Work effort & Work Product Driven Activities

Hi Shahul,

I did not understand that your question is about Spider. I will explain what is productivity driven activity.

For some activities initial information is their durations, for others we define activity volumes (quantities) of work in physical units (cubic meters, tons, etc.). For these activities duration may be calculated if to know total productivity of assigned resources.

When you assign a crew consisting of several resources only some of them (driving) have productivities (may be different), others are supporting (masons and helpers, trucks and drivers, etc.). The number of driving resources is not restricted. Resource productivity is defined as the work volume that resource does in one hour (like cubic meters per hour). If the crew is the same during activity duration it is calculated as Activity Volume divided by total productivity of assigned crew. Productivity may also be defined for a crew (multiresource) as a whole.

But sometimes the crews may change during activity durations (different crews working in different shifts, variable resource assignments, resource replacements). in this case the software calculates the work done by resources during the time in the process of scheduling and this way calculates the moment when all work will be done (activity finish).

There is also skill assignment option. If you have several resources with the same skill required for activity execution (different types of excavators as an example) you can assign skill (excavator) and the software will select what resources to use basing on their availability, costs and productivities. In this case activity duration is also calculated during scheduling because before it is not known what resources will be assigned.

If to set iactivity volume n work hours then productivity driven activities are similar to effort driven activities if resource productivities are set as one hour per hour. But resources are different - one works faster (productivity 1,2 work hours per hour), another one slower (productivity 0.8 work hours per hour), some do not have their own productivity at all.

But it is necessary to control the real work that is done, I don't approve measuring work in hours. Besides all norms are applied to physical work units and having work volumes in the schedule model we can apply production norms, material consumption norms, unit costs, etc.

Best Regards,

Vladimir

Unless all resources have the same productivity work effort is wrong, this is too much of a restriction; an hour of resource A can produce twice of an hour of resource B, resources can be personnel or a piece of equipment , a high productivity resource might be available for one shift while a less productive but less noisy equipment might be prescribed for work at other shifts due to noice concerns.

Teams, a concept similar to crews or multi-resources but different, is what makes Spider able to correctly model shift work. For example, on a job two shifts might have similar composition and similar productivities but say one shift is an 8-hour shift, the second a 6 hours shift both working the same five days while a third shift can be a 4 days 10 hours shift and still not all software is capable of modeling this. Of course the modeling of shifts must work correctly with crews or multi-resources, different productivities and resource leveling among others. There is more than what you see on the surface, all resource modeling functionalities must work in harmony.

Hi Friends,

I was going through some documents of Spider and it says....

"Some construction companies use the approach to construciton management that is not supported by traditional project management technique and software. The core difference is they Plan, Control and Monitor Volume of works. Assigned resources define activity duration. "

I guess this is the reason why Spider is able to give proper resource shift calculatioins.

Perhaps Rafael & Vladimir can give more detail on this.

Best Regards

Shareef A Azeez

Activities driven by work product? In my understanding work product means deliverables resulting from performing the activities. How can a activity can be driven by a work product. Please correct me If I am wrong.