When Critical Paths Become Endangered
CPM Schedule Decay: It’s ugly – watching a contractor’s best laid plans slowly disintegrate into chaos over the course of months – even years. The degree of this disintegration is commensurate with the baseline schedule level of aggressivity, or deprecation of project controls. Not infrequently do an owner and builder contract to build according to overly aggressive schedules that they should know – can only portend disaster.
Savvy builders know from experience that such contract schedules are unrealistic, yet they agree to these terms every day. Why? Because they know the likelihood of design changes and change orders will inevitably make the contract schedule obsolete, inevitably affording them the slack they need to extend deadlines.
This happens so often because many daunting design challenges are met with feeble attempts by design professionals to substantially* define the work in the base (not revised) construction drawings. Most notorious is the absence of MEP and structural pre-coordination that should take place between the designing architect and MEP and structural engineers that is meant to obviate design conflicts, or ‘clashes’. Sadly, there seems never to be enough pre-coordination, and the trades end up having to make multiple resubmittals, or issue RFIs, to resolve conflicts.
RFIs necessitating time consuming and disruptive designing on the fly is the consequence of design oversight, especially if it involves the owner. Many designers mistakenly convince themselves that they can feed’ a job with frequent revisions, or build the job from ‘sketches,’ similar to the fast-track approach, until the schedule begins to run away. Perhaps the design team expects the sub-contractors to pick up the slack.
Projects with unforeseen, or pre-existing conditions present a particular challenge to the design and build teams to keep on schedule, as do complex projects, or those with many technical or sophisticated innovations, or finishes. A scheduler must skuffle to keep up with the continual barrage of RFIs, SWOs, and change orders for these projects, which he must integrate into the project database. If not, the schedule lapses into disarray. If the information is not forthcoming, the schedule becomes threatened, and eventually abandoned.
Some projects become side-tracked to such an extent that only a rebaselining can represent the revised critical path, and this too changes every month, just like the weather. We used to say the team were “flying by the seat of their pants.” As a scheduler, one usually can see catastrophes coming. It begins when the contractor becomes incommunicado: perhaps embroiled in the building process, he no longer returns calls or emails regarding updates, or otherwise.
Other projects become completely unmanageable, in terms of methodology, when there no longer is a linear path of progression, or there are too many, i.e., a schedule would be superfluous to represent. If an owner or contractor understands nothing else about the CPM, he knows when a scheduler will no longer avail them, or is no longer ‘needed.’ In my mind, this acknowledgement is tantamount to an utter failed effort in planning, and concedes the ability to represent disruptions in a claim schedule, or if the contract should come to arbitration or litigation.
I wonder at contractors who abandon, or otherwise let a schedule tank as a consequence of project instability. I suppose they – at some given point, became resigned to the fact that they would not be able to develop proper claim schedules to represent disruption, i.e., they accept the responsibility for the cost of such disruptions, and they do not bother to contest what they could nary challenge in any cogent fashion.
*substantial, meaning: having all the elements necessary for the builder to construct a substantially complete product.
