Seeking assistance re: Project Recovery

I work in an industry where the client's processes often delay contractor's delivery activities.



The resulting delays are generally unanticipated for the contractor's first project and absorbed at their cost. They then learn the lesson and re-adjust their planning process to varying degrees of success and try to recoup financial losses during the next project(s).



I wish you luck in convincing the client that all these 1 to 2 hour delays are unreasonable and justified without a detailed diary of evidence. The client may take the view that this is the contractor's risk and should have foreseen it. How this is possible without extensive experience of the project environment and especially if the job is competitively tendered is beyond me....



However to help you recover some time I would suggest a detailed schedule would be more in order. You tend to find micro-management of the schedule is more necessary in your situation. A more detailed schedule at activity level will allow you to carefully plan dependancies. The BoQ is a good prompt for the activities you may want to put on the plan. This will assist you also in measuring progress accurately as you can more easily estimate progress at this micro-level by using, say, square meterages from the BoQ. This will give you some clout with your sub-contractors as you will know exactly how far ahead or behind they are and you will be able to pay them accurately on work completed. Incidently measurement of progress is generally far easier for civils than for other disciplines such as M&E.



There is however a provisio. The amount of effort you will need to expend on producing and statusing a schedule to this detail may not be realistic. I would suggest you look at critical activities:- those on the critical path, long lead-in and risky (from a project point of view). Plan these in more detail and those of less concern in less detail. By less detail I mean by rolling up several activities into a single bar on the chart. Also accuracy of work completed may not be that necessary for payment and invoicing purposes.



As a rule of thumb I was told an activity should be around 6 weeks or £30k. But again this can be varied and would not be approprate for short duration,extreme time critical works such as an overnight system outage.



There is no right answer and more than one way to do this. You will need to find a balance between too little and too much detail, have some reasoning in your own mind for what you do and be prepared to be flexible.

I work in an industry where the client's processes often delay contractor's delivery activities.



The resulting delays are generally unanticipated for the contractor's first project and absorbed at their cost. They then learn the lesson and re-adjust their planning process to varying degrees of success and try to recoup financial losses during the next project(s).



I wish you luck in convincing the client that all these 1 to 2 hour delays are unreasonable and justified without a detailed diary of evidence. The client may take the view that this is the contractor's risk and should have foreseen it. How this is possible without extensive experience of the project environment and especially if the job is competitively tendered is beyond me....



However to help you recover some time I would suggest a detailed schedule would be more in order. You tend to find micro-management of the schedule is more necessary in your situation. A more detailed schedule at activity level will allow you to carefully plan dependancies. The BoQ is a good prompt for the activities you may want to put on the plan. This will assist you also in measuring progress accurately as you can more easily estimate progress at this micro-level by using, say, square meterages from the BoQ. This will give you some clout with your sub-contractors as you will know exactly how far ahead or behind they are and you will be able to pay them accurately on work completed. Incidently measurement of progress is generally far easier for civils than for other disciplines such as M&E.



There is however a provisio. The amount of effort you will need to expend on producing and statusing a schedule to this detail may not be realistic. I would suggest you look at critical activities:- those on the critical path, long lead-in and risky (from a project point of view). Plan these in more detail and those of less concern in less detail. By less detail I mean by rolling up several activities into a single bar on the chart. Also accuracy of work completed may not be that necessary for payment and invoicing purposes.



As a rule of thumb I was told an activity should be around 6 weeks or £30k. But again this can be varied and would not be approprate for short duration,extreme time critical works such as an overnight system outage.



There is no right answer and more than one way to do this. You will need to find a balance between too little and too much detail, have some reasoning in your own mind for what you do and be prepared to be flexible.