A lot of reasons can be found, for this phrase to find some truth in the project world. Everyone who ever worked in a project can relate to at least one project, where things didn’t go as planned, because something was dragged out of sight. But what if we told you that this happens in every project? And that it almost always can be tracked to one thing? Schedule overruns!
Schedule overrun is the most prevalent issue large projects will encounter and can cost obscene amounts of wasted resources and time. And this leads to runaway costs.
Schedule Overruns can occur for a number of reasons, which are mostly down to an inability to complete or record work in a timely manner. These delays can compound over the life of a project reducing the efficiency of resource allocation.
The best schedule is worth nothing, if the resources and tools to complete the scheduled work are not provided. All facets of the job from procurement to final turnover are often scheduled but without the proper tracking in place, small delays can compound to future issues.
Without structured reporting you are guessing how far along the project is at a broad scale. This leads to schedule slippage, where up to 80% of your workforce is standing still due to procurement gaps, delivery delays, or any number of items. So without a detailed schedule combined with proper reporting, your company’s decision makers can’t see the slippage when it is still within a manageable manner (10-20%). And it is definitely too late when your 50-80% of your current work is standing still.
Companies rather hire more workforce to achieve their goals, than actually determining why they are underachieving.
For example, we noticed when working with one of our clients, that they were reporting their individual progress at the end of an 10,000 hour work block. This means that ever issue that was identified throughout this timeframe, was only registered at the end, but it was most likely bringing up problems in the project. And even more likely, this project experienced a schedule overrun.
Another main reason for schedule overruns can be geological issues which haven’t been considered when laying out the schedule. Geological issue can be everything from inaccurate travel time estimations, to miscalculating the weather conditions and access difficulties on a job site. If these issues are reported in a timely manner, the schedule can be changed accordingly.
As we already pointed out, overruns due to geological issues can easily be avoided by proper communication and scheduling prior to the project start. For that reason we will focus on how to avoid schedule overruns due to inaccurate reporting.
Individual reporting on workflow helps identify inefficiencies. If these inefficiencies are tracked early in the project, the schedule can be adjusted by allocating and reassigning Manpower, to help minimize the delay and therefor the costs these efficiencies will generate. Inefficiencies can be tracked by addressing which components in a project are under/over-preforming, which gives the project manager the opportunity to reallocate hours, to not hold up the projects schedule and a chance to transparently work with the client on a solution.
Being able to determine if manpower is causing a schedule overrun is very important.
Our Advice to any Project Manager is, to follow these 3 Steps when setting up a project:
Step 1: Develop a schedule as accurately and transparently as possible.
Step 2: Have some frequent and objective means of updating the schedule.
Step 3: Develop a tracking system inside the schedule to accurately track any inefficiencies or unforeseen variables in the scheduling.
So how can you set up a tracking system to make sure you track all inefficiencies and unforeseen variables during the lifetime of a project? Getting frequent updates of the fieldwork can be hard, especially when working with contractors. When asked, the answer often is, that the project is on schedule, only to find out at the turnover phase that it is not.
The answer is: A Project Completions Software
Progress updates from fieldwork are often not accurate, mostly due to the hope that the efficiency will improve and deadlines can still be met.
Arbiter Completions & Controls allows for full project visibility through every stage of your project. With this knowledge leads can do informed decisions regarding the planning and execution of the project.
Arbiter achieves project transparency through the following features:
Don’t be left in the dark about your project progress, stay on top of it.
Arbiter Completions & Controls – Projects Done Better
Arbiter Completions & Controls is a project completions software, that enables customers to efficiently execute projects of any size, helping the project to stay on track. This prevents project overruns, and ensures that you retain the profit that you anticipated. Arbiter will help your company document your project processes, chart your process flow, and build check sheets for each activity in the process. As your project progresses, project check sheets are updated in real-time. This consequently leads to project status transparency on all levels, and real time reporting to help you make the decisions needed to keep your project on track. By implementing Arbiter, your company will undergo the process of standardizing your process flows. This helps eliminating redundancy and waste in your project process. Additionally it ensures your processes are streamlined, resulting in increased quality of your end product.
Book a discovery call today to learn more about Arbiter Completions & Controls, and see why companies like yours are using our
product to take their company to the next level.
