Schedule Revision – Construction and Schedule Management Services

Construction Scheduling. Schedule Performance Measurement, Part 5. (For Owners).

When monitoring and responding to the Contractor’s schedule performance on the project, how do you know if the schedule update is even valid for use?

When we review a schedule progress update, we need to first determine if the schedule update is a valid update. By that, I mean is the logic still complete? Have there been any revisions with this update that result in the schedule not meeting the contract requirements or best practices? It doesn’t take much to render a schedule useless….

There are most likely logic revisions, changes to lag values, or possible changes to calendars or assignments. There are also deletions and additions of activities and/or Activity Relationships. Then there are changes to quantities or Resources which may impact Activity Durations or Resource Calendars.

For this post, we will address the lack of correcting Out-of-Sequence, OOS Logic.

Personally, the first schedule “quality check” I make is for complete logic. Please see the previous post, Schedule Performance Measurement, Part 2. (For Owners).

Next, I check for changes to Relationships and Relationship Lags. Please see the previous post, Schedule Performance Measurement, Part 3. (For Owners).

I then check for changes to Activity and Relationship Calendars and Calendar assignments.

But, my personal pet peeve is OOS Logic which has not been addressed.

When the Contractor is assigning actual and expected dates to the schedule update, while assigning the current progress for work in progress, it is common and acceptable for actual work in the field to have been executed differently than planned. This results in Out-of-Sequence, OOS Logic.

Primavera P6 provides a Schedule Log with lots of information. One of the things this log provides is a list of activities with OOS Logic. This is simply a list of activities with assigned Actual Dates which are not progressed the same as the Schedule Network Logic.

For example, if activity A drives activity B with an FS Relationship and Activity A is assigned an Actual Start Date with a projected scheduled Finish Date and activity B is assigned an Actual Start Date, activity A will show up on the Schedule Log as having OOS Logic because activity A does not have an Actual Finish Date prior to activity B actually starting. This condition is simple to correct. We simply change the logic to an SS relationship. This allows the as-built relationship to match the revised logic. If activity A has not actually started and activity B is assigned an Actual Start Date, then more work must be done to correct the OOS logic. Activity A is obviously either not progressed and missing the Actual Start and Finish dates or the actual sequencing of the work is being executed differently than planned and activity A should no longer be the predecessor to activity B.

If the issue is OOS logic, it should be addressed. Leaving OOS logic in the schedule allows the now incorrect logic to drive the successor activity dates, which is incorrect. This happens when we use Retained Logic, which most schedule specifications require. It is also best to use Retained Logic to allow the planned logic to drive the schedule. We just have to correct the OOS logic with each update.

Not correcting OOS logic with each update can produce erroneous specific Network Path scheduled activity dates. This can create a Critical Path based on the original logic which is no longer valid due to the actual OOS work in the field. We want the Critical Path, and Near Critical Path(s) to be based on the most accurate progress input and plan to execute the remaining work.

Typically, correcting OOS logic for driving activities on the Critical Path will shorten the Remaining Duration of the Project Schedule. I prefer to correct the OOS Logic immediately after I assign the actual dates, expected dates, and actual progress. This way, when we need to determine the best method of recovering any lost time, we are working with a valid Schedule Network.

The same applies to Near Critical Path(s).

That said, understanding the impact of the uncorrected OOS Logic, and reporting those findings is important to the Owner. Personally, I do not consider the Schedule Update valid if the OOS Logic is not corrected. But many schedule specifications do not address this issue.

As Planning and Schedule Professionals, we need to provide the Project Team with the “tools” they need to manage the project. The owner needs to know what the performance of the actual work in the field is, compared to the planned performance. Unless we have a valid schedule update to measure with, and against, and understand the impact of acceptable schedule revisions, we cannot provide an accurate measurement.

I’m sure many of you have comments or additional insight into this subject. Please share!

I’d love to hear what you think!

Please visit https://conschmanservices.com to learn more about Construction and Schedule Management Services, LLC

Please visit my LinkedIn account to learn more about me.

Please visit my “The Blue Book” ProView.

Paul Epperson CCM, PMP, PSP, PMI-SP

Construction Scheduling. Schedule Performance Measurement, Part 4. (For Owners).

When monitoring and responding to the Contractor’s schedule performance on the project, how do you know if the schedule update is even valid for use?

For this post, we will address changes to Activity or Relationship Calendars.

Personally, the first schedule “quality check” I make is for complete logic. Please see the previous post, Schedule Performance Measurement, Part 2. (For Owners).

Next, I check for changes to Relationships and Relationship Lags. Please see the previous post, Schedule Performance Measurement, Part 3. (For Owners).

I then check for changes to Activity and Relationship Calendars and Calendar assignments.

When the Contractor is making schedule revisions to recover lost time for the update period, they may decide to work a crew more than the Activity or Relationship Calendar currently allows. If the Activity is assigned to a 5 Day Workweek with Holidays and Weather Days, they may decide to work 6 days a week for a specific resource to recover lost time. To be able to do this, they need to create an additional Calendar and set the work days up accordingly. They then replace the existing Calendar with the new Calendar. This allows the same amount of work, or Work Day Duration, to be scheduled over fewer Calendar Days. This results in shortening the Calendar Day Duration of the Activity Network(s) which contain the affected Activities.

This is the kind of schedule revision the Owner must be aware of and understand. It can be checked for in Primavera P6.

What Primavera P6 is not good at checking are changes to the work days in an existing Activity or Resource Calendar. As long as the Calendar Name does not change, P6 does not report it.

Most of us use third-party software designed to identify changes to Calendars. That’s great, but we still need to understand the impact of the changes identified.

Changes to Calendars and the Work Days in a specific Calendar do not make the schedule invalid for use. But, the owner needs to know what changes were made and what effect the changes have on the affected Logic Path(s).

That said, finding the changes to any Calendars, understanding the impact of the changes found, and reporting those findings is important to the Owner.

I’m sure many of you have comments or additional insight into this subject. Please share!

I’d love to hear what you think!

Please visit https://conschmanservices.com to learn more about Construction and Schedule Management Services, LLC

Please visit my LinkedIn account to learn more about me.

Please visit my “The Blue Book” ProView.

Paul Epperson CCM, PMP, PSP, PMI-SP

Construction Scheduling. Schedule Performance Measurement, Part 2. (For Owners).

When monitoring and responding to the Contractor’s schedule performance on the project, how do you know if the schedule update is even valid for use?

For this post, we will address changes to the logic.

Personally, the first schedule “quality check” I make is for complete logic. The Primavera P6 schedule log provides a basic check. But I also use third party software that provides a more in-depth check for activities which may only have an SS relationship to their only successor activity. Sometimes, the check uncovers missing lag values or “reverse logic”. It may even uncover an SF relationship. All of these must be identified and addressed.

Often, when the Contractor is making schedule revisions to recover lost time for the update period, they make subtle changes to logic. As a Project Owner or CMa, we need to understand what was revised and why. If the relationship for an activity in the current or previous period Longest Path was changed from an FS relationship to an SS relationship, with or without a lag, to pull the scheduled Finish Date back, we need to understand that.

The same applies to the previous period or current update Near Critical Path(s).

If the contractor makes a logic revision for an activity which results in the only successor activity having an SS relationship, an open end is created. (There should have been an FS or FF relationship added to complete the logic). Otherwise, the finish of the activity does not drive anything in the schedule. This is an open end, (which does not show up on the Primavera P6 schedule log).

Any “open end” relationships make the schedule network logic incomplete. Sure, there are activities that once complete will not drive any other activity or work until the project is complete, if that is the case, they should be tied to Final Completion or whatever the last activity in the schedule is called. But more likely, the activity relationship was missed during development or when making revisions.

However, if this activity is supposed to drive other work, the relationships should model this. Not having complete logic for just one activity results in an erroneous schedule network. The activity could potentially be Critical or Near-Critical, but without the complete logic, there is nothing in the schedule to model the intended sequencing of the work for the affected network path. This means the Total Float values and scheduled dates for driven successor activities on this logic path are incorrect.

One of the basic checks and the first check I make is to verify the schedule network logic is complete. As an owner’s rep, we cannot know the detailed intent of the schedule sequencing, but we can identify open ends and any questionable logic we discover.

I’m sure many of you have comments or additional insight into this subject. Please share!

I’d love to hear what you think!

Please visit https://conschmanservices.com to learn more about Construction and Schedule Management Services, LLC

Please visit my LinkedIn account to learn more about me.

Please visit my “The Blue Book” ProView.

Paul Epperson CCM, PMP, PSP, PMI-SP

Construction Scheduling. Schedule Revisions and the Reality Check.

When we finish updating Actual Progress for the Schedule Update, (See previous post), how do we revise the schedule to maintain the contract completion date or whatever period of performance is required?

How do we get the Project Schedule back on-track?

More often than not, the Schedule Update models actual performance which does not support an on-time project completion. Work slips, production isn’t what was planned, deliveries are late…..

The Project Team usually has to make Schedule Revisions to “recover” the lost time. This is sometimes called “crashing” the schedule.

This is an exercise based in future failure.

When most schedules are developed, they are already overly optimistic because the Project Team had to “crash” the schedule to even create the Project Baseline Schedule. Once the work starts and progress slips, the work starts to stack. Even if the Critical path work is completed sufficiently to maintain the Critical Path, all the other work activities have to maintain or beat their dates. If not, that work pushes out and soon stacks up to double the resources necessary to complete the work later. If we couldn’t complete the work as-planned, why will we be able to complete it later, when we have fewer resources to work with? What is going to change?

Back to the Schedule Revision process. The process is basically looking at the current Critical Path and deciding which activity duration can be shortened cost-effectively or which logic for sequential activities can be changed to have them run concurrently, with a slight bit of lag time. Then the schedule is calculated again and this process is repeated until the schedule is “on-track”.

Unfortunately, this is also when contractors are pressured into completing work in less time than they may have budgeted or have the resources to support. But, this is often exactly what happens.

Now we have a schedule for the remaining project work which is most certainly impossible to execute. Sure, the owner will issue change orders which may provide some concurrent delay the contractor can attach their lack of progress to. But most likely, there will not be enough changes to cover all the time lost.

It is my opinion that the best thing the Project Team can do, is establish the most realistic expected Finish Date for incomplete work. This also applies to establishing the most realistic delay (lag) in concurrent work planned to recover time. If these revisions are not realistic, the contractor can’t support the shortened duration or additional resources necessary, then we are just kicking the proverbial can down the road.

We should, as Schedule Professionals, provide the “reality” of the project performance and the realistic plan to execute the remaining project work and let the Project Stakeholders know sooner than later that the project cannot, under the current cost or resource constraints maintain the contract completion date or period of performance.

I’m sure many of you have comments or additional insight into this subject. Please share!

I’d love to hear what you think!

Please visit https://conschmanservices.com to learn more about Construction and Schedule Management Services, LLC

Please visit my LinkedIn account to learn more about me.

Please visit my “The Blue Book” ProView.

Paul Epperson CCM, PMP, PSP, PMI-SP

Construction Scheduling. Recovering Lost Time or Saving Work for Later?

When the project baseline schedule is developed, most of the relationships used should be Finish-to-Start, FS. There is always the need for Start-to-Start, SS or Finish-to-Finish, FF relationships to model some sequences of work, but it’s best to break the work down enough to schedule with predominately FS relationships.

That said, far too often it seems that progress is not what was planned due to one reason or another. During the update process, assigning the actual dates and expected finishes to current activities pushes the schedule out. Sometimes only a day or so, but sometimes the schedule can push out weeks…..

How do we recover this lost time? How do we plan the remaining work to mitigate the late project finish? How do we keep from turning in a schedule update that the owner will immediately reject with the demand for a “Recovery Schedule”?

Often, there is a mix of activity duration reductions and resequencing of work.

If the parties responsible for the activities agree to the duration reductions and commit to supporting the schedule with additional resources or hours, this is usually not a problem. There may be work area size constraints that limit the effectiveness of more resources, or there may be logistical constraints that limit the amount of work which can be placed. But usually, adding resources or hours, in small quantities can work.

The trouble usually comes from resequencing the work. All too often, the recovery is achieved by taking several activities sequences with FS relationships and making the relationships SS with small lags. Basically, this is modeling the work to have each trade on top of the predecessor work’s trade. Rarely is this successful. What ends up happening is the work gets “stacked”. The work that couldn’t be completed when it was scheduled, with the resources available, is now magically supposed to be completed when other work is demanding more resources and there is less time to complete the work for that area.

Don’t get me wrong, limited resequencing of work is normal and can be done successfully. But it is not the cure-all for lack of progress.

So, how do we efficiently recover the lost time?

In reality, the scheduled finish date is only pushed out by lack of progress for work on the Critical (Longest) Path. The key is looking at the activities on the Critical Path and finding a way to work with durations and sequencing to shorten this path. This is an iterative process because the Critical Path will shift to the next Near Critical Path as you shorten the current Critical Path.

The thing to remember is not to let work not on the Critical or Near Critical Path sit. Work where you can when you can. But always make sure you’re making adequate progress for work on the Critical and Near Critical Path(s). If you do this, you won’t have to worry about recovering time!

I know many of you can offer additional comments and recommendations. I welcome your comments and input. My goal, as always, is to help our industry and help the projects we support….

I’d love to hear what you think!

Please visit https://conschmanservices.com to learn more about Construction and Schedule Management Services, LLC

Please visit my LinkedIn account to learn more about me.

Please visit my “The Blue Book” ProView.

Paul Epperson CCM, PMP, PSP, PMI-SP

Construction Scheduling. Schedule Updates, Revisions and Recovery.

In my previous posts, I described some basic schedule quality validation suggestions.

This post will cover progress updates, schedule revisions and basics for recovery schedules.

When the contractor updates the schedule each reporting period, they record the actual dates for the start and finish of activities. We all know that. What about the progress for activities underway? Are they using duration percent complete to report progress? Or are they using physical percent complete? Or schedule percent complete? Or another method? There are several choices….

The project specifications often include requirements for the type of percent complete. When they do not, the easy way is to use duration percent complete, which is typically the default setting anyway. This is fine if you’re only concerned with duration.

What about work in place percent complete or cost percent complete? I personally like to track all three. On resource driven projects, I prefer to track the resource usage against the duration percent complete and work in place progress. But that is another post….

You should verify the percent complete type used in the schedule you are using. This can be done by simply showing the percent complete type column in the Gantt Chart layout.

This is important because it defines how you will compare progress performance and identify trends and foresee problems. This is also a topic for a future post.

Require the contractor to provide validation of the percent complete type setting used and ensure it meets your project schedule specifications.

That said, the update process is just that, the entry of actual dates, adjustment of remaining durations or schedule finish dates to model the plan going forward and the assignment of progress for work in place and cost of work in place.

There is a process called a bifurcated or two step progress update. This is a valuable method which is not used as much as it should be.

When the contractor updates the actual progress, the schedule shows the actual performance and completion date with total float value based on only the period performance. This is step one. I personally keep this update for record. The next step in the update process is the minor schedule revision to correct the out-of-sequence work. This could also be done during the update process, but I prefer to do this after…. This provides the “as-built” history of the project’s progress to-date and allows any revisions to model the plan going forward to be made based on valid data.

If/when the contractor needs to change the sequence of work or reduce durations to allow the remaining plan to achieve the desired finish date, a record of these changes with the reason for the revision(s) of should be provided to the owner or their agent so all parties understand and agree with what was changed and why. Simple transparency and relationship preservation.

This is the end product, (less the list of revisions with explanation) typically submitted by the contractor as the updated progress schedule.

I prefer the two step or bifurcated process and when possible I like to get the update only schedule and then get the revised schedule. It’s possible to “back into” this process but that is not the same as working as a team to manage the schedule process…. Having both pieces of the update allows the owner, and the contractor to easily see schedule slippages and then see the measures taken to recover time. Many schedule specifications require the contractor to propose the corrective revisions for approval, but that rarely happens. The owner wants the update asap and the contractor wants the invoice processed asap…. However, it is a good practice for the project team to review the update and revisions together. Owners understand the contractor will encounter problems and schedule slippage and just needs to confirm that the contractor is taking care of business…… The tricky part is the owner not taking over the schedule by directing revisions or denying revisions unless there is a justifiable reason to do so…. Again transparency and communications are key.

From time to time, the contractor may change the plan for completing the remaining project work and a true recovery schedule is called for. This could be driven by changes in their supply line, material delivery delays, changes to the contract….. This is a big step and the process for reviewing this revised schedule is the same as that used to review the baseline schedule. After all, this will become the new baseline schedule!

I will only touch on recovery schedules in this post. Recovery schedule are typically described and required in the project schedule specifications and are required by the owner when the schedule performance trips a metric for poor schedule performance.

The development of a real recovery schedule is a specialty unto itself and the contractor has many cost/benefit decisions to weigh before they can start to make any presentations to the owner. This is a subject for a future post…..

As you can see, there is a lot to a project schedule update. And as always, the schedule settings, logic, constraints all need to be verified as part of the schedule update review. It is important to maintain a high schedule quality level throughout the project cycle.

I know many of you already know this information and can offer additional guidance and support, for all of us. I welcome your comments and input. My goal, as always, is to help our industry and help the projects we support….

I’d love to hear what you think!

Please visit https://conschmanservices.com to learn more about Construction and Schedule Management Services, LLC

Please visit my LinkedIn account to learn more about me.

Please visit my “The Blue Book” ProView.

Paul Epperson CCM, PMP, PSP, PMI-SP

Construction Scheduling. Checking the CPM Schedule for Lags/Leads and Relationship Types.

In my previous post, I provided some basic schedule quality validation methods for use by project management professionals without access to, or proficiency with Primavera P6.

Continuing this area of discussion, this post will cover relationship lags, leads, and relationship types. This is a sore subject and there are typically many problems found in this area.

Again, when someone hands you the schedule update Gantt Chart, how do you know that the plan is valid? How can you do a quick validation of the schedule for basic requirements?

As I said before, a pdf of the schedule is nice for meetings, but someone from the owner’s and the contractor’s project teams needs to verify the schedule quality. The contractor usually has an in-house scheduler, so this is part of their processes during the development, update, and revision processes. What about contractors using a third-party planning and schedule professional? How do you validate our work? What about the owner and their construction management agency? How do they validate the schedule as presented by the contractor?

The owner and CMa will require the schedule in native format. That will allow their planning and schedule professionals to use the schedule program and verify schedule settings and structure. This is a must. I still see owners who simply look at the pdf and hope the schedule slippage will stop, one day….

Simply reviewing the schedule log generated by Primavera P6 will let you see the open relationships, out-of-sequence relationships, schedule settings, constraints, and other information.

You will not, however, be able to find the relationship types and lags/leads used. One word of note here, I personally, do not use leads or negative lags. This is my preference. That said, you need to know how the logic is structured to know why it flows across the Gantt Chart layout the way it does. Just because the dates make sense does not mean that the logic is valid.

You can require the contractor provide you with a logic report from Primavera P6. This can be run sorted on activity ID. You can also have the predecessor and successor columns shown. The recent version of P6 will also show SS or FF relationship information, (with lag durations) much like MS Project does. Older versions of P6 do show relationships or lags/leads in the predecessor and successor columns. The logic report does. It just requires you to use the report as a legend while looking through the schedule layout to verify predecessors, successors and lags/leads used. This is very tedious, but this is a good practice. There are third party software programs that will produce reports only showing the activities with relationships other than FS. You can also produce this report in P6. But you must know how to do so…

The use of SS or FF relationships and limits for their us is a bit of a hot topic among planning and schedule professionals. Many organizations and government agencies include requirements in their schedule specifications limiting the use to a percentage of the total relationships. Many specifications do not speak to the use of relationships at all. I personally severely limit their use during development and only grudgingly use them when I do.

I avoid lags, but I do use them to push submittal development activities out to stagger the process. I do not use lags for concrete curing or other non-work activities which drive successor activity starts. These should be activities and transparent to all users of the schedule.

When reviewing the schedule for the use of SS, FF relationships and lags, simply make note of the usage and decide for yourself if the logic could be better modeled by breaking the activities into smaller areas or processes to allow the use of FS relationships. This is always the best approach. Review the use of lags the same way. If the activities can be broken down into more detail to allow the use of FS relationships for the work process, that is your best choice.

You can’t review or validate any of the information above if you don’t have the information in a format that allows you to analyze it. Require the P6 logic report or use third party software or learn how to find and analyze this information using P6 yourself. It is basic schedule mechanics, but the logic, relationships and activity durations are the backbone of the schedule. If the schedule isn’t developed following the project schedule specifications and schedule best practices, it is very doubtful the schedule will be a valid tool for the planning or control of the project performance and management.

These are just a couple of additional items that form the basics…. There are other items worthy of validating and I will speak to these in future posts.

I’d love to hear what you think!

Please visit https://conschmanservices.com to learn more about Construction and Schedule Management Services, LLC

Please visit my LinkedIn account to learn more about me.

Please visit my “The Blue Book” ProView.

Paul Epperson CCM, PMP, PSP, PMI-SP

Construction Scheduling. Checking the CPM Schedule for Complete Logic, Verifying the Use of Calendars, and Identifying Constraints.

When someone hands you the schedule update Gantt Chart pdf, how do you know that the plan is valid? How can you do a quick validation of the schedule for basic requirements?

First and foremost, a pdf of the schedule is nice for meetings, but someone from the owner’s and the contractor’s project teams needs to verify the schedule quality & validity. The contractor usually has an in-house scheduler, so this is part of their work during the development, update, and revision processes. What about contractors using a third-party planning and schedule professional? How do you validate our work? What about the owner and their construction management agency? How do they validate the schedule as presented by the contractor?

Simply reviewing the schedule log generated by Primavera P6 will let you see the open relationships, out-of-sequence relationships, schedule settings, constraints, and other information. This report includes the most basic information you need. You should receive and review this report!

If you only have one activity missing a predecessor and one missing a successor, you are OK. This doesn’t mean all the logic in the schedule is correct, that is a very subjective review. It just means you don’t have any open ends reported. You can still have activities with only start-to-start successor relationships, which is basically the same as having no successor relationship. But, you need third party software or the ability to use the program filter, sort and report features to ferret these out.

The out-of-sequence activities listed on this report simply tell you that the successor to these activities most likely started prior to the finish of the activity listed. There are other reasons the activity may be listed, but this is the most likely reason. Why does this matter? Because the logic continues to drive successor dates and correcting the logic ties to model the as-built progress allows the remaining work to model correctly. It also provides you with an as-built schedule, one day….. Require the contractor make corrections to remove all out-of-sequence activities from the schedule log. It’s not hard for them to do.

The schedule settings are typically listed in the schedule specifications. You can use the schedule log to verify several of these. Retained logic or progress override, total float computation, longest path definition, and predecessor calendar use are just a few of the settings which should be reviewed and verified.

The schedule log will also list activities with constraints applied. What it will not do is tell you if the project has a must finish by date applied at the project level. It will also not tell you what type of constraints, (or their dates) are applied to the activities. Again, you must use third party software programs that will report the constraints or you must know how to use the filters, sorting, and reporting functions of the program to see this information.

This schedule log is a very important tool and you should require it with each schedule submission.

What about calendars? How do you verify calendars are assigned? How do you verify the calendars assigned to activities use the correct work days, work hours, holidays? Again, third party software or manually going through the calendars for the project. You can require a pdf layout with the calendar column showing. This will at least let you verify there are calendars other than the default calendar in use.

These are just the basics…. There are other items worthy of validating and I will speak to these in future posts.

I’d love to hear what you think!

Please visit https://conschmanservices.com to learn more about Construction and Schedule Management Services, LLC

Please visit my LinkedIn account to learn more about me.

Please visit my “The Blue Book” ProView.

Paul Epperson CCM, PMP, PSP, PMI-SP

Construction Scheduling. Developing the “Time Impact” Fragnet. Or, this is how bad this change hurts!

Avoiding Project Delays I often assist contractors with their schedule development and updates. This also includes preparing the “fragnets” for Time Impact Analysis, (TIA) or change orders. I find that many smaller contractors are not used to following a procedure for managing their schedules. This makes it nearly impossible to manage their change order time impact.

What I find, more often than not, is a schedule, (not the latest update, if there is one) that someone has increased the duration for a piece of work that is “impacted” by the change order or delay.

This may seem intuitive to the project manager or superintendent. It may actually work somewhat to model the impact of the change order or delay impact.

But, does it model the actual change or delay? Is it applied to the most recent accepted update or revision? Can it be used as a tool to visually explain the sequence of events associated with the change or delay to arrive at an understanding and agreement of the change package, associated relationships to existing work, and impact to the scheduled completion date?

There are best practices and white papers devoted to the development of “fragnets”. As professional planning and schedule consultants, we should follow these best practices. But, we still need the involvement and direction only the contractor can provide.

The contractor needs to explain the series of events driving the impact and be prepared to provide dates and references to RFI’s, field directions, RFP’s, meeting minutes, or other records which will support the request. We can then build the model of the impact events accurately. Then the contractor needs to tell us specifically which activities this impact actually drives so we can apply the correct logic. We also need to know what work was starting or underway when the issue presented so we know how to apply that logic as well.

It is much more complicated than simply increasing the duration of the activity impacted. The goal of the professional planning and schedule consultant is to model the impact package so it can be presented to the owner as an easily understood representation of the group of events laid out in a timeline fashion with durations and logic the owner can agree to or discuss further. Once this is accomplished, there isn’t much more to argue about. The impact model or fragnet stands on its own and the subjectivity is all but removed from the issue.

But this all depends on the willingness and ability of the contractor to provide the information and direction to support the development of the fragnet.

What other methods have you found to help with this issue?

I’d love to hear what you think!

Please visit https://conschmanservices.com to learn more about Construction and Schedule Management Services, LLC

Please visit my LinkedIn account to learn more about me.

Please visit my “The Blue Book” ProView.

Paul Epperson CCM, PMP, PSP, PMI-SP

Construction Scheduling. Schedule Delays!

Expect-Delays-sign(1) We’ve all worked on projects where a major event has occurred and the project team had to scramble to manage the crisis.

This happens. As construction scheduling professionals, we have to deal with it. Some general examples that come to mind are:

Very extreme weather events such as hurricanes & floods. We plan for “normal” weather and manage weather impacts in excess of the anticipated “normal”. But an extreme weather event requires the immediate involvement of the entire project team.
Drastic change in the owner’s program resulting in a gross change to the contract scope of work. This could be a facility design changing from a male facility to a female facility, at 70% construction complete. There would be a lot of rework and resequencing of work required. It happens……
A serious unforeseen condition which changes the geotechnical design or suspends the project until remediation work can be completed. This is not all that unusual and is typically mitigated. But, it is still a major disruption to the start of the project.

What types of schedule delay events have you seen? How did you, as a construction scheduling professional manage them? How did the project team manage them?

I’m interested in hearing your stories!

Please visit https://conschmanservices.com to learn more about Construction and Schedule Management Services, LLC

Please visit my LinkedIn account to learn more about me.

Paul Epperson CCM, PMP, PSP, PMI-SP