One year of data collection and three-and-a-half years of analyzing and summarizing the results during weekends, evenings, and holidays finally paid off: a full manuscript of my PhD thesis is ready and our book, Location-Based Management for Construction, even has a Kindle Edition.

When I started the work on the PhD, I had no idea about just how broken construction projects really are. I thought that construction project problems are primarily those of planning - if you plan a better plan based on locations, quantities and productivity rates, things should start to work better. My plan was to introduce three projects to location-based planning, optimize the plan with the project teams, and then record progress against the optimized plan and try to find out why actual progress deviates from plans. Based on earlier research results and experience, I expected to see some deviations based and then to see control actions to restore the planned schedule.

I spent a year collecting data from three construction projects every week. Although there were some deviations from plans which were discussed in subcontractor meetings in each project, there was no sense of great urgency or big problems. In reality, based on data analysis, each project had hundreds of production problems (start-up delays, discontinuities or slowdowns) which were never discussed in subcontractor meetings!  (For my advice on running subcontractor meetings, jump to this blog post.)

It seemed that management was unaware that these problems were happening. It also turned out that many of these problems had actually generated an alarm in Vico's Control software but the alarm had been ignored with the hope that production somehow automatically will be restored to planned production rate.  Delays suffered by one subcontractor in one area rippled down to other subcontractors in other areas because of shared resources, shared locations, and unanalyzed decisions. Each project had a clearly identifiable chain of cascading delays which started in the beginning of interior finishes and MEP phase and continued to end of commissioning. The total effect of these delays was 10% increase in project duration in each project and huge productivity losses to subcontractors because of location congestion. The loss of productivity associated with labor flow issues has been estimated to be 20% (Thomas et al. 2003), not to mention the General Contractor management time required to continuously update the plans and communicate different plans to subcontractors.

Figure 1 below shows a typical cascading delay chain (red circles indicate production problems). In future blog articles, I will discuss the root causes of these delays and how to prevent them from happening. The main conclusions of my thesis are currently being tested in construction projects both in Finland and in the US. I will keep you posted on the results.

To see a real-life example of these alarms and how to quickly respond to them, please review the Klorman Construction example with their work on an Amtrak train station in Los Angeles.

You can also review the BIM 401 webinar on model-based scheduling and the Scheduling Tactics in a Hard Bid webinar.

References:

Thomas, H.R., Horman, M.J., Minchin, R.E. Jr. & Dong, C. (2003). Improving Labor Flow Reliability for Better Productivity as Lean Construction Principle. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, Vol. 129, No. 3, pp 251-261.