Improving The Construction Management Process

The project manager of a construction company has developed the following network diagram for her building construction project. After receiving the plans, the manager must coordinate a number of tasks. Key areas she want to focus on, is time and risk. “Planning is responsible for project Time Management. The Plan process selects a scheduling methodology, tool, sets the format and establishes criteria for developing and controlling the schedule of a project. Rules and approaches for scheduling process are defined by the scheduling methodology”. PMI (2008)

The total duration of the construction project by adding the estimated task duration serially would give us 70 weeks. But some tasks within some activities can be done in parallel sequence or simultaneously, which would significantly reduce the construction project completion time using the critical path method (CPM). In this method the longest path is the critical path which runs through one of the route in the project network diagram from start to finish. This project network diagram is illustrated on the printed assignment page, we have 10 tasks listed from A to J. Below is an activity list of the tasks;

In 1957, DuPont developed the project management method that was to become the critical path method (CPM). As seen in the case of The Campus Wedding, by utilizing the CPM, managers are able to take a closer look to the complexities of a project and their timelines. The CPM provides some excellent benefits, which include an easy to read graphical view of a project. It also predicts the time required to complete the project, and illustrates which activities, specifically, are critical to maintaining the schedule and which are not. This is useful in operations management because it provides valuable insight to see if, or whether a project will be completed on time and what may occur if there are delays.

Fondahl, John W., “Non-Computer Approach to the Critical Path Method for the Construction Industry”, Report #9, Stanford University, 1961 Fondahl, John W. “The History of Modern Project Management – Precedence Diagramming Methods: Origins and Early Development”. Project Management Journal. Volume XVIII. No. 2. June 1987. Hendrickson, Chris & Au, Tung, Project Management for Construction, Prentice Hall, 1989 Weber, Sandra C., Scheduling Construction

Critical Path Method has been extensively used for planning and scheduling construction work for decades. As mentioned earlier, the study conducted by Tavakoli and Riachi (1990) results from responding industries has shown overwhelming satisfaction of using the CPM technique for planning and scheduling projects.

This method fails to provide a clear view of the actual ongoing work at the project site since it is done manually. Moreover, poor judgement of an activity progress by the project managers can result in improper allocation of resources which may affect the cost and/or schedule of the project [1]. Another reason is that even with the presence of building modeling package, the difficult interaction between a scheduling software and BIM is resulting in it not being exploited to its full potential [3].

Effective management of resources including but not limited to managing architect, engineer, building contractor and subcontractors are crucial to Project Time Management. Professional team and third party contractors are difficult to manage as to that of in-house resources. Time attracts costs and must therefore be carefully arranged, screened and monitored. Effective managing of contract time can be the difference between on time schedule and schedule overruns. In order to manage contract the implementation of penalties and other mitigation actions must be established.

Over the past few years, the construction industry has been changing dramatically. One of the most important stages in the construction management and business management is the planning phase. They share similar two main levels of planning which are the strategic and operational planning. However, business management planning to decide in advance what should be done, and how to do it, when you do and you are done. On the other hand, Construction management strategic planning is to deal with selection on a high level of overall objective of the project, including the scope, procurement methods, schedules and financing options but the planning of operations, including the

Project scheduling can be performed in many ways. Some of the more common and popular methods of project scheduling are network analysis and the critical path method of scheduling (CPM). Although companies do not always use these methods in there exact form, most do tend to use a modified version of one or both of these methods. I discovered that Craft does not use network analysis or CPM, but they do have a scheduling method that works for them and is quite similar to CPM.

The construction management is the process of controlling, coordinating, and planning from the beginning to the completion of the project. A construction management is one of the important fields in the society that can be counted on developing a nation’s infrastructure. The aim of construction management is to meet the client’s requirements with a high level of quality, that’s why it is important to include the risk management as a significant part of the construction management. Construction management can be categorized into different types, which is heavy civil, residential, commercial, and the environmental ("What Is a

To shorten completion time of construction projects, various researchers have worked on time-cost tradeoff to optimize project plans and resource allocation keeping in mind no potential loss in quality. This paper discussed various research findings in this area and summarizes methods and approaches found. Various approach have been introduced such as The Potential Quality Loss Cost (PQLC) in time-cost tradeoff proposes linear programming model preventing crashing of activities beyond quality limits and bring practicality in planning. Another research highlights using linear and integer programming algorithms for resource optimization while scheduling of project, thereby analyzing potential time-cost tradeoff. In a different approach, researcher used fuzzy multi-attribute utility methodology and justifying it with computational analysis to provide an alternate solution to the problem. A research focusing on principle of genetic algorithms, results in development of VBA macro programs which uses the total project cost as an objective function and accounts for project-specific constraints on time and cost.

Our research is applied for a specific package of construction projects (concrete work) based on 17 projects with a 115 records.

Let us first take a look through to some other major business and technology trends we are facing today that will impact how we execute our construction projects. It is no secret that we are living in a highly competitive environment, thanks to the global financial crisis there are fewer available projects with more contractors vying for them. Owners and governments increasingly demand that you deliver their complex projects faster and at a lower cost. You need to provide more accurate cost estimates and material quantities to ensure that you stay on budget and because project timelines are shrinking you have to manage projects with as few time and cost intensive RF eyes and change orders as possible. In addition owners and governments are increasingly savvy and expect you to have new qualifications before awarding the work. The construction industry is realigning in a fundamental way that is construction firms like yours are driving integrated practices in more effective production cycles by taking more control of the supply chain.

Depended upon developing trends of not only the U.S. construction industry, also the worldwide one in general, this research is precisely about the cooperating relationships and efficiencies of a full collaboration, including Integrated Project Delivery (IPD), Lean Construction, and Building Information Modeling (BIM) in intensifying performance of plenty construction project types. Specifically, this research investigates and analyzes numerous necessary means and techniques used for a true collaboration of cooperation of IPD, Lean, and BIM (or ILB in short); additionally, the efficiency of full-ILB cooperation is proved by the examination of two important variables of a construction project, which are Cost Performance Index (CPI) and Schedule Performance Index (SPI), with participation of more than 75 projects and case studies. Technically, three essential phases of a construction project, such as pre-construction (planning, pre-design, estimating costs, schematic design, and constructability review), construction (managing constructing process, tracking project schedule, and controlling costs), and post-construction (closeout work and final completion) are specifically investigated together with proposed conceptually synergistic models of these factors. Investigating all possible components for a perfect ILB and evaluating this partnership’s effects on project cost and schedule performance are spreading more and more knowledge and applications of

In almost every business, project management is critically important. The critical path method (CPM) will provide a timeline for the project manager for when tasks should be completed. In addition, providing a deadline and the negative effects it will have on the following successors if not completed on time. These many task are interdepended. Therefore, the CPM provides the start and finishes times of the tasks, and identifies the few tasks on the critical path that the project manager should observe to determine which task needs the most attention. Already discovering and incorporating the details the task or assignments may require, CPM calculates all task times, which can be measured in hours, days, weeks, and months. For any unintended manually input errors, a warning message will be provided. Including an automatic successor generator, task numbering comment, and data validation, makes it easier on the project manager.