Major construction projects consist of many sub-projects, various phases, and cooperation among many specialized skills and disciplines. From a number of vendors, multiple work crews responsible for specific aspects of construction, and even changes to the scope of work, you need a project planning tool that is flexible and powerful enough to keep your project on time and within budget. Today’s construction projects are more complex than ever before. If a manager says that a resource is 50% available, but they have multiple roles or assignments, I will decrease that number by some factor to account for the lost productivity in bouncing between assignments, unplanned events, or priority conflicts.Īlso, your company culture may dictate some significant accommodations for employee training, coaching, and staff meetings/functions.What Is Microsoft Project Construction Scheduling? Within the world of Agile Methods, we know that resources take more time to shift gears or change focus, so we should try to minimize that to the greatest extent possible. I like the analogy of a golf handicap, where you try to create a level playing field for all resources, so you set different expectations for some so that everyone feels like they’re contributing fully and equally.īe very careful when allocating resources with multiple roles or assignments. Newer staff will start out at much lower levels of productivity and you should account for that. You should also consider some other nuances, such as the level of skill, experience, and maturity for the staff being allocated. I typically don’t allocate any resource above 90% within MS Project, rather I use 80-85% as my high-water mark to ensure I’ve accounted for some unplanned events or issues. You are then in a good position to adjust allocations where and when necessary. You will want to monitor this regularly and closely so you can stay on top of their true availability to the project and their productivity levels. You should use some method to track 100% of all resource time spent, such as via a timesheet. It considers that any unblocked days are then available at 100%, until you specify otherwise.So, in this scenario, you should allocate the resources remaining time available at 100% minus your unblocked overhead, for an allocation of 93-95%. This doesn’t factor in resource availability or productivity.Now, you need to account for the remaining 5-7% of time lost to Administrative Overhead in your MS Project resource allocations.MS Project doesn’t include those blocked days as part of a resource’s availability. Your use of a Company Holiday Calendar accounts for those lost days.Your use of Personal Calendars accounts for days lost due to planned time-off.MS Project only uses the calendar data for work scheduling and duration calculations. Your PM’s desire fits neatly within that range. Administrative Overhead: About 5-7% of time consumed on unblocked days.A total of 11-18% of time consumed for blocked and unblocked days. This figure can be large for some firms, such as where you have a project resource who supports some operational functions or works on other projects.Ĭalendar days blocked by holidays or planned time-off: About 6-11% of total week-days annually. L time where appropriate, that figure can be large for some firms or project roles.Plan for other staff work commitments. Figure about 2-3% time-off for contractors (regardless of whether it’s paid for or not).Plan for about 1-2% of time used for unplanned time-off, such as for illness or personal appointments.Plan for about 1% of time used for employee education & training.Plan for about 1% of time used for employee performance management, coaching, etc.Plan for about 2% of time used for department or staff meetings and other staff functions.For more senior staff, plan for about 1% of their time used for teaching, coaching, or mentoring others.Plan for trave This will vary considerably by organization and personnel years-of-service. If you have any historical data in your company on how staff typically spends their time, capture that and use it in the next steps.Figure about 1% of week-days (M-F) consumed by holidays annually.Figure about 5-10% of week-days consumed by planned time-off for employees. What to account for – Consider the following: I believe you have two areas to address what to account for with staff availability and productivity, and how to account for it in project planning. There’s no Best Practice that I know of, but I can share my own experience.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |