Time is money, and it is a non-renewable resource. Due to mismanagement with our schedules, it costs us so much in our business. But why do people struggle so much in managing schedules to complete a job on time? In this episode, Michael Pink, Chief Executive Officer of SmartPM, talks about the key to overcoming construction schedule delays. He also reveals that hiring schedulers is unnecessary because PMs should learn how to do it. That is the problem his company saw, and they decided to create a CPM Bootcamp to address that. Join Michael in this episode and learn to be smart with your schedules and eliminate delays.
—
Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
How To Overcome Schedule Delays Through Understanding, Discipline, And Communication With Michael Pink
What is the key to a good schedule, and why do people struggle so much with managing schedules so that a job is completed on time? That is the topic of conversation with my guest, Michael Pink. He is the CEO of SmartPM, a leading project control solution for the commercial construction industry. Michael has several years of experience in the construction industry. He is an expert in making sure that you understand where you’re at on your projects when it comes to the critical path and that everyone on your projects fully understands what needs to be done to achieve the schedule. Enjoy my conversation with Michael, and thank you for reading.
—
Mike, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
It’s great to have you on the show. I want to kick it right in. You’re all about the construction schedule. What is the key to a good construction schedule?
There are a lot of different keys, but if I’m to drill it all down to one key, it’s built using best practices. There are a lot of them that most people don’t know about.
Let’s talk about that. What are some of the best practices for a good schedule?
There are a few metrics and things that you always have to remember when building a good schedule. That’s the rule of every activity must have a predecessor and a successor. That’s quite often an area of error. There are only two activities that shouldn’t have either a predecessor or a successor. That’s the first activity because there’s nothing preceding it in the last activity. The number one rule that I think all schedulers and PMs should know is that every activity should have one thing that comes before it and one thing that comes after it, or it’s generally an incomplete schedule.
I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but what you said sounds incredibly obvious to me. You said, “This is an error that many people often make.” Is that the case?
It’s called an open-ended activity. It’s forgetting to put something after it. Even if it’s the finished milestone, it opens up float. The more that it happens, the more it results in compression by design and activities that can stack on their own. When you have that situation, it results in a critical path that is not accurate in many cases.
Every activity must have a predecessor and a successor except the first and the last activity. What are some other best practices that we need to nail if we’re going to make sense of our schedule and execute accordingly?
Another issue that we see a lot is a lot of long-duration activities. The rule of thumb, according to the DCMA methodology, is less than two months. No activity should be greater than two months. I don’t necessarily agree with that. There are specific activities that should be over two months or can’t be less than two months.
What that rule is all about is a level of detail that makes sense. If you think about a construction activity specifically two months of time to do something, it is a hard thing to gauge from a progress perspective. They should be in bite-sized pieces. A week is generally a good rule of thumb, or no more than a month is a good rule of thumb on a construction activity. If worse comes to worse, go two months.
This is a risk because if you don’t have an accurate progress calculation, which only gets harder with bigger scopes and is evident through longer duration activities, you can say the wrong percentage, which results in the wrong remaining duration and results in something becoming critical or non-critical that’s not true.
What we’re talking about is thinking logically and paying attention to detail. This is not necessarily rocket science.
There are other things like not putting a ton of constraints in. That ties back to the lack of logic. If an activity does not have a predecessor and it’s not going to happen for a while, you would pick a date and put a constraint. If that’s a start constraint, nothing is driving it. If something truly is driving it, you forgot to put in the logic, and you dropped in a constraint to hold it, when the date comes, and its predecessor’s not done, the schedule thinks it should be happening even though it shouldn’t.
There’s a finish constraint issue. If you put in finish constraints and update the schedule and the schedule’s delayed, the float value turns negative, and the program’s designed to say anything zero or less is critical, whereas that’s not what the true critical path is. The longest path is the true critical path. Another area that we want to focus on is not building a schedule with constraints because that’s the user guessing dates with no movement of that until the time comes and creating an environment where more things appear critical to the naked eye than are critical to delaying the end date of a job.
The longest path is the true critical path. Click To TweetExplain that more to me. Something is becoming more critical than it is. Therefore, it is drawing attention that isn’t necessary. Give me an example of that.
One of the most important features of a CPM scheduling program like Microsoft Project or Primavera is that once it takes all the things that you add to it, all the activities and all the logic, it produces a plan over time with all of that taken into account, but it doesn’t stop there. Each and every activity has a float value assigned to it. The float value is how much room for delay this activity has. If the float value is zero, that means that on this path of things, there is no room for delay without impacting the end date of a job. That’s what the true critical path is. It’s a series of activities that dictates the end date of the job. Those activities have no room for error.
You put a constraint on that end date. You updated and lost a month. You didn’t do anything in that month, but you put a constraint on that last activity that said we cannot get finished past this date, but now we’re a month late. Anything that has a float value of zero to 30 days will turn red. You’ll have even more activities that are critical to the look of the schedule, but you don’t truly see what is driving the end date of the job anymore. You see anything that has a float of zero to 30.
That doesn’t help you make good decisions on resources. That area is a challenge because a lot of people put finish constraints on a lot of activities midway through the job. The viewer of the schedule file itself can’t decipher, “Is this an activity that’s critical towards driving a milestone? Is this critical towards driving the end date?”
There are two major differences there. One is it’s not going to result in extended general conditions, and the other one is that it will. Because of the nature of liquidated damages being assigned to interim milestones, people are naturally thinking that’s the right thing to do. What they’re not realizing is they’re making a mistake in how to use the schedule, sabotaging themselves to look at the color scheming, to make decisions on where the important resources need to go to manage something that costs time and money versus something that may not cost anything and liquidated damages associated to it. The knee-jerk has been to put in that finish constraint. You can see how late a milestone is, but what it does is sabotage the critical path of the job.
How much of that is driven by subs giving the GCs schedule information with the intention of making sure that their stuff’s a priority, and the GC taking it, plugging it in, and getting a path that doesn’t necessarily reflect reality?
Little is coming from the sub. The sub generally produces a plan at a high level. I want to go from this area to that area, and here’s how long each one’s going to take. They’ll build a simple series of activities. It’s not like they send it over and get cut and pasted. They have a discussion. The scheduler on the GC side will build it out there and start to add the logic. I don’t think the subs are causing that. It’s more done by somebody who doesn’t understand all the best practices out there.
Let’s take more time to look at those best practices. We’ve talked about every activity having a predecessor or a successor, making sure that we’re dialed in on the long duration of activities and a clear understanding of constraints. What are some other best practices we need to focus on?
Another one is the types of logic ties you put in. There are three types of logic ties that are important. One is the finish-to-start tie. It’s saying that a successor can’t start before its predecessor is finished. There’s a start-to-start tie and some lag. That’s saying, “When I start one activity, a couple of days later, I can start the next. I don’t have to wait until it’s done.” There are many examples of that. It’s the same thing with finish-to-finish. Paint in a drywall. If you’re talking about a whole room, you don’t have to put all the drywall up to start the paint. You can’t finish the paint until the drywall is up.
The rule of thumb is to limit that. That’s because, for the most part, you should try to clear a trade out before the next trade comes in. That also aligns with the length of the activities. The less detail you’re putting into an activity, the more it’s going to be staggered with another activity. The more detail you put in, the more you should strive to get one chunk done before you start the next. There are examples of things that will always be start-to-start and finish-to-finish. If your schedule is 90% of your logic ties start-to-start or finish-to-finish, there’s a total lack of detail or an absolute ton of compression.
Clear a trade out before the next trade comes in. Click To TweetThose are indicators of a schedule that’s not been built well enough to manage a job. These are all indicators. This isn’t gospel. With different types of projects of different sizes and ways in which people do things, these numbers can fluctuate, which is why our company has produced a schedule quality rubric that’s customizable by organization or by project type or project size.
We’re raising these things as red flags but not saying, “Therefore, your job is going to be terrible. It’s raising the risk metric to know that there’s a potential, based on how this schedule’s been built, that could result in risks of mismanagement. I don’t think that there’s a one-size-fits-all deal here, which is why I’m not necessarily a huge fan of the DCMA. I like all of their calculations as indicators, but there should be ranges of acceptability based on many different factors related to the job.
What’s the one piece of flexibility that people often miss, and they’re hard on it and rigid, where they need to chill a little bit?
That’s the type of logic. A lot of times, especially when I’m training a company or our company’s training a company, the rule of thumb by the DCMA, which is Defense Contractors Management Association, put together a rule of fourteen checks that you should be looking at. If they didn’t fit the box, you failed the scheduled test.
They claim that you should have no more than 5% of your relationships being start-to-start and 5% of your relationships being finish-to-finish all of your relationships. If you think about it like a multifamily, if you were to do that and you were going room to room to room to fit that bucket, you would have a small duration and go to the next room.
Usually, multifamily or office building contractors argue it. If you think about the floor, they have flow built in from room to room. If you’re doing drywall first and tape and finish second, you’re not going to wait until it’s over. Since you have that ability to go room to room and you’ve got an overall duration, you should relax on that rule of thumb. There’s the missing logic rule. There should be no missing logic in any schedule, and I don’t care what type of project it is.
What else do we need to know? What else do we need to focus on? What’s that one area where, time and time again, you see people swinging and missing when it comes to the schedule?
Are you talking about swinging and missing on building the schedule?
Yeah.
Another metric we calculate, which is different, is I want to know how much float is in your schedule. Once you have built your schedule, assuming you’ve tried to build it with good practices, I want to know how much the average amount of float is and how many activities you have over a month or two of float. If your numbers are in the 75, 80, 90, or even more than 50% range, that’s saying half of the activities in your schedule have two months to be delayed before impacting the end date of the job. What that usually indicates to me is that there’s a lot of missing logic, or if there’s a lot of missing logic, you forgot one important tie, and that’s crew logic.
A lot of people are wired to put in what’s called hard logic. I cannot put on a second layer of concrete before I put on the first layer or first level. That’s impossible. I am not going to be able to hang duct work until there’s an actual ceiling or a roof until there’s a building. There are things that you can’t do. There are things that you could do. For instance, you could put two crews out there putting up drywall, one on one floor and one on the other.
You could do it for the entire building, but generally, you have one crew. A lot of times, if some early delays are happening and you didn’t hold that tie between floor to floor and one floor got delayed, and the other one is on time, those trades are going to stack, you’re not going to have two crews, and the schedule is now going to start telling a story that is not the way in which you need to manage a job. All of that is going to impact the critical and near-critical path. One of the biggest hidden gems we noticed, having looked at about 120,000 schedules in our database, was one of the biggest problems in construction as people forget crew logic.
Tell us more about that. What are some things to look for to let me know that I’m missing the mark there?
It’s a lot of high flow. If you think about a building and you’re going up level one to level two to level three to level four, the look of the schedule looks staggered when you create that baseline because the concrete activities are holding these ties. Mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and windows all look like they’re getting done in sequence from a high level, but they have not been connected with logic. You don’t know which trade is causing the most impact. The schedules compressing and stacking trades by design. The critical path is usually going up the building and out the top floor and not through the trades, which dictate progress. That is one of the biggest ones.
There are two ways to see that. You see a critical path that looks funny. Up the building and out the top floor is saying that if you get the structure done on time and you finish out the top floor and that the allotted amount of time, everything is going to be fine. All the trades mixing up in the middle would have no impact. It would require more people. That’s the issue. If you don’t lock in those important trades with crew logic based on the number of crews that you intend to have, that schedule is not going to react when you do an update and change the critical path. You know which trade is causing the most problems. It’s always going to say up the building and out the top floor until one of the floors takes too long.
—
Thank you for reading my discussion here with Michael. All things scheduling, and let’s have a quick break to remind you about my book, Construction Genius: Effective Hands-On Practical, Simple, NO-BS Leadership Strategy, Sales and Marketing Advice for Construction Companies. This is what you do. You go out to Amazon and purchase ten copies. That’s $200. What you do is you email me and say, “Eric, I purchased ten copies.”
Do you know what I’ll do? I’ll come into your office via Zoom with your leadership team, do a Q&A around the book, and also a bonus leadership training session. That has a value of $2,500, but you’ll get it for $200 if you buy ten or more copies. Go out to Amazon and click on the link or rather type into the box Construction Genius. My book will pop up. If you buy ten copies, contact me. We’ll have an awesome time in that one-hour Q&A and leadership training session. Now, back to my conversation with Michael.
—
How can owners, GCs, and subs work together to manage the schedule effectively?
A lot of discussion needs to ensue. The process should be as follows. Once the baseline has been established, the GC should be out there updating the data in a given timeframe. It could be every two weeks. A month is about as long as you should wait. You could do it every week, but they should go out and status the job. They should say what started, what date, what activities finished on what dates in that timeframe, and what activities are ongoing and estimate progress with a methodology that’s not guessing but at least being able to look at it and guess 50% or 40%.
Once that’s completed, you update the schedule to see in that period of time, based on all the progress we made in that period of time. What happened to the end date? If you wait a month, the end date is going to slip. That’s the point in time where you need to talk to the relevant subs about mitigating some delays that have happened.
You will be able to identify quickly, if you build a good schedule, what the critical path is now and what trades need to be discussed on recovering from delay, but not running out and making that change to the schedule. Going out and having a discussion first of some of the ideas they might have to speed up those tasks, whether it’s getting more resources now or down the road, ways in which they can speed up the durations they need to get that subcontractor to buy in. Maybe working weekends for the next month. I don’t know.
Let me ask you. Let’s say I’m a GC going out to the job site or meeting with the sub. Give me some key questions that I need to ask him or her so that I can get my hands around any of the schedule issues and make sure that the project’s moving forward.
After you do the update, you’ll see what happened. Maybe a delay happened. At the end date moved out, you’ll see that there was a specific trade that caused that. The number one question I would ask is, “Why did that happen?” If it was an owner issue, I’d point it out to the owner and say, “This activity drove the critical path, and we’ve lost a little bit of time. How do you want us to proceed?” If you’re talking to a sub, you can say, “You’re not keeping up with durations. I want to know why. Going forward, we need to come up with a plan that will overcome the delays that have already occurred. How do you think we’ll achieve that?”
We can work extra shifts, staggering some of your stuff down the road or now, and get their insights on how they’re going to recover when there is a delay. Changes happen to the schedule to overcome delays. The problem is that the scheduler or the PM starts dictating things to shorten the duration without having the conversation and discussing the ramifications and the causation of those issues. Not giving them a chance to weigh in usually results in them not doing it or inefficiencies that they didn’t agree to. That’s where the rollercoaster effect of arguments and headbutting starts.
At what point do you think a GC should consider hiring a full-time scheduler as opposed to delegating it somewhere else in the organization, like revenue size or a number of projects, based on your experience?
I don’t think it’s necessary to hire a scheduler. The problem has been that most PMs and supers have never been taught what this process is all about and how to do it well. As a company, we saw that problem and created what we call a CPM bootcamp where we’ll meet with supers and PMs over a two-day period and teach them what this program is doing, how it works, and how it aligns with your goals.
A lot of PMs and supers have seen a lot of crappy schedules, and they don’t necessarily trust them. We’ve had to teach them that your goal is to get done on time and on a budget. This tool is doing calculations for you to achieve that. You’re foregoing those calculations to try to do it in your head. That’s impossible. Being impossible starts on a $10 million project and above.
Tell us a little more about that bootcamp. What stuff would someone learn going to that bootcamp? What’s the agenda? Where do you start? What’s your goal? Where do you want to bring them at the end of that?
The number one thing is we have to teach Microsoft or Primavera for your entire career using it. CPM Scheduling program stands for Critical Path Method Scheduling. What we do need to point out is that this is a calculator. It’s not something that you put in logic and durations, and it spits out a plan. That’s not where it ends. The most powerful features of this program are the float values and the criticality. That’s how you make good decisions. That critical path, the definition of it is, it’s the path that you can’t be delayed on without impacting the end date of the job. Those float values are your indicators of how much wiggle room you have, which is what you need to rely on to make good decisions.
There are a lot of pitfalls in the programs themselves. If you miss a few things, like a logic tie, it can alter every single number. You end up in that situation where you’re following this thing verbatim. It’s broken, and it’s making you make bad decisions, which is that reality is why you have felt such hatred towards this process. If you understand these best practices and rely on it, it’s doing the math for you to answer the question that you have every single day.
What needs to happen now to not impact the project two years from now? If you don’t know the answer to that question, which we humans can’t figure out on our own because we don’t know how to do complex math like that, and if you do, you wouldn’t be doing this job. It’s getting them to admit that they can’t do that and none of us can. It’s complicated. That’s an unbelievable level of math that Einstein couldn’t do.
The program is designed to answer that question day in and day out, but it does come with a responsibility. You build the schedule well enough to manage a job. You don’t make a lot of these mistakes that happen with such a complex thing like writing 2,000 activities and assigning logic to them in a manner that’s aligned with best practices. Letting them know the pain they have felt where they thought everything was fine, leading up to 75% when the end date blew out, is because of the challenges in this process.
We teach them the process for building a good quality schedule that they can rely on to make those decisions. How do you do that? Once we teach them that, we let them know that that responsibility needs to carry through to the updating process. In addition to maintaining that quality, you can’t start to try to course correct in ways that you hope will happen over and over. You get to a schedule that’s unreliable because it’s impossible. That’s the compression effect.
You’re not looking at the delays. You’re only looking at the future. What’s happening is your project’s delayed. You’re course-correcting with changes. You’re compressing the job. That’s going to result in your subcontractors not making money, and they’re going to leave. They’re not going to bring the people you need. You’re exacerbating this problem by being overly optimistic.
By teaching them those pitfalls and giving them a path to do this right and well, we see that they end up feeling much better and have a lot less stress on their jobs, and they embrace it. We have to get them to buy in and to know that this isn’t dark art. There’s a real technical side to this. We have to connect with them to the day-to-day challenges that they’ve had and let them know that if they follow this process, those stresses go away.
You look like the rockstar because you’re the one getting them done on time and on budget. If there is a problem, you know what it is. You know how to respond. You press the buttons that are important to getting to your goal, and it works. That’s how we train them. That goes on over a two-day period with a couple of workshops where they can see they get a good grade on their schedule because we’ve got a grading system that checks the level of best practices built into their schedule. We also do the same thing in an updating workshop.
We do some follow-up after that because we know it’s a lot to digest in two days. We have office hours every two weeks or every month for an hour when all of the people are in the midst of updating their schedules. We answer their questions using repetitive education. It starts to stick. After about six months, these PMs and supers could be schedulers at that point. It’s making them in control of their own destiny because the problem that exists when you have a scheduler that does all the schedulers and PMs and supers that builds all the jobs is the scheduler doesn’t necessarily understand how to build, and the PMs and supers don’t necessarily know how to schedule.
When the PM and the super get it, they take on the ownership of that. They manage effectively. What ends up happening is they start to not have that level of stress at the end of the job. They see the problems before they happen. These people are problem solvers. That’s why they’re in construction. They’re good at it. They’re optimistic. They go through hell to get there, but they show up to the next job. We see it being effective, especially in the middle market.
Tell us more about SmartPM.
I was a consultant getting involved in projects that had been delayed or over budget or working on projects that were headed towards something that didn’t look so good. I was always asked to figure out why this was happening. I always got the most out of the schedule data because it’s the only data set that has every part and piece. For the most part, it’s tied logically together. You can see how everything interrelates. No other data set provided that.
I got knowledgeable about extracting meaningful data from that data set. I also saw a lot of problems. For me, analyzing the schedule and getting to understand those things was time-consuming but powerful nonetheless. Having done it as many times as I did, I got tired of it, but I also saw a lot of room for improvement.
Not improving the process of scheduling itself or those programs, but looking at the data in ways that would speak towards risks and problems and identifying the delays causing it enabled us to do our job well. There was a time constraint and an experience constraint. I thought a million different things that you can do. If you could do it as a human in a short amount of time, it would add a lot of value, but you can’t. The manual analytics is a long thing. They pay a lot of money for consultants. They don’t hire them to do it. The only answer was to teach a computer to do it.
That’s what we did. We said, “Let’s build a product that sits on top of this process and gives you the understanding that you need to have that solves a lot of these problems.” First, you need to do the analytics and put it into a presentable format. The people involved can understand it instead of looking at that 100-page Gantt chart that doesn’t tell you much.
It’s all the math behind it brought up to a level where executives, project controls, teams, schedulers, and site teams can all be on the same page about the issues and understand them for what they are to make good decisions. Part of it is making sure you’re building a schedule that’s good enough to manage a job. The next piece is, once you do that, study performance for what it is. Look at the response to the performance through the updates and project out risk issues based on the learnings you have from those updates.
There are many different construction companies out there of different types. Who is the one company that needs to go out to SmartPMTech.com and talk to you? What’s the one type of company that should contact you?
There are two. Any company that’s involved in commercial construction. ENR top 200 to 300 benefit from our program because they have people there in project controls who are doing this stuff manually. You only have so much time and energy to do it and many resources that they don’t necessarily get to do everything that they could do from an analytical perspective on their jobs. These people are run ragged. They benefit by being able to do much more in-depth analysis and look at what the data says to start resulting in better outcomes across their entire portfolio. They take our product, run with it, and get to do things that they never had time to do before, but they understand it thoroughly.
There are the GCs that don’t have project control teams, which start in the E&R 400 and span the complete middle market. Those are the people who don’t have visibility and understanding of their jobs. They’re the ones that end up in more claims in those situations where their business could go out of business. A lot of it is rooted in not having full visibility, performance, and risk on their jobs and not having a schedule that’s built well enough to manage a job, but needing non-schedulers and non-project controls people to understand and grasp the concepts and executives to obtain that visibility. We fill that project control gap through technology.
All of these companies need project controls. Less than 4% of the GCs in America have those teams. We fill that void. For the companies that do have those teams, we give them depth that they never thought they’d ever have. GC side is benefiting greatly. On the owner’s side, making sure that your contractor is performing well, is accountable, and knows how to build a good schedule is what they purchase our product for. Being able to show up to a meeting with some understanding that’s not looking at a building and hoping is a pain point that we solve on that owner’s side.
How can people get in touch with you?
We have a website, www.SmartPMTech.com. The best way is to make sure that it seems like something you’re interested in and request a demo on any one of those pages. We’ll get in touch with you. We give it a free analysis as part of it, which you’ll get some value out of for meeting with us.
As we’re wrapping up here, Mike, let’s say I’ve hired a new superintendent. I want to make sure that he or she is dialed in on how to build and manage a schedule well. Let’s focus on managing the schedule. What are the top three things I’m going to make sure that person has nailed in the first 90 days?
First and foremost, you can assess the aptitude of a scheduler or the experience of a scheduler based on whether or not they’re following those best practices. You want to first run their schedule through an engine like ours and see what grade it gets. Aside from that, you want to look at how frequently they want to update. If they want to update once a month, they’re putting the project at risk of delays happening without them realizing the extent of them. They should be updating more frequently and want to do that to see what the critical path is and what the end date variances are.
If they’re not doing that, they feel like they can do this math in their head, which is a risk. From there, assessing things like compression and management of delay through looking at changes, how frequently they’re changing things on the critical and near critical paths, and how much they’re progressing the plan versus actual earned value. If those things start to go apart, they’re supposed to be earning more, and they’re not, but the end date’s not changing, which is resulting in compression. Those are indicators of a person who doesn’t understand the things that they need to manage a job effectively.
When it results in compression, that person doesn't really understand the things that they need to effectively manage the job. Click To TweetMichael, you’ve been generous with your time. I appreciate your insights, and thanks for joining us.
Eric, thank you. It’s been nice to talk with you. Thank you for the opportunity.
—
Thank you for reading. Feel free to check out Michael’s website, SmartPMTech.com, for all things related to interpreting scheduled data correctly and taking the appropriate steps to make sure that you finish your projects on time. Feel free to share this episode with other people you think would benefit from reading it. Thank you once again for being a faithful reader of the show.
Important Links
- SmartPM
- Construction Genius: Effective Hands-On Practical, Simple, NO-BS Leadership Strategy, Sales and Marketing Advice for Construction Companies
- https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/MaPink
- https://10minuteswitheric.youcanbook.me
About Michael Pink
