Chronicle of Planning

Introduction to Planning.

Project Planning is a vital activity in construction since the success or failure of construction projects – the core activity – depends upon it. At the same time, there are unique factors in construction, among them the complexity of resourcing, impact of weather conditions and existence of multiple contractors, making this particularly difficult and time-consuming activity.

Cost reduction and increased efficiency is vital in the construction industry and if this is to be achieved it is clear that project planning must become more rapid, more accurate and more responsive to change. Provided that the complexity of the process is captured, the ability to draw on best practice within the organisation and to re-apply knowledge already held within the organisation has a major contribution to make.

Traditional Planning – Biblical Times.

The Egyptians and Romans worked construction miracles in their day. Surviving ruins attest to the brilliance of their architecture, but little is known of their construction planning and scheduling. It can be supposed that they solved many scheduling programmes by the “Use of a bigger whip” philosophy.

Project management has other roots reaching back into the days before the pyramids. Historical project managers included Noah, Solomon and the unknown architect who designed the Tower of Babel. History records much about the construction details, but little about the methods of control.

Traditional Planning – The Early Days.

In the mid nineteenth century, at least one writer discussed work-versus-time graphical representation very similar to today’s bar charts.

However, it remained for Henry L Gantt and Frederick W Taylor in the early 1900s to popularise their graphical representations of work versus time. Their “Gantt Charts” were the basis of today’s bar graphs of bar charts.

The work of Taylor and Gantt was the first scientific consideration of the problem of working scheduling; it was readily accepted for planning construction and recording its progress.

The bar graph was, and is, an excellent graphical representation of activity. It is easily read and understood by all levels of management and supervision. If the bar graph is so well suited to construction activity, why look for another planning aid? The reason lies in the fact that the bar graph is limited in what it can retain.

In the first preparation of a bar chart, the author is nearly always influenced by desired completion dates, often working backward from the completion dates and plotting the course of events using the window of time stipulated for the project. This could be termed as an “inspired guess” exercise “looking at the forest instead of the trees”, otherwise known as the top-down approach or strategic planning.

Simple Bar Charts may well serve a purpose in this role. With a large project the bar graph cannot show intelligently the interrelations and interdependencies which control the project. At a later date, even the originator is often hard pressed to explain the plan using the bar graph. In changing the bar chart at a later date, this is so often a juggling of the original bar graph and is not based upon logical planning.