A Planning and scheduling process is the heart and soul of any construction project, provide owners with the means to keep their budgets under control, identify and mitigate risks and provide contractors with tools to ensure they will be adequately rewarded for all the work performed.

Planning executives refer to this process as economy of schedules and it begins and ends with proper implementation and management of an Integrated Master Schedule (IMS). The primary purpose of any IMS, is to help Owners, Program Managers, Program Teams and Contractors optimize project planning, coordinate workflows, timely identify risks and support the decision-making processes.

IMS helps communicate and coordinate ideas about what, when, and how things might occur in the future. At the same time, it records past events in a disciplined manner, allowing forensic analysis when necessary to clarify issues.

Unfortunately, many owners and construction contractors in the Middle East and Europe choose to ignore what the economy of schedules can do for them. In most cases, this is because they consider money, not time, to be their primary asset.

As a result, millions of dollars are wasted either due to lack of proper systems to identify savings or recognize variations and validate them or due to lack of know-how and experience in the field. In the planning and scheduling arena, each organization or program can choose to customize some IMS segments to optimize their outcome.

But this does not mean that planning and scheduling should be reduced to an accountability exercise. A well-implemented IMS uses intelligent dynamic tools, not just reporting instruments that can save an organization's money and eliminate the frustrations brought in by the complexity of a project.

As the IMS represents a predictive model of the entire program, it should be considered the focal point of any project's program management strategy.

IMS will not guarantee success, but operating without effective plans and schedules can increase the risk of missing targeted costs, time milestones, and technical objectives, not to mention more expenses for project owners, less revenue for contractors and continuous dissatisfaction for both.

Protecting the owners' investment or contractor's revenue requires more than simple Bar charts, Non-resourced schedules, Cost accounting, Cost estimates, Histograms, Spreadsheets and Data bases. Those tools do not provide the real-time intelligence that can be derived from ongoing IMS collected information coupled with outstanding contemporaneous innovations and software.

If schedules, their revisions and their updates are to be an effective financial tool, they must always reflect reality, be cost oriented, be continuously updated, be revised with the latest progress, cost and procurement information and be owned by all project stakeholders.

If the IMS is used simply as a reporting tool, project owners and contractors will not benefit from instant performance feedback.

ACE professionals have planned and scheduled the Middle East since the 1980's:

• Oil refineries;
• Gas Plants;
• Petrochemical plants;
• Towers;
• Bridges;
• Housing;
• Off-shore Projects;
• Land reclamation;
• Hotels;
• Airports;
• Malls;
• Ports;
• Waste Management;
• Roads;
• Schools;
• Mosques; and

Much more....

ACE Planning and Scheduling Services include:

• Work Breakdown Structures Development;
• Projects Integrated Master Planning;
• Project Scheduling;
• Schedule Performance Indexes Development and Maintenance;
• Change Control;
• Resources Management;
• Reporting and Forecasting;
• GASP and PASEG Implementation
• Time Impact Analysis
• Forensic Analysis;
• Risk Management; and
• Claims Analysis.

E-mail:
manza05@gmail.com

Web Site:
www.projectmanagement.20m.com