Don’t Forget to Update Your Project Schedule or (Don’t Neglect Your Project Schedule)
On construction projects, time equals money. When construction projects finish late, both contractors and owners potentially incur additional, unanticipated time-related costs. It often happens that well before the project actually finishes, the project team is aware that the project will finish late. A properly updated project schedule is the only time-management tool available to the project team that can reliably forecast the project’s late finish date.
Unfortunately, toward the end of projects, as the pace of work intensifies and as the project team focuses their efforts on solving problems and completing the work, the project schedule is too often ignored. As a consequence, the project schedule is not updated and submitted on a monthly basis, as required by the contract or per project schedule management best practices.
Just as a properly updated project schedule is the only project management tool that forecasts when the work will be complete, it’s also the only time-management tool on the project that can be used to reliably identify and measure how, and to what extent, the project was delayed.
Predictably, and as Murphy’s Law dictates, the project is nearly always delayed whenever the project schedule is not updated and submitted. Therefore, to ensure that the current schedule update always represents the current plan for completion, contractors should also prepare and submit periodic schedule updates in accordance with the contracts. Additionally, contractors should also ensure that their schedule updates include new activities, that depict additions or changes to the project’s work scope, as the project progresses and evolves. Note that contractors should be aware of the contract requirements they must comply with when making changes or additions to the project schedule. A discussion of the process for both parties to follow, to agree upon revisions to the project schedule, will be the subject of a subsequent posting.
Similarly, owners should always demand that their contractors routinely submit updates to the project schedule, to ensure that they can both track progress and resolve delay-related issues as they arise during the project.
For more on this, or any other topic, please call me at 215-814-6400 or email me at mark.nagata@traunerconsulting.com.
