10 Reasons Why Construction Schedules Fail and How To Avoid This

This post was originally published on the RepOne blog.

CPM Schedules invariably become erroneous, despite best practices, when the rest of the team isn’t pulling their own weight. The integrity of the schedule may have nothing to do with why it became useless or meaningless, or as I like to say, a recorder more than a predictor of the critical path and progress. If the project is large and has multiple prime contractors, its schedule is all the more susceptible to deprecation.

“A CPM schedule ceases to achieve its intended purpose once it becomes a recorder, rather than a predictor.

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Schedule Reliability and Buffers

Project schedules tend toward tardiness, but what can be done to make schedules more reliably on time? Schedule buffer similar to a cost contingency helps projects become more reliable.

Project plans are generally more optimistic than reality. Reasons for this disconnect are that project plans do not consider: inefficiencies in the handover of tasks between resources, workplace congestion, coordination among contributors, and the multitasking of critical resources. One would think that not accounting for these delay effects would be counter balanced by contributors padding their estimates. But this is not the case. Once a duration is entered in the project plan (whether conservative or optimistic) it becomes subject to all the drag effects of Parkinson’s Law and procrastination.

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Spending Plan

“Spending Plan” is the least used option in Primavera, but it is especially helpful when you want to track your Actual Costs against the Budget allocated to your project. You can track Actual Cost vs. Budget across WBS and rolling up to your Project and ultimately to your EPS. While using Spending Plan we need to keep one this in mind that this method uses a Top Down approach i.e. You have a total budget on the top node (Project) and you distribute it to the respective EPS/WBS underneath it.

Note – Spending plan dates start from PS-3 Months and finishes by after 4 yrs.

The following fields are used in Spending Plan;

1) Spending Plan – This is a user entered field where you enter the allocated Budget for the WBS/Project/EPS.

2) Spending Plan Tally – is a summary and it rolls up from the child nodes. If you are using it for a project then it will rolls up one level up from the child WBS and the same for EPS nodes.

WBS		Spending Plan		Spending Plan Tally
WBS 1		200		200	Rolls up from WBS 1.1 + 1.2
WBS 1.1		100		0	No Spending Plan Tally cause no child node
WBS 1.2		50		0	No Spending Plan Tally cause no child node
WBS 2		50		10	Rolls up from WBS 2.1
WBS 2.1	10		0		No Spending Plan Tally cause no child node

3) Undistributed Current Variance – (Spending Plan – Spending Plan Tally) – Follows a Top Down logic, it shows whether you have distributed your budget to the child nodes (WBS/EPS) or not.

WBS	Spending Plan	Spending Plan Tally	Undistributed Current Variance
WBS 1	200	200	0
WBS 1.1	100	0	100
WBS 1.2	50	0	50
WBS 2	50	10	40
WBS 2.1	10	0	10

4) Benefit Plan – Benefit plan follows the same logic as spending plan but indicates the benefits that you stand to gain every month. This is also a user entered field and data has to be manually entered

5) Benefit Plan Tally – Same idea as Spending Plan Tally but only for Benefits.

6) Benefit Variance – (Benefit Plan Tally value – Benefit Plan value) – Follows the same logic as Undistributed Current Variance

Primavera P6 Project Layout Files (PLFs) Explained

In Primavera P6, it can take some effort to achieve an agreeable look and feel for the presentation and/or layout of your schedule activity table and Gantt chart. Did you know these layouts could be saved and used for reporting on other projects as well?

Often the schedule creation process requires carefully setting up the activity’s screen, i.e. activity table and Gantt chart. And special activity layout presentations are essential for reporting project status to stakeholders. 

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Assigning Fixed Price Costs to Activities in Primavera P6

Primavera P6 has a standard process for creating and assigning labor, material, and equipment resources to compute activity cost. What if the activity is performed at a fixed price? Yes, there is a way to specify a fixed price activity cost in Primavera P6 Professional.

A popular procurement contract type is the fixed price contract. In this type of agreement the subcontractor agrees to perform an activity at a fixed price, regardless, of the actual labor, material, and/or equipment costs. In this way your company procurement department transfers the risk of exceeding the budget onto the subcontractor. Any unforeseen activity expenses must be paid by the subcontractor. Great! Well, how do we specify a fixed price activity cost in Primavera P6?

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What is a Project Plan?

In large enterprises with hundreds or thousands of capital projects, it is important to create standards to which all projects must adhere. This provides the organization the ability to roll up and assess overall project performance across the organization as well as look at resource capacity and other key performance indicators.

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Primavera P6 and Resource Codes Explained

Primavera P6’s resource codes are helpful for sorting resource databases, which can become cluttered with an abundance of resource definitions.

Once created and assigned resources become an important fixture in the scheduling historical record. Resources are meant to be permanent database elements, and resource databases are therefore, generally, large and difficult to sort through. Resource codes, however, make it possible to sort resources by your desired category.

This article demonstrates how to employ resource codes to sort a Primavera P6 Professional resource database.

https://tensix.com/2017/11/primavera-p6-and-resource-codes-explained/

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