strategies for managing in the face of constant change.
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