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With many irons in the fire, your team has come to expect more from their scheduling solution.  Imagine tracking your baselines, projected, and actual in a single location – and then generating your reports in real-time for distribution to the team and your executives.  More productive, less busy work.  That’s scheduling reality with site|folio.

In my time in the industry, setting a key date at the start of the schedule and calculating forward, and setting a key date at the end of the schedule and calculating back, have been the two most prevalent methods for developing baselines and projecting progress.

I got to spend some time with Steven Spencer (check him out on LinkedIn), who suggested another method that he uses extensively with great success: “starting in the middle”

Starting from the middle is based on the recognition that the permit is generally the most fluid and unpredictable part of any real estate process.  But once it’s obtained, projecting the execution of the project in both directions from the center is pretty straightforward.  And effective.  This approach relieves project managers of having to constantly adjust durations moving forward, but requires they accurately estimate when they think they will have the permit in hand. Not impossible, but not exactly a cakewalk. It takes a bit of experience.

In larger projects, starting from the middle essentially provides a checklist for the more fluid aspects of the process: obtaining the site, legal agreements, and approvals.  Drop-dead dates let the team know when they need to deliver something in order to meet company goals.  At the same time, moving forward from the permit gives the construction team clear deliverables and a mobilization strategy.

Setting your projections with this approach can be handled in a couple ways. One option is to simply project forward when an actual date is entered, allowing a team to see the impact of their efforts on the intended schedule.  With the start of any real estate development schedule being so fluid and indeterminate, a second option is to group earlier milestone in phases and treat them like checklists.  This keeps the schedule from constantly changing with every hiccup and allows the people finding the site the ability to “get these 5 things done” by specified date. 

Starting from the middle is intriguing approach that Steven has used with a lot of success in his past roles.  As this method is more widely adopted, I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.

Some of our customers who manage a large number of smaller projects calculate their schedules backwards from the opening date.  At first it seemed strange to me, (I always projected from the start) but this method has some interesting implications, as it forces team members to think differently about how they get their work done. 

Making your key date the opening date makes it easier to get a group of projects scheduled to open in a designated timeframe.  For example, most real estate development teams are given goals to open a specific number of stores by the end of a specific quarter.  In this case, simply enter an opening date and the targets are set. 

When working backward you still need a baseline and a projected schedule; but in this case each calculates in a different direction and provides different insight into the process.  The base line projects backward while the projected schedule adjusts forward as tasks are accomplished. The idiosyncrasy of this approach allows the baseline to tell you when things have to happen by, and the projected driven by actual, tells you what day to day impact is. 

Unlike starting from the start, now even the less tangible tasks in the front of the process have clear expectations and the team doesn’t spend as much time adjusting durations as they post actuals. The comparison of the two makes it easy to gauge the success of the execution of the project. 

To date I have seen this method work well for smaller projects. With short construction schedules, a drop-dead checklist and a forward projecting projected schedule allows everyone to plan and project accordingly.  

The most common scheduling approach starts at the beginning and calculates forward.  Users enter a key date, link the tasks, and then adjust durations to determine future effort and timing. 

Conceptualizing and executing a linear schedule is the simplest solution because the starting key date is within reach.  But there are drawbacks.  A linear schedule may create pre-key blackouts and can require continual adjustment of the projected durations as the fog of the project clears and more unknowns become known.  For example, trying to open X number of stores in the third quarter would require some black magic to produce schedules that calculate from the start to end up in that timeframe.

Here are three ways to confront this issue:

•         Set a baseline independent of any projections.
•         Make durations easy to understand and update.
•         Allow manual override of any projected date.

Setting a baseline (I like to call this an independent calculated stream based on the key date) independent of the projected schedule allows project managers to compare any future adjustments made to durations in the projected calculated stream. It’s a great way to see what was expected and what actually occurred. Future project schedules can leverage the difference between your baselines and actual to make your projections even more accurate in the future.

Design the calculations between the milestones to be easy to understand and update.  Sometimes companies can get a bit carried away and over-design the number of independent conditions that each date reviews before selecting a date.  It does make the schedule more accurate, but it also increases the workload of your staff in keeping your projections accurate. In these cases it’s not as simple as updating a single duration. You would need to update the duration for each valid independent condition. Keeping it simple makes this issue less of a concern.

If the user doesn’t care about the duration, but simply knows the date they will have the permit in hand, allowing the user to simply override a calculated date by manually entering the projected date (not adjusting the duration) is pretty straightforward. This allows the rest of the schedule to pick up and calculate the impact that date has on the projection.

From my experience to date, I have seen this method work best on larger projects with longer construction cycles or projects where the key date is a bit later in the real estate process – not right at the start.

Correctly modeling your projected schedules is critical. Having a flexible tool that can handle your requirements will centralize your efforts and save your team countless hours.

When projects require a quick turnaround and the construction portion of the schedule will be over in a matter of weeks, you probably don’t need the full power of sitefolio’s conditional logic scheduling engine.  We’re talking minor construction – such as getting the interior shell in place – and things like maintenance.  Maintaining detailed progress of this type of work provides no immediate value.  It happens too fast.

Still, it’s critical to ensure short construction projects are completed on time and to specification.  These projects generally involve many moving parts converging at the site with multiple departmental and external business partners waiting to execute their roles at precisely the right time.  The solution, then, is a checklist – a departmental focused master schedule that shows everything from planning through execution.  The checklist ensures all parties understand when and what they need to execute.

When approaching the schedule as an inter-departmental checklist a nice strategy is to group these milestones within a series of phases known as “gates”.  Gates help keep your projected schedule from jumping all over the place as each task is completed, essentially forming a critical path based on phases.  Knowing that “these five items” require completion by a specified date allows staff to be responsible for their own workflow.  It keeps your projected schedule stable - only pushing the schedule forward if any milestone in the gate occurs after each gates’ due date.

site|folio’s scheduling edition is designed to handle the subtle but real differences of small and larger projects.  Imagine the time your team will save retiring outdated spreadsheets or inflexible systems.  Great scheduling isn’t just for larger projects.