Planning a construction project comes down to five things: account for every resource the job will consume, set benchmarks and build a schedule with slack in it, agree how the team will communicate before anyone breaks ground, review the design for constructability, then measure and report performance against the plan as the work runs. The first four are done once. The fifth is what tells you whether the other four worked.
Construction Project Planning Starts Before Anyone Breaks Ground
Most construction projects that finish over budget or behind schedule were set up to do so before any work started. The planning phase decides what the job can absorb: which resources have been accounted for, how much slack sits in the schedule, whether the design has been checked for constructability, and whether anyone is measuring progress against the plan once crews are on site.
That holds whether the job is a highway, a water treatment plant, a mine expansion or a commercial build. Scale changes the numbers involved, not the sequence of decisions — and on a capital project, the cost of skipping one of them scales with everything else.
What follows is a checklist for a construction project. Although many of these may seem like fundamental building blocks, they are well worth revisiting as projects continue to grow in scope and complexity.
1. Establish a Foundation for All Project Resources
Think of this as your project plan’s infrastructure. Skilled labor, large and small equipment, and building materials are perhaps the most obvious resources to account for when planning a construction project. And they typically make up the bulk of the budget.
But make sure to anticipate and plan for line items that might be less top-of-mind, such as time and costs involved in securing permits and inspections, site utilities, office space rent, tools and office supplies, and perhaps even legal fees.
How do you effectively manage and track all these items throughout the planning and building phases? With a construction software program — one that is accessible to on-site and remote team members. There are a variety of such programs on the market today. Not all are created alike or have the same features. Plan on doing some leg work upfront to research what is ideal for your construction project; and start by researching what a construction software program needs to doon a job of your type and size.
2. Determine Benchmarks and Create Schedules to Support the Project
Everyone involved in the build needs to know where to be, what to do, how to do it, and when to have it done. Having these individual and project targets in place provides a baseline against which to track progress and results.
Plans slip for ordinary reasons. Weather closes a site, the supply chain is interrupted, the wrong materials arrive. Labor availability can tighten without warning, and a subcontractor can lose a crew to another job right in the middle of your sequence.
It’s impossible to account for every potential unexpected scenario, but it is possible to mitigate some of the impact. How? Build some wiggle room into the schedule. Have equipment on-site ready to siphon accumulated water resulting from heavy rains. Source materials as locally as possible to eliminate supply chain issues. When the unanticipated happens, you’ll be ready to meet some of these challenges directly to help keep everything on track for a successful construction project. Where you put that float matters as much as how much of it you have, and that’s most of what separates an optimistic schedule from a realistic schedule.
3. Set Up Team Management and Communication
The best-laid plan is useless without effective communication. How do you ensure everyone involved in the build knows what’s happening and why? Having a pre-build meeting with everyone — virtual or in-person — is a good start. Such a meeting can help identify potential areas of confusion or conflicts before the first boot hits the ground and the first hole is dug. And because each project is unique, communicating the information and expectations specific to your build will ensure everyone’s on the same page.
Here are some things you should cover:
Who talks to whom
- What are the processes and chain of commands to ensure the right information gets to the right people at the right time?
- Is there a designated point person(s) for individual employees or teams to get clarification on job-level responsibilities or to express concerns?
- How are team-level jobs assigned and managed?
What everyone is expected to do
- What are the expectations, goals and timelines for all phases of the build?
- When is everyone expected to be available or on-site? And how do they clock in?
- Are there required progress meetings to attend?
How problems and changes travel
- How are mistakes communicated to the broader team so they’re not inadvertently repeated?
- When, how and with whom are change orders shared?
- What is the quality control process?
How the software and the documents work
- Will everyone be trained in how to use the chosen construction software?
- Why is accuracy and consistency in using such software so important?
- How are project documents managed, distributed and accessed?
This is just a starting point. Consider what else you, the foreman, the superintendent, the project manager, and the owner want everyone to know (ideally, they’ll be at this meeting as well).
There’s going to be a lot of information shared at this meeting, so prepare materials to distribute to participants for an easy point of reference. These could include the meeting agenda, contact list, contract, schedule, policies and procedures, drawings, etc. Again, each
4. Review Plans for Design and Construction Feasibility
Few things cost more at the start of a construction project than discovering the design is flawed, or worse, not even feasible.
Constructability review means having your team of designers, architects, consultants, engineers, foremen, etc., examine the drawings or designs to ensure there are no errors, incomplete information or other reasons it can’t be built. On a modeled project, much of that review is clash and constructability review, done against the federated model before you issue drawings. To be extra sure, invest in a third-party professional (such as an architect, contractor or engineer) to review them as well. Having this second set of eyes from a peer reviewer can prevent late-stage change orders, delays and pricey cost overruns.
5. Monitor and Report on Ongoing Performance
So how do you know if all that effort you put into planning your
Remember that step above about procuring a construction software program? It can serve as your source of truth, the one place where all the critical data and documentation from your build is housed, analyzed and acted on. These details are going to tell the complete story of your project, such as:
- Whether the different aspects of the project are on target with established schedules
- Attendance, productivity levels and work quality of the on-site labor teams
- Ongoing costs of work hours, materials, delays, change orders and how they align with the overall budget
- Areas of inefficiencies or problems that have the potential to lead to delays or cost overruns
- Full accounting of who did what and when they did it
Being armed with real-time data can help you and other stakeholders make informed decisions throughout the project, making any adjustments if necessary. And that can make the difference between a
As an added bonus, all that data still has considerable value long after the build is over — better cost-estimating accuracy, more realistic scheduling expectations, lessons learned and more. Together, these can be used as historical information when bidding on and planning for future builds.
What the Monitoring Step Needs from a System
Step five is the one that most often gets skipped, usually because the system you have can’t support it without a lot of manual effort. Three things make the difference:
- Progress claimed against the same breakdown your estimate and schedule were built on, so percent complete means the same thing to your estimator, your scheduler, and your project manager.
- Cost and schedule read from one dataset on one cut date, rather than two reports you compile separately and then reconcile in a meeting.
- Project history that survives closeout in a form you can query, because that benchmarking value above only exists if the data outlives the job.
Those three points are worth checking against whatever system you use to run step five. InEight Schedule covers planning, scheduling, and risk on one shared breakdown, so your plan and what actually happened stay comparable.
