Hi Guys,
How did everyone go with last week. Did you all comment in the post, sharing your experiences and opinion.
If not, please do so.
This week, i thought we would talk about the Lack of Fortnightly and Main Programme Integration, and as mentioned briefly on an earlier post, this has been surprisingly are very common issue amongst foremen and project managers .
Whom seem to not have been taught and guided through how important this part is to their day to day job, especially in being able to do their jobs more effectively and efficient.
This brings memories of a project, where the foremen was struggling to keep control of the project and the construction manager had visited site to assess the situation and concluded that the clients were difficult and that the contractors were not working with the foremen. With the project already passed completion date by 7 weeks and the remaining 5% of the project which should of been wrapped up in 3 weeks, ended up dragging out another 9.5 weeks.
Wow, that 16.5 weeks or just over 4 months in total, passed the completion date.
Can you imagine how much over cost, this totalled to. And at face value it certainly seemed that the cause lay squarely on the client.
But the more i dug into the situation and probed, it became apparent that it was not so.
On one occasion, I would get a call from the foremen stating the contractors were not coming out to do there work until another 7 days, beyond schedule. And so I would be calling these contractors ready to have a serious talk with them for dragging out the project. To find out that the foremen had only called him the afternoon before the pour and was expecting him to drop all other prescheduled works weeks in advance, for him.
And so when I questioned the foremen why he hadn’t booked the contractor earlier, it became apparent that he didn’t realise it until the end. So I requested the fortnightly programme, which would of detailed the works planned out for that fortnight, but it wasn’t so, but instead a two liner, which didn’t even relate back to the main programme. Almost as though he literally just scribbled it up just then.
In the end, it was being based solely on a day to day basis, hence the lack availability of contractors when tasks were needed to be done. So no fortnightly programme or even a basic task schedule on a white board or paper as such, just so he could plan the project out.
In other words absolutely no form of planning had been done at all. And in addition, they were simply doing one task at a time with continuous and high probable of delays, issues and so on just because they didn’t know where they were going.
“Did you know: More than 85% of these contractors didn’t integrated their fortnightly programmes into the master programme, when identifying the true effects of the daily progress over the full project”
Just because you weren’t looking at the bigger picture (main programme) or end in mind, simply because you were working on a day at a time. With no sense of direction or understanding where you were going.
In conclusion, as you can see the importance of planning ahead, through fortnightly and main programme, cannot be understated and without it, can lead the project to stagnate and a heavily delayed outcome.
Don’t forget to add your experiences and challenges that you have had with fortnightly and main programmes, as we would love to hear it.
Till next week,
Nelio