Scheduling and project duration is something that is near and dear my heart. One of the positions that I have held within my company was that of Project Coordinator, with my primary responsibility being assigning manpower to the various construction projects of the branch. I therefore looked at scheduling from a higher elevation view of when each project would begin and when and what manpower resources they would receive. Over time I ran into two specific difficulties, deciding what project to begin, and getting updated progress reports from projects.

At my company, a project could only begin after they have been funded with the resources that they required. After projects are assigned a project manager, the next step is to assign a field manager and laborers. Being an open-shop company (non-union) all of our laborers are employees of the company and do not come out of a union hall. This creates a finite amount of resources that the company can draw upon to complete the projects.  I therefore was in the position of creating and managing through a live resource schedule, similar to what we had worked through in class.

One difference to the resource schedule is that projects were independent of each other and could being before or after another with no effect to the other projects. Therefore at times when resources were maxed out, decisions had to be made to start one project above another. A problem that I inherited within my position is that it seemed as if the project managers who would cry the loudest would receive resources and begin their projects first, as opposed to what project needed to begin based upon the impact to the branch. Through time I developed a rudimentary template to discuss certain items with the project managers such as if the client is now or key client, potential to develop strategic goals, and overall financial impact to the branch. I was not able to finalize a formalized version and my successor in the position is still struggling through this. If you have had experience with similar issues at your company, what methods do you use to decide what projects to start above another?

The second main issue that I experienced was updating the schedule on a consistent basis. Due to delays or early finishes in projects for a variety of reasons, the durations of projects were constantly in flux. There was no formalized method of running status updates for projects and information about these duration changes was not making its way back to the overall resource schedule. Project managers have many demands placed on them throughout the course of projects, and getting the schedule information back to their scheduler was not a priority. Again, I developed a rudimentary system of getting this information. I got with each project manager every Friday to collect updated information and circulated the information to the operations group. This had a weekly delay even with the best information I received.  What methods has your company developed to maintain up to date information on project status progress?

One of the common denominators for all companies is that they have scarce resources. Time, money, and personnel are just some of the things that are often in limited supply. Companies have developed comprehensive cost saving measures and other means of utilizing their assets most efficiently, however many companies fall short when determining what opportunities to pursue, creating waste in the process.

Many companies fall into the trap of trying to be everything to everyone with projects selected based upon intuition and few practices in the decision. What results are higher priority projects being neglected due to lack of capacity. Educated companies are now employing sophisticated project selection criteria in attempts to avoid this.

I work for a construction company who had struggled in this arena when determining what projects to pursue. In the recent past we have made considerable improvement and growth by creating and utilizing a simple tool incorporating selection criteria. Two of the basic groups of criteria that we incorporated fell into two groups: Project Fit and Return on Effort.

Project Fit is more or less based upon strategy. We first developed a list of questions that we could answer in the initial determination phase. Some of the items that were included were quantity of past business with the client, amount of competition, and how the project fit within our core competencies. We formulated an excel spreadsheet that allowed us to generate a numerical score that would depict how well the opportunity fit the business that we are in. We could also compare the score to other opportunities.

We had a similar approach in creating our Return on Effort metric, which is primarily concerned with financial information. Such items as projected revenue and profit are compared with costs of selling and estimating the project. Projects that are more lucrative receive a higher score. The intent here is to eliminate those projects that would consume numerous resources and not provide a large financial benefit. It was interesting to see how this is not always obvious without a detailed analysis. Projects that I would have otherwise thought would be profitable would score low.

This overall process has helped us gain some direction when prioritizing projects. We have had less wasted time, more adherences to strategy, and clearer priorities. However, I believe that we still have some room for improvement. For an example, one shortcoming that I have observed is salesmen manipulating the tool to generate a higher priority project than it would otherwise have.

We are working on trying to further standardize the process, but I would like to see if any of you have had similar experiences with the ambiguity effect on the scoring, and would be able to offer some tips on how to deal with this. I would also like to see if you have any tips on different selection criteria or methods of evaluating our projects?