What do you do if your civil engineering projects are constantly behind schedule?

- Investigating the project history and records to realize the root cause of the project delays, with the support of the project team. - Studying the project's critical path to conclude the activities that can be mitigated (either by crashing the activities by injecting more resources or by fast-tracking [overlapping the activities] through increasing the supervision. - Re-generating the project risk register to put a practical plan for each risk. - Study the outstanding sections in the project and find out how to expedite the work in such activities. -Organize training sessions for the project team to improve their technical skills, and to avoid any human factors that caused any of the project's delays.

*We should be worried when the project we are working on starts to fall behind schedule,do not panic.This by itself is not a step towards dealing with the project falling behind schedule but is the first step towards solving this and any other problem we encounter.Panicking will only impair our judgment and worsen the whole situation. *Identify Core Issues such as our team’s efficiency, the client’s additional scope of work,complexity of the project,funds available for the project and so on. *Reorganize,Rearrange and Reschedule by squeezing the remaining work into the remaining time. *After we have identified the causes and dealt with them, made changes and rescheduled everything, make sure that our team and the client are on the same page.

If your civil engineering projects are consistently late, it’s high time you take some measures to eliminate the problem. To identify the root causes, carry out an in-depth study that will ensure you get to the bottom of the delays. They could be due to such things as poor project planning, improper distribution of resources, lack of communication channels, the unknown nature of soil at the site or weather elements, and perhaps external elements like government regulations changes.

Optimism bias is endemic in the industry. Unless it effects the bottom line why change it - nobody else is. Once you've had a tender rejected because you submitted a realistic schedule rather than a ridiclous one that met the clients contract end date and watched as your competitors delivered the project 5 years late you wont do it again and the same outcomes will continue.

This phase is very important as fine tuning the whole process, will help us avoid any other delays in the future, either because we will have a better idea of the output of the resources available to us, or because we will be better and planning. It's important to involve the whole team at this stage, since they are involved during the whole process, they become effectively experts in the matter, at least regarding the particular project that was delayed, this because one of the most obvious cause of the delay could be our management, while we love to think about ourselves as the best at what we do, is important to learn that there's always space for improvement in any discipline, and management is not different.

Some of the things you need to assess to avoid civil engineering projects being behind the schedule are; - Project's scope. Scope of the project should be assessed before the start of implementation. - Resources. It should be clear about the available resources such as materials and equipment's against the required resources and technology if it's feasible. - Anticipation of uncertainties such as weather and external factors that can affect project schedule including projects milestones approvals and certificate payments. - Project planning. After assessing clearly the above constraints, one should come up with a realistic project planning to achieve given project time.