scheduling methods

[grumpydasmurf]

Currently we use a dry erase board. We have marked the board to look like a calendar. We color code our crews and write the customer's name on a day. The beauty of dry-erase is you can easily make changes.

I am currently working on a much better system! It is going to be web based so customers can go to our website and see in real time when their work is planned. The problem is we will still need to use the dry-erase because my boss isn't the brightest computer person. :(

[Rich]

We use primavera 3.1 for our CPM schedules... then Microsoft Project or Suretrak for our 3 week breakdowns.
But before we ever get to a scheduling software we do what's called storyboarding. Where we will take a scope of work and brainstorm about all the activities for that scope. We then put each activity on a sticky note. This is where the scheduling actually begins. Place the sticky on the "storyboard" in the order of early start.
You can also do it by storyboarding by area or floor instead of by scope. This makes it easier to place all the activities into primavera.
Primavera also allows to export as a pdf which is excellent to put on the web as pdf is considered to be the only legal electronic file.

[kdavis]

I like that storyboard idea I think the next time I am asked to create aschedule I will try it. Thanks

[Rich]

The biggest thing with storyboarding is to keep the number of activities small and try to break it down as much as possible... otherwise you get so many activities it can get confusing.

[mack]

Hello, my first post =). We are currently developing 88 acres for residential use with approximately 180 lots. Our preliminary plat is done and we are a week away from city approval and annexation. If you guys could provide me with more info on storyboarding that would be great. It seems like a really effective method to mangage scheduling. I have never done this before and have really no idea how it works.

[Rich]

For a development project I would probably start out by doing a trade breakdown or a 1/4 split of the property.
By that I mean you will have a few trades up front that will do the majority of the work.. which would be excavation, plumbing, electrical, or something like that. The worst thing for any project is to have subcontractors come onto the job and then have to leave before it's done.
So treat each of these trades as a seperate schedule. You will storyboard each of the trades as if they were on their own without interference from other subcontractors. This gives the "flow" of work for them. Do that for each of the different trades... if that's too much then break it down further into something like plumbing trade on the northeast corner.
Now when you bring all the trades together into a main schedule you will be able to tie all the pieces together by setting which activity for plumbing can't start until some excavation is done.
Hope that makes sense.

[mack]

Yes it does, thanks a bunch.

[Dan J]

I see that this is an old thread, but I’m new here and just started looking around. Scheduling is one of my pet peeves, and I figured that maybe I could add to the discussion.

We are strictly commercial contractors. Our schedules are “contractual” documents, and must be organized in a manner that makes them easily understandable. One of the first things we do is to break down all of the activities on a project into groups. Those groups being 01 Mobilization, 02 Site Development, 03 Foundations, 04 Superstructure, 05 Building Enclosure, 06 Interior Construction, 07 Interior Finishes, 08 Site Improvements, and 09 Project Close-Out.

Once the activities are sorted into these groups, sequential logic can be applied to the activities within each group.

If there’s any interest, we can discuss further.

Dan J

[Rich]

Doesn't that make if difficult to follow the flow? It shows each multiple scopes' flow but very little of the sequence of work as a whole. I suppose you can always do a different filter to show floor by floor or other breakdowns easy enough.

I'm not trying to fault your logic - just throwing other considerations out there that I'm sure have already been thought about within your organization - the more I can see the way others do it the better IMO.

For instance, how do you see the relationship between interior framing crew (Interior Construction) working on 3rd floor and the drywaller beginning to hang drywall on the 1st floor (interior finish). I understand the logical tie is there - but visually it's not. This example is pretty typical for us as we usually have at laast 2 crews that jump every other floor - 1st floor crew jumps to 3rd floor 2nd floor crew jumps to 4th floor.

We break it into areas - which could be floor by floor or smaller portion of work. Within that area we break it into scope of work - framing, plumbing, etc. After we get the areas seperated and flowing well we can resort by scope on the project as a whole to keep the flow of work for the tradesmen consistent. Nothing worse than having 2 guys then 400 guys then 8 in a short period of time (man loading).

I work for a multi-billion commercial contractor(actually just broke 2 billion in backlog a month ago).

[Dan J]

Rich,

I apologize for not giving an overall explanation of our basic schedule layout in my previous post. You’ve obviously been involved with large projects, and of course larger projects should be delineated into physical work areas (i.e. wing “A” 1st floor, wing “A” 2nd floor, wing “B” 1st floor, etc.). We like to break down the area designations into portions that easily show the flow of the planned progress.

Once the physical areas of work have been designated, and the sequencing of these areas has been established, this becomes the primary sort / order of our schedule.

Within each work area, the schedule is then organized and sorted according to the phasing groups I describe in my post above. This gives each physical area of the project a schedule sequence that will coincides with the actual work. For instance, it gives a clear picture of when the foundation work (and related trade activities) is occurring for wing “A”, wing “B”, etc., and the exterior wall framing, sheathing, veneer, windows, etc. (“building enclosure”) is occurring for each area of the project. Again, the primary sort is physical areas of the project and the secondary sort is the phasing group.

Our activities are usually trade specific, and we assign a trade resource to each activity. This makes it easy to filter a schedule for each trade (i.e. plumber, drywall, etc.). For instance, we can provide the plumber with a plumber specific / filtered schedule and he can see when the below grade rough-in work (“foundations”), the interior rough-in work (“interior”), and fixtures installation (“finish”) is scheduled for each physical area of the project.

We’ve been told many times by subcontractors, architects, and owners that our schedules are the easiest to work with that they’ve seen. The way we set up the phasing groups is really the biggest difference in what we’ve seen in other GC schedules.

Dan J

P.S. I’ll checkout the www.teamcontractor.com site soon. I’m glad to have found your forums.

[Rich]

That makes more sense - very similar to what we do.. with the filters for trade specific sorts. Do you use Primavera?

[Dan J]

Yes, we're Primavera users. We work with Expedition for our contract and document management, and have been using SureTrak for scheduling needs. With Expedition 9 we can no longer link our SureTrak schedules to Expedition, so we've recently purchased Primavera's "Contractor" scheduling software. I must admit that we've not scheduled a job with Contractor yet.... it is going to take a little bit of a learning curve to become productive (I think).

Are you guys P3 users?

[Rich]

Yep P3. We don't use it near to it's capabilities except on rare occassions where a government job is cost loading a schedule. Very rarely do we use the resource loading either. We use SureTrak too, for our 3 week schedules.