planning

Project Management in Construction: The Difference Between Profits and Losses

Posted on by johnd301s1

Project management tools like Gantt charts and precedence diagrams can mean the difference between high profits and painful losses for project-centric lines of business. During my time with a general contractor in the construction industry, these two tools played a central role in each project we undertook. From planning to ground breaking to final inspection, the documents were an anchor for organizing our activities. We referred to them daily to determine when to schedule sub-contractor (plumbers, electricians, HVAC installers, etc.) arrivals, as a reference tool for updating clients during site visits, and as guide for keeping track of the literally hundreds of activities that needed to happen in precise sequence to stay on schedule.

On Site

In construction, business is negotiated on a per-contract basis. Before groundbreaking, general contractors will examine a proposed project in concert with architects and engineers to develop a construction schedule, calculate expenses, and formulate a bid. The schedule is basically a detailed Gantt chart and precedence diagram. If the client likes the bid amount, they will award the contract and agree to make payment after certain milestones and upon completion. If everything goes to plan, the contractor can reap substantial profits. On the other hand, failure to meet deadlines on the contractor’s part will result in penalty fees and turn the project into a financial loss very quickly.

Once work begins, on-site superintendents use the finalized Gantt chart and precedence diagram to manage sub-contractors and schedule upcoming activities. As a superintendent it was my job to know when each task needed to be completed, to understand how each activity played into the overall project timing (were they on the critical path or was there slack time?), and to manage the site accordingly.

The Five Guys Project

I remember one day, while working on a Five Guys franchise project, when our company was in danger of missing a critical deadline. Even though the consequence of our delay wouldn’t become apparent for several weeks, we knew from our precedence diagram that some certain cement cutting was on the critical path and had to happen before going home that day. We stayed overnight to get it done because failure to do so threatened the whole job’s profitability. Our project management tools helped us see the problem, address it, and avoid a costly delay.

The point of saying this is to drive home the applicability and usefulness of the tools we’re learning about in class. Understanding how to develop and how to use them is absolutely critical in the construction industry.

In your experience, what are some projects, industries, or situations where project management tools have played a central role?

The Cursed Shop

Posted on by mohammedala502

“Beware of this haunted shop I heard there was a kid who once entered this shop and never came out. His poor mother lives in misery because of her loss” said Cousin Noah. I still remember that day while my cousin and I were walking passing by this shop located in Arad Town. It was before 20 years but I remember it like yesterday, this shop was called the cursed shop, or the haunted shop. Furthermore the title (cursed shop) came because whenever a restaurant opens in this same shop after a while the business shuts down. By time people started believing that this shop was really cursed, it’s funny how some people are naïve.

 

 

I kept in mind this shop and the different restaurants that opened there; I said to myself there must be a reason behind this. Further investigation in this case I found out the reason was simple; the restaurants did not have good forecasts for the demands of the customers. A restaurant would open to operate and they would order for example a large amount of Kebab given it’s a restaurant serving fresh food they would have many Kebab left unfortunately some were already grilled and been ready to serve, this is just one example. Of course the forecasting was not the only reason, given the place of the restaurant, prices, and demand of customers played a role.

I believe that this restaurant could have avoided the risk by using the forecast starting from Qualitative method (using surveys or even second hand information.)Also using the Quantitative methods to forecast the demand and base the price on the forecasts.

Friday (11th may) class was an eye opening class, I always wanted to know how restaurants were able to survive and know exactly how much portion of meat, salads , fish , or any type of food to prepare each day. From the class exercise I leaned that there are different types of forecasts that addresses different categorize like (Economic, Technological and Demand forecasts.)Furthermore each method is suitable for a different case or scenario. There are two approaches to this matter the Qualitative  including ( Delphi method , consumer market survey , sales force composite) , and the Quantitative method including  ( Naïve approach , moving averages , exponential smoothing , trend projection , linear regression. )Moreover the manager has to know what type of forecast to use because each approach will give an answer however only one answer is accurate and reflects reality.

 

 

CLICKER TIME:

 

Do you believe that Forecasting is vital for any restaurant?

  1. YES
  2.  NO
  3. I didn’t read the article I just want to comment for the 5%

What do you think is the best Quantitative method to use for the restaurant?

 

 

More on restaurants failure click here:

http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/Ec1F07/restaurantsfail.pdf

 

Project Managers vs Workers

Posted on by Ali Almahdi

During our first class, we got to do our first exercise. This exercise was making the paper puppets. Though I was not involved with the workers or even the timer guys. I was observing the whole operation. The teacher acted like the project manager, and 5 class colleagues were doing the assembly line workers job.

During this exercise, each worker was given a task to be done. The teacher was putting pressure on them as she was acting like the project manager. As a result, they were trying hard to finish as much paper puppets as possible. I was observing the behavior of each worker, since the last three workers were sitting idle until the second worker finishes her job. Her task was a longer task than the rest, thus she was a bottleneck. The class was fun and we have learned a lot.

Some of what we have learned from this class was:

  • The way you layout the operations space, is going to influence the production and product quality, it even influences the communication between the workers. During our exercise, though they were close to each other, each worker was only talking to the one right next to him/her.
  • During the exercise, the first worker tried to optimize the way he worked but the project manager which is the teacher told him to follow the process. This teaches us that if we ever want to  re-engineer a process, we need to talk to the workers. They see the obstacles, they most probably know how to optimize their work.
  • During the exercise, the workers found defected paper, but due to the pressure, they passed it on just to finish the process. What we could learn from this, when project managers or management puts so much pressure on workers, workers will have ethical issues and lead to high rate of defected products.
  • After we were done with the exercise, the teacher asked the workers how did they feel about their work load. Some said they were doing so much work, others said they didn’t have to do much. It is probably one of most faced issue with operation workers. Work isn’t divided equally among workers.
  • We also have discussed what we could have done to help our second worker which she had more complicated work to do, we have came with so many solutions which seemed to help, like hiring one more worker with her. Or distributing the work among other workers too.
Here are some pictures that I took during class while we were doing the exercise: (Note: Some faces are blurred because they asked me to blur their faces). Edit: One more colleague asked for her picture to be blurred., so I re-uploaded the images.

Project Management Deadly Sin: Poor Planning

Posted on by layalz502

After discussing project management in class the other day, I got interested in the topic and decided to do some reading on it. I came across a sentence in an article, which prompted me to write this post. The sentence was, “in a perfect world every project would be on time and within budget, but reality (especially the proven statistics) tells a very different story.”

In other words, projects more than often end up in the failure range, that is; failure to meet expectations, failure to meet the deadline, failure to remain within the budget…etc. So the question remains, why do so many projects fail? Among the articles that I read, one caught my attention because it portrayed what I had already established in my mind.  The article stated; to keep your projects from ending up in the failure range, you must avoid making the single biggest project management mistake: inadequate project definition and planning. While project management encompasses three main activities (Planning, Scheduling and Controlling), after reading the article, I firmly believe planning is the key success factor in any project.

This is because, planning defines what the project will deliver, when it will be complete, what it will cost, who will do the work, how the work will be done, and what the benefits will be. Without clearly establishing these aspects of the project, the subsequent phases in project management are next to useless. Moreover, poor up-front planning leads to inevitable poor estimates. In many cases, if the definition and planning is not done ahead of time, the project team starts off with inadequate resources and time. Thus, many projects that could be successful are viewed as failures because they overshot their budgets and deadlines. This critical error is usually not realized until the project is already in progress.

In conclusion, how do we avoid making that error? The article offers the simple solution of spending the time up-front on good definition and planning, which will eventually end up taking much less time and effort than having to correct the problems while the project is underway.

So my question to you: if you don’t think poor planning is the deadly sin, then what is?

And how do we avoid making the common errors of failing to meet budgets and timelines among other things?

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/poor-planning-is-project-management-mistake-number-one/5034294