Construction planning and scheduling are key aspects in the integration of all construction activities and phases required to complete a given construction project within a given budget and timeframe. Although they have individual roles, planning and scheduling are inseparable when it comes to successful project management.
Construction planning essentially encompasses the choice of relevant policies, procedures and processes to achieve your project objectives. Construction scheduling adapts the action plans of your construction project in terms of scope, time, cost and quality into a functional schedule. This process of adapting project specifications, including resource requirements (labor, equipment, materials, etc.), communications, risk and procurement into an operational workflow system is critical to your project team.
Along with your project plan and budget, your schedule becomes your central tool for managing your projects. In addition, having an integrated or coordinated cost schedule serves as a basis for monitoring and controlling activities throughout the life cycle of your project.
Why is construction planning and scheduling important?
- Proper construction planning and scheduling are important to ensure that your construction project is completed on time and on budget. A thoroughly planned construction schedule not only describes the pace of your work, but also dictates how your work is performed. It also helps define your processes, methods and sequences for when materials are placed.
- Preparing your construction schedule meticulously and in advance maximizes your efficiency and productivity. Because your construction schedule allows you to improve your quality control measures, it’s easy to sequence the work and ensure you have the right quality and quantity of materials used at each step.
- Procurement of materials and resources is on track, as you can use your schedule to purchase the right materials exactly when you need them. Safety performance improves as you use your schedule to keep track of which worker is on site and ensure that protection guidelines are followed correctly.
- Having a reliable construction schedule also allows you to better allocate your time among all your project stakeholders, helping them to better plan their activities. By gaining full control of your project, you reduce unpleasant surprises, making it easier to avoid cost overruns and delays.
What is construction planning?
Construction planning is essential in the management and execution of your construction projects, as it involves the selection of technology, the definition of work tasks, the estimation of required resources and the scope of individual tasks, and the identification of possible interactions and workflows between the different activities.
An efficient construction plan is critical to establish your budget and schedule for all necessary work. Creating and developing the construction plan is a very challenging and critical task in construction management.
You have to develop the technical aspects, and, in addition, you have to make organizational decisions about the relationships between the project stakeholders and even the subcontractors that you will have to include.
However, it is not enough to track and use construction data from a single project. Real estate developers especially benefit from storing their data over a long period of time. For example, one of the best reasons to keep CRE data (or commercial real estate data) is because it enables better decision making.
Types of construction project planning:
-Strategic planning
It involves a high-level selection of project objectives. Strategic planning is usually performed by the project owner’s corporate planners. In order to achieve the owner’s project objectives, they decide what project to build and the timeframe for completion with the project teams developing the master construction execution plan that conforms to the guidelines set forth in the strategic and contracting plans.
-Operational planning
It involves detailed planning by the construction teams to meet the strategic objectives of the project. Before project teams can detail the construction schedule, they have to go through a series of questions so that they can prepare the master construction plan:
- Will the operating plan meet the strategic planning deadline?
- Are there sufficient construction resources and services available in-house to meet the project objectives?
- What is the impact of the new project on the existing workload?
- Where will we get the resources to handle any overload?
- What company policies may prevent the plan from meeting the target date?
- Are long delivery equipment or materials usually involved?
- Are the project concepts and design firmly established and ready to begin construction?
- Is the original contracting plan still valid?
- Will it be more economical to use a rapid programming approach?
What are the first steps in planning a construction project?
Construction planning can be either cost or expense oriented or schedule oriented. With cost-oriented project planning, there is a distinction between costs incurred directly in carrying out an activity and indirectly in carrying out the project. Indirect costs may include costs borrowed for project financing and overhead costs. For schedule-oriented planning, the emphasis is on the timing of project activities over time, and this is considered critical.
Planning focuses on ensuring that proper precedence between activities is followed and maintained and that resource scheduling is performed efficiently. This results in critical path scheduling procedures (the maintenance of seamless workflows) and shop scheduling processes (the efficient use of resources over time). Regardless of what your construction planning focuses on, effective delivery, schedule and budget are always intertwined and are the primary concerns.
Once you’ve figured out your planning emphasis, it’s time to consider all the other functional requirements for your construction planning.
-Choosing which technology and construction methods to use: Choosing the right technology and construction methods are critical to the successful execution of your project. Your decision to do cast-in-place concrete structures or order precast structures will directly affect the cost and duration of the tasks involved in the construction process. Finding the right digital solution for your project will be critical to your team’s productivity, as it will directly affect the time it takes to complete different activities and the flow from one activity to another, reducing unnecessary administrative tasks.
-Defining work tasks and activities: Because construction planning determines your construction schedule, defining various work tasks is vital to framing the timeline of your construction activities. That way, you can estimate the resources needed and schedule the required sequences and critical paths between tasks. Defining the appropriate work tasks is tedious, but it is necessary in the application of formal scheduling processes and in the standardization of specific tasks. Once the tasks are properly defined, a hierarchy of activities emerges that can be visualized as this example of activities in a road project plan:
- Define the relationships and critical flow between activities. Once you have defined the work activities, you can now specify the relationships between them. Precedence relationships between tasks and activities mean that activities must happen in particular sequences. There are numerous natural sequences for construction activities due to structural integrity requirements, regulations and other technical requirements.
- Estimation of the duration of the activities. Remember, each work activity is associated with a duration of time and these durations are the basis for preparing the schedule. All formal scheduling is based on duration estimates as well as defined precedence relationships. A realistic estimate along with historical records of particular tasks and activities is critical to avoid delays.
- Estimation of resource requirements for work activities. In addition to precedence relationships and time duration, resource requirements for each activity are also estimated. By correctly estimating the resource requirements per activity on the basis of their comprehensive definitions, it is also possible to define the particular resource requirements for the entire project, while avoiding problems with resource allocation and procurement issues.
- Establishment of a coding system. Having a coding system for each of the identified activities allows a better integration of the organization’s efforts and a better flow of information. A coding system makes it possible to standardize definitions and categories of elements and activities across projects and among project stakeholders. Coding systems also facilitate the retrieval of historical data on costs, productivity and duration of your activities. Add to this a construction management software that keeps all your data in one central location, and your coding system becomes even more efficient.
These steps are necessary to develop a proper construction plan and allow you to transform your plan into a schedule. Construction planning is not limited to the period after a contract is awarded. It should be an essential and ongoing activity even during the design of your facility.
What are the phases of construction?
Construction projects are complex. Breaking a construction project into major milestones can improve your planning. There are approximately five phases of the construction life cycle (although sometimes you may see as few as four or as many as seven).
- Start. First, the project is defined, and the scope is delimited. The client will come to you with their vision, and you will determine its feasibility and how much it will cost. At this point, you will assemble a large team and begin to create a list of resources.
- Planning. You will develop a more detailed plan that covers the entire scope of work. You will also create a timeline and budget. This is the phase where you will get into the details of the project and can find any possible underlying problems.
- Construction. Your team will execute the plan and, ideally, everything will go as scheduled.
- Post-Construction. Once the project is completed, you will conduct a review with the client. At this stage, you may encounter rework or problems. Better planning leads to less rework.
- Closing. This is the final phase where you make sure all the paperwork is in order and all loose ends are tied up. The project is now complete, and you can move on to the next one.
- By dividing your project into these phases, you can make the planning and scheduling process much easier.
Getting Started with Construction Planning and Scheduling
Now you know why reliable construction planning and scheduling is so important. But you still need to get started. Let’s take a look at what you need to do to improve your construction planning and scheduling, starting today.
-Identify appropriate tools
Many software options on the market can help you with construction planning and scheduling. Do your research and find one that fits your business needs.
Many construction companies still plan and schedule construction through paper-based processes. This can be disastrous: employees don’t know when they are scheduled and can’t easily change their schedules when they need to.
Instead, by moving the construction schedule into an application, you can ensure that you and your team are always aware of the latest schedule. And when it comes to payroll time, you’ll know exactly how many hours they worked.
-Create a checklist
When you set project milestones and tasks, how do you make sure they are completed on time and in order? Checklists. Checklists are frequently used throughout the construction industry because they are simple and easy to manage. Your construction team may not be able to complete a lot of paperwork at the end of the day, but you can check off tasks that need to be completed.
-Establish the roles and responsibilities of your team.
Establish clear roles and responsibilities for everyone involved in the project. Make sure everyone has access to the same information and understands the project plan. When employees are accountable for specific roles and responsibilities, they are more likely to perform at their best.
When a team is well trained and organized, it works better. But they need to understand what their objectives are. Poor organization means employees don’t know what they need to accomplish on a daily basis, they don’t know what projects they are working on, and they don’t know who to escalate problems to when they are encountered.
-Create a template for the planning of your project.
Construction is a process. And like any process, it’s much easier to manage when you have a template to follow. For each type of project you have, create a template consisting of the major milestones you’ll need to achieve. Take a look at your previous projects, how long they’ve taken and the most essential elements.
By creating a template for your project planning, you can ensure that all projects follow the same steps and that no steps are forgotten. You will increase the accuracy of your bids and have a game plan to follow.
-Be flexible
The construction industry is unpredictable. Whether your client changes his mind or mistakes occur, there are bound to be problems throughout a project. Before you start a project, ask yourself: what could change? Be prepared for scope changes and other unforeseen circumstances by incorporating backfill into your initial plans.
It can be tempting to take shortcuts when it comes to your initial bids. You know a project takes ten days on average, but you really feel like you can get it done in eight. While this is a great way to land the project, it’s overly optimistic and will only lead to unhappy customers. Instead, give yourself an adequate margin for error. Over-promising and under-delivering will never lead to sustainable results.
By following these tips, you can set your construction business up for success. Planning and scheduling may seem daunting, but they are essential to keeping your projects on track.
Conclusion
To be successful with your construction projects, careful planning is needed to create a schedule that will allow you to deliver your projects on time and on budget. Both construction planning and scheduling take a lot of time to create and implement, but the time you will save during the actual work will be greater than the time you spent creating your plan and schedule.
Get in touch with our Expert Guest Services Team
Alternatively, email us directly to assist you further.
