¿Cómo puede garantizar una planificación de proyectos rentable?

Defining the scope for construction projects is crucial for timely, budget-friendly, and satisfactory project completion. Here are the key steps: 1. Project overview: Summarize the project’s purpose, stakeholders, and end-use. 2. Expected deliverables: Explain the assigned deliverables and smaller tasks to reach the main goals. 3. Schedule and timeline: Include a schedule and timeline that outlines when each task will be completed and how long it will take. 4. Constraints: Identify any constraints that may impact the project, such as budget, time, or resource constraints. 5. Assumptions: Identify any assumptions that have been made about the project, such as availability of resources or materials.

By following these steps, you can ensure that your construction project is well-defined and that everyone involved understands their roles and responsibilities.

You can ensure effective project planning through asking and answering who, what, when, how and when questions: Who are the stakeholders involved in the project? What are the project goals and objectives? When are the project start and end dates? How much are the required resources, project budget, manhours and the project scope? Once you found the answers to these questions, you will have a head-start in managing the project. Just keep in mind 3 important factors: 1. Scope, 2. Manpower 3. Manhours And you are good to go!

One of the recommendations for establishing a realistic budget is to use a bottom-up approach and break down the WBS items into smaller, more manageable components that can be properly estimated. Proper estimates usually include the following resources: manpower, equipment, and material estimates. The estimate should include both the unit rates and unit costs and add up contingencies to account for the learning curve, uncertainties, and emergencies. It is important also to not overestimate the impact of those on the unit rates/costs as you might not win the bid if your pricing is higher. Furthermore, it is also recommended to use analogous estimating technique while considering the time value of money, project surrounding environment, etc..

Prioritizing and trade-offs take place on our day-to-day life and certainly with the dynamic nature of construction projects, decisions must be taken based on priorities. Thus, it is important to establish a ranking for the level of importance of the following factors: client needs, project requirements, timeline, cost flexibility, deliverables, project requirements and change orders, stakeholders preferences. This will help you focus on the critical aspects for your project success.

For instance, projects with high liquated damages for delays will by default trigger the project manager to prioritize the construction timeline over the cost. Thus, if the project timeline is compromised for a cause that does not entitle them to extension of time, the project manager would highly consider crashing activities and overlapping activities to meet the timeline as the benefits of completing the project on time surpasses the risk of failing to meet the timeline and pay liquidated damages.

Planning the project execution is a crucial step to complete your project within budget and schedule baseline. Here are the key aspects that shall be considered: 1. Outlining the construction methods to better estimate duration, cost and resources. 2. Establishing the activities sequencing to determine the critical path. 3. Determining a site logistics plan (e.g. location of tower cranes, sequence of work sites (in case of many). 4. Appointing your key sub-contractors early on to avoid any delays. 5. Developing a framework and plans on how the project will be monitored, controlled, and evaluated (e.g. cost, risk, quality, stakeholder, communication, schedule management plans).

Considering those aspects will allow you to track your project progress, performance, and quality and take timely corrective measures should the project fall behind schedule or run over budget.

It is very common that the project manager is the one who is leading the drafting of the project management plans, with the inputs of other team members. Thus, it is necessary to use peer reviews, expert reviews, stakeholder reviews, quality audits, to check and validate the accuracy, feasibility and completeness of your plan and identify any gaps, errors, inconsistencies, or conflicts prior to executing it. In my experience, we have involved the corporate PMO to review the plans and ensure their consistency with the corporate project management standards and ensure that the project reporting and communication channels are aligned for all corporate major projects. This is an example of how stakeholders’ review can add value to your plans.

Adapting to changes will allow project managers cope with the uncertainties and accordingly react in an informed manner to mitigate the impacts of those changes on the project success.

Changes are inevitable in construction projects due to the high uncertainty nature of the projects especially in a design-build delivery model. Changes could be related to scope, cost, value, execution approach, project environment (site, weather, environmental, etc..). Even though, most of the standard forms of contracts have a process for managing changes against the baseline scope. project teams should establish a framework to adapt to those changes. The framework shall consider: 1- Project contingency to cover scope changes and uncertainties. 2- Establishing a change evaluation process. 3- Creating a CCB. 4- Considering schedule and cost impacts of changes.