INEIGHT SCHEDULE
FOR PROFITABLE CONSTRUCTION, RETHINK SCHEDULING
A GOOD SCHEDULE REQUIRES TWO THINGS: TIME AND EXPERTISE. SCHEDULING EXPERTS WITH BOTH ARE A RARE FIND.
CLEARING THE BOTTLENECK
Far too often, master schedulers get stretched across mega projects, high-profile opportunities, and urgent deliverables. They have the expertise to craft an insightful, reliable schedule but cannot scale their time across more and more projects.
Software is at its best when it extends the expertise of those using it, saves them time, or both. But the software tools historically available for construction schedulers fail in one way or another. On one hand, some tools are inaccessible to all but the most specialized professionals who have accrued hundreds of hours of training, On the other, many tools are inadequate for the demands of capital construction and the complexity of today’s delivery models or can only be made to work with laborious or risky workarounds.
The extreme specialization required by complex tools has a significant downside: isolation. Without scalable ways to seek input and validation, specialized schedulers too often work in a silo, resulting in schedules other team members don’t understand well enough to trust. Side schedules are often accepted as an undesirable but inevitable result.
When dedicated schedulers are fully occupied, other team members – project managers or estimators, for example – are often tapped to fill in on lower-visibility projects. Lacking training in the complex tools, they turn to less robust software that lacks construction-specific structures and guardrails. Again, side schedules often follow, compounding the challenges of these more light-weight tools.
Schedules shouldn’t rely on one person shouldering the weight of a multi-million dollar effort. They should result from collaboration between highly specialized professionals uniting to anticipate obstacles and deliver what’s best for the project. Transformational scheduling clears that lonely bottleneck and gives teams their best shot at project certainty.
Transformational scheduling relies on software that makes two highly significant corrections to the shortcomings of older tools. First, it opens communication between roles and invites everyone into the planning process. Specialized contributors in the field – not to mention owners, general contractors, engineers – carry deep knowledge of their business and are frequently overlooked in the planning process. Transformational scheduling invites those perspectives into the planning process, integrating feedback about every phase of the project lifecycle.
Second, the software used in transformational scheduling offers radically greater ease of use. That allows organizations to scale the expertise of their teams by relying on this open, insight-rich approach. By capturing and incorporating the expertise of field execution experts along with the perspective of key stakeholders like owners and project managers, transformational scheduling distributes the full range of relevant expertise across the entire project portfolio. Suddenly, early plans are more accurate, teams have more confidence that every perspective is accounted for, and those scheduling and planning capabilities are further distributed across the team.
THE WORLD CHANGES, BUT CPM STAYS THE SAME
