Construction Time Management

A reader at PM Hut asks: Why do we see so much lack of time scheduling in construction business? And how can time management In a contractor company make the work more efficient?

I cannot speak to the "lack of time scheduling in construction business". I'm in education, and most school construction projects have pretty good time scheduling because they need to be completed in time for the new school year. If they are not, schools are left to scramble to find space for displaced students. This goes for K-12, colleges and universities, and even non-traditional schools since they are forced often by law to adhere to some semblance of a school year.

In general, there are also a number of project scheduling tools which compete with the more common Microsoft project because they have features which support construction projects. Primavera is one notable package that is a full solution from proposal to construction to back office functions. Prolog is another that comes to mind. There are 87 other packages cited at Software Advice. 17 of these are specialized in time scheduling.

As project managers, we have two basic ways of improving the schedule time: crashing and fast tracking. Crashing adds more resources. This isn't always helpful -- it depends on the level of expertise of the resources, the nature of the work, etc. Fast tracking on the other hand looks to make the work more efficient by finding more things to do in parallel. On a major software project, I had three major applications which had to read and write from a common file. I could have developed them serially. Instead, I got the team together and the first thing we did was define the common file format and read/write methods. With that out of the way, we were able to work independently on the three applications at the same time. It seems like there are parallels in the construction industry. This was shown very effectively by the four hour house project. You can watch the video documentary at Google Videos. Two complete, livable houses were finished within four hours by very careful time management and scheduling. I'd say that's a lot of efficiency!

The people devoted to tasks are very important to efficiency as well. Teams which are able to self-manage their own time usually accomplish a lot more. I have a number of online articles devoted to helping you or project team members become more effective at getting things done:

GTD for PMs
GTD for PMs - Part II
GTD for PMs - Part III
GTD for PMs - Part IV
GTD for PMs Part V - How to Work with GTD

At the end of the day, it’s about balance – completing the work of mutual value for you and the stakeholders in as efficient a way possible, leaving you more time for non-work activities and some time to address the unknown unknowns (aka risks) which will arise during the course of your project.If this doesn’t fully answer your question, you may continue the dialog in the comments or drop me a line at sdcapmp@aol.com.

The Speed and Economics of Trust

To prepare for the PMI Leadership Institute Masters Class in October, I've been reading a digest of Steven Covey's book, The Speed of Trust. He suggests that trust simply means confidence and that trust impacts (in PM terms) time and cost. We can see how this operates in the world around us:

- the cost of drug packaging increased after the Tylenol poisoning case
- the time to get through an airport increased after 9/11
- the decline of trust in corporations arguably began with Enron, resulting in costs and time for meeting Sarbanes-Oxley compliance

The summary I'm reading only gives one example of high trust (a Warren Buffett acquisition), but in thinking back, high trust has had a positive impact on my project management:

- I've been frequently called upon to handle failing projects or project gaps where execution was critical
- my projects have had regular reviews (weekly or monthly) while others have had more frequent scrutiny to the point where execution was slowed
- working with teams where trust is strong has helped meet or beat parameters and build high performing teams

Covey suggests that the traditional business formula of Strategy x Execution = Results is actually (Strategy x Execution) x Trust = Results. This would move trust from a "nice-to-have" to a critical position, making it required to achieve results.

The book outlines 13 behaviors exhibited by high trust leaders. The first one caught my eye -- its no wonder why most politicians, used car salesmen, and many executives have an issue with trust. The behavior is "Talk Straight". This means to communicate clearly to make sure there is no misunderstanding. No withholding, partial truth, flattery, spin or distortion of facts. (This one is easy for me... as a former New Yorker, I'm always direct).

Another concept I can readily identify with is that one of the four cores for building trust is results. Jack Welch talks about results as having clout or performance chips on the table. Results are evaluated by past performance, present performance, and anticipated future performance. Low Results = Low Trust.

This is a very difficult book to summarize because there are many dimensions of trust which are explored. So my suggestion would be to go out and get a copy because it will be a great tool for building high performance teams and achieving project excellence.

PMP® Challenge Question - 1/1

For the first reader to successfully email a correct response to two of three challenge questions (12/15, 1/1, and 1/15), I have the following gift:

Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers – The People Skills You Need to Achieve Outstanding Results by Anthony Mersino, PMP.

So without further ado, here is the question:

What does PERT stand for? What company is usually credited with the "invention" of PERT? What is the basic PERT formula?

Good luck and have a Happy, Healthy, and Prosperous New Year!

A Quick Project Visual

Here is a very clever way to use MS Excel to make a quick project visual of tasks. We all think of Gantt charts as having dependency arrows, a fallacy created by project software. The original Gantt chart did not show dependencies and was a simple bar chart.

Of course we often don't know the actual duration without knowing the effort of the tasks and the resources which apply, so a refinement would be to add a Work or Effort column and a Units column. The Units column would hold the total number of full time project resources. If a half person is applied, it would be .5. One and a half project resources would be 1.5. Using the MS Project calculation of Duration = Work x Units gets the number you need for duration. If we know the dependencies, we can simply sort the tasks to get the appropriate ordering.

Following the instructions in the video with the suggested refinements and others you might want to make create a quick project visual suitable for sharing with the executive team. An added benefit is they are likely to relate more to Excel than Project, demystifying the schedule.

Herding Cats Not Required

Some people like to refer to project management as herding cats. With all due respect, project management should be more about planning the work and then working the plan. This is usually very easy with a group of dedicated resources working on a single project, but gets to be much more difficult when fractional resources working for multiple project managers are involved.

Without the proper planning and preparation, these projects can become a little like herding cats -- you constantly have to be checking in on the team to make sure the tasks for your project are getting the proper level of attention. Properly planned and executed, however, these projects can finish smoothly without the need for micro-management or cat herding.

Here are a few things you can consider to make the management of multi-project, fractional resources an easier management task:

Start with the kickoff meeting -- make sure the expectations and ground rules for handling competing priorities and planning are known up front.

Plan the work and work the plan -- a thorough plan with well estimated and defined tasks goes a long way to making sure everyone is on the same page. Ask everyone to carefully consider their estimates and the commitment in light of their other work.

Don't micro manage -- encourage the team to follow the plan, but be available if needed to resolve conflicts. Use the flexibility of scope and schedule to negotiate.

Enlist the aid of the functional manager -- the functional manager who manages the resources needs to be sure they understand the nature of their commitment.

Handle issues promptly -- since there are competing priorities, be sure issues get sorted out as soon as possible to make sure all tasks stay on track.

There will obviously be other challenges, but focusing the team on the plan will help you to spend more time planning and managing than herding cats.

New PM Tool: EPM Live

For those of you local to San Diego, you may be familiar with one of our local companies, LMR Solutions. LMR recently "branched out" and launched EPM Live. I've made myself a commitment to take a closer look at this tool over the next weeks and months as I believe it has a lot of strengths for those who aren't hosting a full SharePoint and MS Project Server.

The hosted solution is SharePoint based. Using a proprietary MS Project ad-in, Project Publisher, MS Office Project plans can be pushed to project team collaboration spaces. There the team can review tasks and make updates to their work. Project status reports and hundreds of other reports can be generated from dashboard and portfolio views. The resulting updates can also be imported back into MS Project. EPM Live becomes a stand-in for Project Server while providing all the benefits of a full SharePoint implementation.

One use I've discovered is I can create a time model in Project, publish to EPM Live, and let team members update their progress. They are focused on the tasks and assignments and not on the overall timeline. When they make substantial updates to the tasks (e.g. change delivery dates, add effort), I import back into the MS Project model where I now get a new project end date computed. If I change the time model, I can push the updates back to EPM Live.

There's a 30 day free trial offer on their web site, so if you are inclined, you may want to check out the site. I found just the full SharePoint features alone to be valuable, while the addition of Project Publisher technology helps me refine my management of time and resources. Its not immediately obvious on the site, but I did find if you are already hosting MS SharePoint, you can host EPM and Project Publisher technology yourself.

If you try it out, please leave me a comment regarding your experience.

Earn Your Value (Part III)

To recap parts one and two of this post, we saw:

- how earned value is useful for monitoring both costs and schedule
- the basic formulas used to see if our projects are off track (and by how much)
- the recommendation that earned value be looked at weekly
- the ideal values for cost and schedule index are one (1.0)
- a simple way of communicating earned value information to our clients.

This week I'd like to take a look at the things we can do to manage our projects, especially if the CI and/or SI is much bigger or much smaller than one. Note that I can merely suggest causes -- you will need to diligently look at your projects and their circumstances to arrive at the conclusion right for you. You may want to produce a graph or visual of your progress so you can pinpoint the time at which things started to go south.

CI << 1 and SI = 1
Being on schedule but over budget might represent a significantly underestimated budget (or a tight budget dictated by the project sponsor), a purchase which required significantly more dollars, or a significant amount of paid overtime to keep the timeline. Since the money is gone, this is difficult to mitigate and bring back on track. Significant re-planning or re-phasing of the project may help. Its probably best at this point to be more concerned about keeping on schedule while watching over the budget more carefully as you go forward.

CI = 1 and SI >> 1
Being ahead of schedule and on budget has some usual generic causes you need to look at first. One is common for construction and other projects relying on good weather -- there was insufficient time in the schedule to mitigate a long run of bad weather. Needless to say, with the delay, you may have resources not working at optimum rates since less work has been completed. You may also have fewer resources working on your project than needed. They are less expensive resources, but the job isn't getting done. You need to look carefully at your resource and risk plans to sort this out.

CI >> 1 and SI = 1
Under budget but still on schedule? This could be enviable, or it might be a sign of unpaid overtime not being tracked. Still, you will probably do best to determine the cause and keep the project on schedule without being overly concerned about budget.

CI >> 1 and SI << 1 In this case, you are under budget, but behind on schedule. The most likely cause is in your resource plan again -- you may have too few resources or are waiting for supplies.

CI << 1 and SI << 1
This is far more typical of troubled projects -- they have problems with both budget and schedule. Worst case, the project is ready for termination. You may have to continue working due to contractual circumstances, but its going to be difficult to correct both costs and schedule. You may have to consider asking for more budget to make some favorable adjustments to the schedule, or shifting some of the work to subsequent project phases. This situation requires the most analysis and judgement to correct.

CI >> 1 and SI >> 1
The answer to being significantly ahead of both schedule and budget usually lies in "sandbagged" estimates. Everyone was a little too cautious and added too much time and money. There may have also been very favorable conditions. You probably want to consider sacrificing some of the budget for the greater good of the company and its project portfolio. Planning for an early release of resources may be necessary as well. In any event, make sure you keep a reasonable contingency (say 15%) available in case your lucky streak stops!

As a final thought, you might want to calcuate what is sometimes called the critical ratio for your project, which multiplies the Cost Index and Schedule Index. This helps you arrive at a single number combining cost and schedule and allows you some leeway in each. As always, if you have a question or comment, feel free to drop me a line at sdcapmp@aol.com or as a comment to this entry.

Happy New Year!

Earn Your Value (Part II)

Last week we looked at the basic principles and formulas surrounding Earned Value Management. While the full practice of EVM may be very complex, it also provides a simple way to update clients on the status of smaller projects. But before we look at the "how", let's take a look at the "how often".


The frequency will actually depend on many things, but I recommend you start with once a week. If a month passes by and there's a problem, its usually too late to do anything about it. Once a week allows you to keep closer track of expenditures and invoices. Once a week also let's the client see the progress. You can always skip reporting for a week if you didn't work on the project, but you still need to follow up on tracking of expenditures and invoices. I usually log expenditures, invoices, and payments to see the full project picture.

Your weekly report to clients needs to contain the basics of cost and schedule variance, plus an estimate of the remaining expenses. Knowing the cost and schedule indices isn't necessarily of interest to a client, but its useful information to determine project health. Rather than include it, you might use it in a formula to color code the information. The basic format I've used for clients is:

Note that each project and change request is listed separately. The client clearly sees the weekly progress of what was projected vs. the actual expenditures. At the start of the status reporting, I include an explanation of what each column means. A simple footnote under the table explains any significant deviations. Whenever I used this format for client projects, I never had issues getting the client to pay the bill. They clearly saw what was happening from week-to-week -- there were no surprises.

You might improve upon this slightly by color coding based on the indicies. Anything around a 1.0 is good. Anything too large may be too good to be true and anything less than .9 may indicate an issue which needs to be addressed. You can decide the actual performance based on how tightly you need to control the project.

So to recap, last week we looked at the basic Earned Value formulas. This week we looked at a very simple way to apply the formulas and report the data. Next time we'll take a look at how to apply the data in a meaningful way to manage projects.

Happy Holidays to all!

Earn Your Value (Part I)

As I was thinking about what to write this week, I noticed my only mention of Earned Value Management was both brief and some time ago. Its an important topic, so I'm going to devote my next three entries to it. This week, we're going to look at the basics. Next week, we'll look at how to report Earned Value to clients and stakeholders. In the third and final post in this series, we'll look at how to use Earned Value Management principles to manage projects.

The usual illustrative story of Earned Value goes something like this ... you hire a painter to paint four walls in four days. Each day is budgeted for $1,000 for a total of $4,000. If at the end of 2 days, I tell you the painters spent $1,500, do you know what the status of the project is?

The answer is "No" because you don't know how much work was actually completed. If I were to tell you the painters finished 3.5 walls, would you know? Also "No" because you don't know how much was spent.

Earned Value is a project management technique which can help you look at time, cost, and performance of your project -- you see the relationships between all the dimensions and not just a view of one. There are simple calculations to provide you with the amount of deviation from schedule and costs, plus performance factors which can be used to predict the future performance of your project. Even simple projects or consulting engagements can benefit from application of the key principles.

The 4 basic formulas to remember are quite simple:

CV = EV– AC -- the cost variance is the earned value less the actual cost

SV = EV– PV -- the schedule variance is the earned value less the planned value
CI = EV/AC -- the cost index is earned value divided by actual costs

SI = EV/PV -- the schedule index is earned value divided by planned value

Basically these formulas help you to understand:

- how far from planned costs and schedule am I?

- at what rate am I deviating from planned costs and schedule

The planned value in the illustrative example is $2,000, the cost of the work planned for by the end of the second day. Since I completed 3.5 days of work, the earned value is $3,500. You can see at a glance that I'm ahead of schedule as well as ahead of my budget. This means the cost index and schedule index will both be greater than 1.

At the end of day 2, I now have several good ways to update my project estimate. If I think the savings I accrued in the first two days of the project are typical of what I will experience for the rest of the project, I can multiple my final estimated budget ($4,000) by the inverse of the cost index. This gives me a new estimated final budget of $1,720. On the other hand, I might judge this not to be typical, in which case I might re-plan the remainder of the project, looking closely at the quality of the work completed and any obstacles which could slow down the finishing of the last 1/2 wall.

Of course this is a very simple example and a more complex schedule or budget would require considerably more analysis. As additional resources, there is an extensive bibliography online, an excellent training resource is Roger Mandel, and Quentin Fleming's (pictured above) book which describes earned value project management in its most fundamental form.

Don't forget to check back next week to see how we can share Earned Value information with clients and stakeholders.

Creating Project Templates

This week someone emailed me and asked me how I create templates for my pre-written software (PeopleSoft, Clarify, Siebel, INFORM, etc.) engagements, so I thought I would share the thinking and one of its products this week. First, let's look at why I create them.

Effective consultants have tools which enable them to repeat engagements and bring value to customers while integrating new and improved practices, but never start from scratch. For a project manager, this represents a "starter" plan which can be used again and again. From the customer perspective, expectations need to be solidly set. An "out-of-the-box" plan is usually a good starting point since you can point to this plan and clearly identify the customizations and enhancements which are out-of-scope.

To create the out-of-the-box plan, you either need to get input from many people who have conducted implementations, both successful and unsuccessful or conduct them yourself. This will allow you to determine the correct list of tasks. The experiences will help you home in on the correct effort and resources to allocate to each task. Adding the billing rate of the resources means you can get a good look at the actual cost to the customer for the out-of-the-box implementation. Now, when the customer wants to start a discussion of customization and changes, you have something to build on. Before seeing the customer, I typically review the contract and any customizations already agreed to, populate them into the plan, and proceed to manage changes in an effective way which customers can easily understand.

Creating a good template doesn't stop there, however. Its nice to make sure each concrete step and deliverable has some associated tools, templates, or guidance to assist in completing the tasks. At Siebel Systems we both posted them to our web site and zipped them up for CD distribution so consultants could refer to the plan and the tools necessary to complete the task.

I'm obviously not going to upload anything proprietary, but I do have a very old plan for a very old version of Siebel software which should give you some ideas of what's possible. You will need MS Project to view this file (you may need to right click the link and save the file locally with a .mpp extension). In this particular case, we didn't worry about the effort and resources so much since we had our own estimating tool which would help us fill that in. Don't have MS Project but still want to peek at the file? Just drop me a line via email or comment and I'll get you a PDF version.

Keeping Your Project on Track with Earned Value

A lot of folks in San Diego wonder how the construction of Petco Park, a managed project, could have possibly spent all the funding before it was half completed without anyone knowing. While I certainly don't have proof as to the actual cause, there is one very good way projects can get into this state -- they failed to look at all three key project success factors -- time, cost, and performance.

The usual illustrative story goes something like this ... you hire a painter to paint four walls in four days. Each day is budgeted for $1,000 for a total of $4,000. If at the end of 2 days, I tell you the painters spent $1,500, do you know what the status of the project is? No because you don't know how much work was actually completed. If I were to tell you the painters finished 3.5 walls, would you know? No, because you don't know how much was spent.

Earned Value is a project management technique which can help you look at time, cost, and performance of your project. Using it can provide an early warning of issues which need to be addressed before they permanently derail your project. Like many other tools, its use must be scaled to your project. Employing all elements of the methodology may be too costly or not including enough may oversimplify and provide a false view of your progress. There are also some limitations -- if you don't have a real plan of any kind, there will be nothing to measure.

The basic principles of Earned Value are easy to understand. There are simple calculations to provide you with the amount of deviation from schedule and costs, plus performance factors which can be used to predict the future performance of your project. Even simple projects or consulting engagements can benefit from application of the key principles.

For more information and resources on Earned Value, please visit http://www.acq.osd.mil/pm/. The DOD was a very early adopter of the technique and has some of the best resources available. Don't be caught with a project that's half done but already over budget -- look over this information for techniques which will help keep your projects on the right track.

When Projects Collide

Thursday was an interesting day, to say the least. In the span of about 12-14 hours I:

• lost the stone out of my old class ring (just had it fixed!)
• had a longer than ordinary commute home due to a massive backup on the freeway
• had someone impatient come up behind me and honk to pass -- this person did it to all other cars in his way
• while walking toward uptown, saw fire engines heading downtown
• a few blocks later, saw billowing smoke uptown -- some trash outside a home caught fire
• called 911 and got a busy signal -- fortunately several other people on the street with cell phones did get through
• and last but not least, about 3 blocks later saw a pickup truck turn across oncoming traffic -- breaks squealed, but fortunately no one was hit

Does this sound like some of your projects? Do tasks come altogether at once and cause delays? Perhaps you haven't noticed, but the default constraint for new tasks added to MS Project is "Start as soon as possible". Of course you could put that task off for a while -- it may have plenty of slack time. But errors in planning, unforseen events, and other issues create scheduling risk. You can wait, but if something else goes wrong, you might not be so lucky as the pickup truck driver who made it across two lanes of oncoming traffic on a busy street.

Of course you will have to use your judgment. Perhaps your project isn't "mission critical" and can withstand some delay. On the other hand, sometimes these things build up past all tolerance and can contribute to a failure.

My lesson learned is to be like MS Project -- start as soon as possible. Be pro-active and not a pro-crastinator and avoid collisions in project timelines.