Deliver: predictability and certainty in project delivery

This is the fifth and final article in this series that describes the underpinning steps of the FLOW methodology for capturing complex processes, integrating and streamlining the overall process, converting the sequence into an operating schedule, and ‘managing, controlling, and reporting’ the ultimate project using the detailed understanding of the information-driven process. This article describes the age-old problem of project / design team members deciding to deviate from the plan and undertake work in a sequence that satisfies their personal drivers or the drivers of an individual business rather than the integrated team. Experience has shown that many conventionally planned projects suffer from this problem. Therefore, having produced an integrated schedule, the integrated process needs to be managed, controlled, monitored, and reported if the project is to be delivered with a minimum of schedule and budget variance.

FLOW should be adopted by any organisation or project management professional faced with managing information intensive processes in any sector: construction, infrastructure, software development, marine, aerospace, discovery research, and others.

Plan the work, work to the plan: what is the issue?

In utilising a collaborative approach to defining the project delivery process, it is anticipated that the team will be far more focused on working to the integrated process as it represents a network of commitments made between team members to one another. Although this process creates a lot more affinity with the schedule, it is interesting to note that if engineers/designers are not guided and managed, they can very quickly disregard the optimum process in favour of selecting activities to undertake based on preference, experience, and in many cases a desire to ‘get on with something’. All too often this type of deviation from the integrated schedule by one individual engineer/designer results in others using incorrect information (as many information requirements may have been assumed by the person undertaking the prior task) and being forced to undertake his or her design in a sub-optimal manner. Once this is allowed to occur, it becomes almost impossible to implement action to get the process back to the target schedule, and the deviation increases to the point where the ongoing process is unworkable (with the baseline no longer being a viable basis for controlling the work or assessing performance). Experience has shown that many conventionally planned projects suffer from this problem. Therefore, having produced an integrated design and delivery schedule, the process needs to be managed, controlled, monitored, and reported if the project is to be delivered to it successfully.

Owing to the definition achieved in the design and procurement phases of the schedule, as well as the construction phase, when determining the integrated project process, management, and control approaches that have been commonplace in other industries (including construction), yet are, traditionally, perceived as being unusable in design/engineering, can be implemented throughout all phases of the project delivery process. Production control principles, such as Last Planner? , dictate that an activity should not be undertaken until everything that is needed to complete it is available (closing out activities is the primary driver here). Yet in engineering/design, those activities that fall within an iterative loop (i.e., are interdependent) do not have all of the information needed to start and be completed and, as such, will never be made ready, thus the need to make assumptions or work collaboratively with others in order to proceed. As these iterative loops become identified, the activities within them are known, they have been scheduled accordingly; hence, production control principles can be applied.

Lookahead planning: one step at a time

The schedule is split into a number of equal work periods—the duration of the work period being agreed between the members of the project team earlier in the process (as the WBS / granularity of the process is defined ideally). The overall schedule is then simply divided into a number of equal work periods, resulting in each work period containing a piece of the overall work plan. To initiate the delivery of the schedule, the designers that own activities within the first work period are asked to proceed with the work and give feedback on their level of completion by the start of the next work period. In this way, the team members focus their effort on a small piece of the overall schedule, completing the activities in the sequence and timescales defined by the schedule as opposed to looking ahead and undertaking activities that they would like to do. In this way, the ongoing rate of production of all stakeholders/team members is dictated by the integrated schedule, allowing their performance against schedule to be monitored and reported to ensure their rate of production is synchronised and controlled throughout. All too often in the design phase, individuals: i) believe that they are adding value by getting ahead of schedule (i.e., increasing their rate of production to do more design than planned); or ii) are asked to complete future activities when they have little to do in the current period so that they can ‘legitimately’ bill maximum hours for undertaking work. However, when the work of the team is integrated into a single, integrated process, the only way that an individual can accelerate his or her work independent of team mates is by making assumptions about the information produced by others. As stated before, this creates risk and leads to re-work and abortive work; in effect, the individual is compromising the design process rather than helping it and utilising budget to complete scope that will have to be revisited (and the value can only be claimed once!). The focus of the team must be always to maintain their collective, agreed rate of production and focus on optimising the whole over and above the individual parts. This approach is applied throughout the project (during design, procurement, and construction) to maintain performance to plan, minimise schedule (and cost) variances, and monitor and report percentage plan complete (PPC) and work in progress (WIP).

If, due to poor performance or unforeseen circumstances, work is not completed to plan in the work period, root cause analysis is undertaken and “reasons for failure” are captured and logged. If an unforeseen circumstance occurs, the detailed understanding within the integrated project schedule allows the impact on future activity and key milestones to be quickly analysed and understood. Only once the true impact is understood is it possible to work collaboratively with all project participants to agree on strategy and actions for bringing the schedule back into alignment with the key program milestones—this level of control is critical to the successful delivery of complex projects. Although this may be nothing new for the construction phase (the Lean Construction Institute has been promoting Last Planner? for a decade now), it remains highly innovative for the non-construction phases.

Utilise buffers to enable production

The schedule can be protected, of course, by ensuring that provisions for time risk allowances (as developed through Quantitative Schedule Risk Analysis (QSRA) at the PLAN stage) are included. All too often, however, risk provisions, whether calculated via QSRA or ‘estimated’ by the Project Manager, are simply applied at the end of the schedule. Whilst this serves to buffer the ultimate project completion milestone, it does not protect any sectional completion milestones / periods of uncertainty along the way. Clearly, risk is relative to discrete events or activities that take over the course of the project and as such, these activities may be distributed throughout the schedule or densely packed over certain stages or work periods – it depends completely on the specifics of the project, the discrete risks, and the associated estimating uncertainties. It makes sense, therefore, to align the time risk allowances to the periods over which the risk is greatest, thus creating buffers at points throughout the schedule and providing protection where it is needed most. Having identified these, the obvious next step would be to apply the additional time to the specified activities within the schedule, distribute to the team, and continue with the process of lookahead planning described above…simple! Unfortunately, experience has shown that when team members review the activities that they need to do in a given time period, they simply see a timescale for completion and thus, a ‘complete on’ date, rather than: i) an agreed period to complete the activity; and ii) a buffer to protect the downstream work from any risks and uncertainties that may materialise as they complete the activity. If this differentiation is not clarified, the time risk allowance can be utilised unnecessarily but, typically, knowingly (a concept that is often termed student syndrome). To counter this, risk provisions are not distributed to discrete activities but are instead extracted and aggregated, being held separately and utilised to protect specific periods of working or chains of events. The team progresses their work in line with the schedule, risk mitigation actions are completed / their impact assessed, the time-risk buffers are only utilised when absolutely necessary, and in consequence, the target scheduled is protected. When implementing this approach, as well as measuring PPC and WIP, the rate at which the buffers are consumed is also monitored…not just the time and cost risk buffers, but also the activity buffers (made ready tasks) that have been developed as part of the FLOW methodology implementation. These concepts, which are embodied in our adaptation of Critical Chain Project Management, will be discussed in a future article.

Identify constraints and work to remove them before they become issues

It is also important to augment the “lagging measures” of how the team has done (PPC, WIP, and buffer consumption), with a lookahead planning approach; basically, working with the project team to look ahead into the schedule and identify any potential constraints that may stop it from delivering in line with the integrated project schedule. This simple approach, based on the Theory of Constraints (again, the subject of a forthcoming article in the next series), enables factors that were not foreseen during the streamlining and planning phases (i.e., inherent variability) to be identified and tackled as the project proceeds, with the aim of removing downstream turbulence.

To enable this, the individuals who are allocated activities to complete or progress in the current “work period” are also asked to look ahead at the next “work period” to identify any forthcoming activities that they believe cannot be completed and, if so, the reasons why this is the case. In this way, the team is managed to be proactive; to identify and share potential concerns that could result in schedule impacts so that actions can be taken in advance of the problem occurring (thus, moving the team’s delivery and management focus from being reactive to being proactive). The process is then monitored on an incremental basis (the period between monitoring and reporting being determined by the scale, complexity, and timescale of the project) with all performance data made transparent and communicated using visual “performance dashboards” (Adept Management has a data analytics capability that utilises Power BI to generate all dashboards, ensuring that data is sifted and condensed into simple digestible formats whilst making it digestible and useful to those that are reviewing it).

This ensures that the entire team knows “where the project is” at any given time and that trends in performance are readily apparent. This workflow management and control approach is maintained throughout the delivery process. It provides key management data that help predict future project team performance and allow the project manager to take appropriate action to maintain performance to schedule while reviewing and ensuring the quality of the asset being designed.

The message here is simple: ensure that you are managing and controlling the right things to enable the design team to be successful, and put in some work up-front to plan and optimise the process!

Adept Management offers Flow implementation as a service , with our team of consultants implementing the methodology and software on behalf of our customers. The Flow software can also be purchased as a standalone application with training and support packages available to suit all needs. Contact us to learn more.