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.

Read it on Plan Academy

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.

Read the Post on Ten Six