Lack of Project Controls – Failure

02 May Lack of Project Controls – Failure

Many Projects are doomed right at the beginning due to failure of the Project control system. In order to set up a supportive and efficient project control system, practitioners must have enough knowledge and experience regarding the components of the Planning system and their relationships.  Having an activity list in a scheduling software or having few Excel files that are almost independent of each other and project scope is not enough.

A Project and consultant:

On an EPC project, the client employs a consultant to implement a planning system. After a couple of weeks working, reviewing documents and collecting data, the consultant presents some outputs e.g. detailed schedule, S-Curve, reporting formats and the updating process. Surprisingly, the client asks for the basis of the S-Curve and progress calculation because they gave a set of contractual weight value for E, P, C which the consultant did not use! Therefore, they request for clarification.

Basis of Consultant Outputs:

1. The consultant fails to do the resource loading then due to time constraints they come with super shortcut idea which is assigning a DUMMY resource to all activities then using the calculated budgeted units by the software to develop the S-Curves.
2. Four S-Curves get developed: Engineering, Procurement, Construction and Overall Project.
3. To develop E, P and C S-Curves; budgeted units for each gets filtered from the schedule. For the overall all budgeted units get extracted without any filter!
4. To update the schedule and S-Curve; a process was developed as well!

It seems there is not much of issue and the developed system should work!

The client askes how the contractual weight values have been used in the development of the overall S-Curve and how they will be used for progress reporting?

The consultant tries to answer the questions but during the meeting they mention that they used a DUMMY resource for resource loading. However, the client still does not know what is the meaning of DUMMY resource and how it works?!

Later, the client asks for Number of resources for main skill set e.g. welder, skilled labor, crane, cable puller, etc. then requests for resource level ling!! AT this stage the consultant realizes that they will not survive and after couple of months they get terminated!

What went wrong:

The S-Curve definition is: graphical representation of cumulative work/cost of the project that has to be completed or spent through the project’s duration. When the DUMMY resources get assigned; it changes the definition to: Graphical representation of cumulative activities duration through the project’s duration or in simple terms it means: cumulative Duration over Duration!? The concept of the DUMMY resource is absolutely wrong and MUST not be used at all. Also in this case, the scheduling software uses Duration of activities as weight value to roll up the progresses (Plan and Actual) which again is wrong because the Duration of an Activity most-likely will not represent its work /cost value.

What should have been done:

For the correct practice, the following steps should have been undertaken:

1. Develop the schedule that covers the entire scope of work and all the deliverables
2. Develop norm table, then assign resources based on each activity scope of work, quantity, etc.
3. Develop the overall S-Curve by combining the E, P and C S-Curves using the contractual weight values
4. Develop a quantitative PMS based on the quantities that have been used for Resource Loading.
5. In order to roll up the progress in PMS, the contractual weight values MUST be used with no changes.
6. A data collection process / system should be developed to collect the Actual Quantity, progresses, dates, and etc.

If you don’t want to fail your project right at the beginning, If you want to implement a Planning system that supports your project successfully throughout the project execution then, contact us now: info@khonopc.com