It is getting increasingly difficult to keep almost all senior projects on schedule during the construction phase of the projects. Some of the hurdles that impede schedule achievement are as follows:
- Limited manpower available from most subcontractors
- Quality of the manpower due to lack of proper training
- Poor or no supervision being provided by subcontractors
- Material delivery timelines
- Poor design documents
- The number of government inspections and the timing of the inspections due to reductions in the number of inspectors by a lot of government agencies
- The quality level of most senior projects the last five years has increased to almost a resort level of finish
- There are ways to help control or help minimize these schedule impacts that The Douglas Company employs on every project:
- Design check to help prevent drawing coordination issues
- Put material purchasing based lead times including shop drawing review for all material on each construction schedule
- Provide and budget adequate Douglas Company supervision to help manage the subcontractors
- Obtain manpower commitments as required to meet the schedule prior to contracting with every subcontractor
- Perform quality inspections for every trade to help prevent quality issues from delaying the schedule
- Conduct a meeting prior to the start of a project with all government inspectors to understand the inspections that will be required and the timeline to expect for each of the inspections
- Schedule the punch out of the building by sections to help control the punch-list timeline at the end of a project
- Two week look ahead schedules tied to the master project schedules
The Douglas Company goal is to limit project schedule surprises to our clients which have become a large problem for most of the construction industry.
Brian McCarthy
Executive Vice President, Midwest Construction Operations
The Douglas Company
