S4E79: Why Schedule Quality Matters with Martin Murphy

On this week’s pod, we welcomed Martin Murphy to talk about why schedule quality really matters. Martin Murphy has more than 31 years of experience working with multinational companies and participating in high profile international projects, such as the Petronas Towers in Malaysia and the Panama Canal extension. He is a Director with Hill International in Spain, dealing especially with industrial, manufacturing and technological projects. Since 1992, he has been working as Project Manager and in the planning and project control departments of Spanish construction and consulting companies dealing with Claims and controlling time, cost and risk elements of projects in Spain, Europe and Latin America. 

The main topics we discussed on the podcast were as follows: · Projects should aim to focus as much planning work upfront as possible. This ensures you are not editing the schedule each week 

· Good schedules have a 3% chance of finishing on time
· A good schedule is like watching a video rather than a photograph
· Setting up the activity coding is more important than setting up the WBS
· A properly coded schedule is critical to successful delivery.

You would be surprised how many people do not use this function
· Coding can really help with developing and leading the discussion on schedule metrics.
· People should think of a plan as a database.

It needs to be organised logically to retrieve the right information at the right time. A good planner can only manage 200 activities a month. Anything more detailed may lead to being overworked and potentially degrade the quality of the schedule · Absolute duration and float duration measurements can be misleading. Should be % of remaining duration · Quick wins for managing quality schedules: o Start-Start 0 should not exist! Laziness in planning o Review the length of lags. o Never, ever use negative lags o Should only use SS/FF to draw summary bars o Activities should have a maximum of a 2 to 3-week duration.

The main themes for effective schedule quality metrics are: number of predecessor/successor activities, activities with high float (always lack of logic), coding · The concept of contingencies understood within the industry, however, clients will rarely accept having contingencies in schedule submissions · Rolling wave planning is not always the best approach. Particularly on projects with an element of repetition e.g. construction of a multi-storey building · Top tips for avoiding failure in dispute resolutions:

- Need to “nurture” a schedule to maintain quality in claims disputes. Need to bring in actual performance even if it is not in the baseline. Do not be afraid to add in more detail
-  Do not tell lies in a schedule e.g premature completions of documents o Always present monthly/weekly reports. Even if it demonstrates poor performance. Some clients may not want to see it!
- Ask if there are any claims in the weekly meetings. Knowledge is key!
- Never combine more than one entity on the same activity (e.g. client and sub-contractor)
- Ensure there is documentation to back up the schedule 

The planner should never assume ownership of the schedule. It must be owned by the project manager 

Resource loaded schedules can help to identify missing logic. If the histogram goes from horizontal to vertical, there is probably something missing! Here are links to some of the topics that were discussed: XER Toolkit – schedule quality software https://xertoolkit.com/ Synchro - https://www.bentley.com/en/products/brands/synchro -----------------------------------------

Join us next week where we’re joined again by Dr Dan Patterson, who will give us his insights into the future of project management technology. Be sure to download it! For more information, b

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