The Core Reason Your Capital Projects Take Longer to Deliver (Even When They Finish on Time)

Why Speed Matters

There are a few primary benefits and a host of secondary benefits to completing a capital project quickly. Here are important primary benefits.

• Time to revenue is reduced and your investment is serving the people it is designed to help.

• Carrying costs during construction are reduced, including the cost of dormant capital and the cost of managing an ongoing project.

• The window of opportunity for outside events to disrupt the project is significantly narrowed.

Why Projects Take Longer – The Planning Approach is Flawed

There is a practice of carefully crafting detailed schedules that identify all important tasks required to complete the project. The tasks on these schedules number into the thousands and are arranged according to the logic in which they ideally will be implemented. The tasks are interconnected and together form a tapestry through which the critical path of activities is identified. It is presumed that a heightened focus on managing the work on the critical path results in the best possible outcome.

These schedules require a great deal of talent to prepare and include such details as the date of a framing inspection on a specific floor, three years into the future. Even though few people believe the schedule portrays the work accurately as the project progresses, the network of activities is relied upon as a map for completing the project. Many capital project owners and builders, subscribe to the approach of building detailed schedules at the onset of the project, institutionalizing a process many recognize as flawed.

Here is the serious challenge with this approach. Project activities are tactics for accomplishing part of an objective. These tactics are defined by a planner far in advance of the purpose they are intended to serve. They most likely are not appropriate to the circumstances in the design office or the field.

This is why critical path method-based schedules are often discarded, or if required are continually and painfully updated to model the current and evolving reality. They have ceased to be planning tools. The project strategy based initially on the successful implementation of a complex web of tactics has low odds of producing an on-time, let alone rapid, completion.

An Alternative Planning Approach

The alternative to this immediate formulation of detailed activities as a method of project planning is to plan a project as sets of loosely coupled modules. Modules are portions of the project that have similar sets of operations required to complete the module. A construction example is the rough-in installation of building systems on hospital patient floors. This may be a different module than the rough-in installation of building systems in the hospital lobby because the mix and complexity of systems is different in each of these areas. Design modules are similar.

A value of this module approach to planning is that within each of the modules it is possible to design workflow by determining plan increments and estimating the number of operations and pace of work through the module. Within construction modules, plan increments are physical areas of work, and it is often possible to adjust the overall duration of a module by adjusting the size of the plan increments. Within design modules, plan increments are the individual design problems and decisions that need to be resolved to complete that module.

Because modules are loosely coupled there is flexibility in designing the relationships between modules during construction to balance crew availability with workflow. There is a similar dynamic in design, however it is during construction that this benefit, along with the ability to adjust the duration of most modules, that allows a project team to design workflow to deliver the project more quickly. Project teams have been able to achieve construction duration reductions exceeding 20% using this approach when compared developing detailed project plans using the critical path methodology.

Is It Time to Discard Critical Path Thinking

It can be hard to give up the sense of certainty that a detailed schedule displaying a critical path on a Gantt chart provides. Yet schedules that provide a sense of certainty are not helpful in an uncertain project environment directly requiring a dozen or more organizations, many more supply chain providers, and scores if not hundreds of people.

While you are watching your critical path unforeseen circumstances can easily be threatening other parts of your project. To finish your capital projects as quickly as possible you need a planning approach that is designed to support the management of work in uncertain environments. A process that organizes projects as plan modules prepares project leaders to adapt to the challenges that uncertainty brings.