The odd one out
If you regularly drive to work, you’ll probably be all too familiar with roadworks. From your experience, which of the pictures below seems unusual?
Picture 3? It’s rare to see activity. From my car window, most roadworks seem sat idle, not a worker in sight.
Why is this?
Parallel vs Serial planners
What if you have carefully planned a project, and skillfully designed its construction, but your contractor does not have the capability to perform the work in a quality manner? That is a risk to your project. The PMI diagram only used to refer to the elements of time, cost and scope.
I like to think of Virtual Design & Construction (VDC) as a process that ideally flows through a project, digitally (i.e., virtually) creating, collecting, transporting, and delivering project data from design through construction. The VDC process includes software, hardware, and people – ideally all in the proper configurations and locations to allow for cooperative participation, and enabled to deliver a high performing (i.e., optimized) constructed facility. In this context you could say that if BIM is the car then VDC is the driver.
Project planning is all about figuring out when we are going to finish our project and how much is it going to cost. We typically start with a fixed start date and then figure out what the end date and associated cost may be.Why then, when planning our day to day lives do the very opposite and reverse engineer the plan in order to achieve our goals? For example, “if I need to be at work by 9am , I probably need to leave the house by say 7.30am” or “in order to get my Christmas cards delivered on time, I should make sure they are in the mail no later than say the 10th December”.
My best friend and I meet up once every year and we invariably end up chatting about our mutual passion for project planning. His view is a little extreme but one with enough merit to warrant discussion: “Ban activities and tasks from scheduling tools…” he says. For those of you who use scheduling tools such as MS Project or similar, you will know this is verging on project planning blasphemy.
So much hinges on the project schedule, yet so few team members contribute to it. Whatsmore, they typically don’t care about critical paths, constraints and other building blocks; they just want to know “what, where and when.” We’re overdue for consensus-based planning tools that bridge execution and analytics.
Globally recognized project analytics thought leader and software entrep…
Is this you?
You’re stretched across too many projects.
Not only that, but you’re frustrated that there are quite a few projects in the company that seem to have little benefit, and yet they just drift on.
Worse still, these projects tie up precious time and money that you believe could be diverted to something more worthwhile.
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Projects are routinely finishing late. Whilst many have no effective schedule controls a significant proportion do outlay significant amounts of money on scheduling software and people to operate the computer systems and still finish late. The simple fact is most schedulers have no effect on the management of the projects they are working on - they are either there to comply with client specifications or to gather data for the ‘inevitable’ claims or both.
Complexity is not a synonym for complicated or large is just one of the dimensions inherent in every project. The four basic dimensions of a project[1] are:
Project failure rates have remained steady for at least the last 30 years.