Breaking through to Collaborative Scheduling: Approaches and Obstacles

Traditional scheduling methods deliver mixed results. CII benchmarking data show that more than half of all projects are delivered behind schedule and the majority of megaprojects are delivered late. When measured in terms of duration and sequencing, the execution of construction activities is rarely a success if project participants simply follow a master schedule developed at the beginning of the project by using the Critical Path Method (CPM).

Capital projects across all industry sectors involve a number of interconnected processes and functions, including planning, financing, designing, procuring, constructing, and commissioning structures for business purposes. Given the uncertain and interdependent environment of construction projects, a single person (the scheduler) cannot perform reliable scheduling, even if he or she defines detailed work packages well in advance of execution.

To address these issues, the industry has observed that collaborative scheduling practices have emerged to address the current shortcomings in capital project management. Although CPM has been the capital project industry’s standard for scheduling, other industries are using new, apparently more collaborative methods. Given the power of collaborative scheduling (CS) to address the industry’s pressing needs, the construction industry needs guidance to encourage project participants to implement it.

CII asked Research Team 362 (RT-362), Challenges and Opportunities to Promote Collaborative Scheduling, to answer the following essential question:

What are the drivers of and obstacles to the development and implementation of collaborative scheduling?

As a starting point, the research team adopted the following definition of collaborative scheduling:

Collaborative Scheduling is a comprehensive process that aligns and engages stakeholders throughout the life cycle of the project in order to coordinate activities and resources on a project and achieve its goal.

RT-362 examined collaboration in project scheduling and identified opportunities for improvement and barriers to CS, based on an industry analysis. The team gathered its findings into a series of strategies that could be applied to implement CS across an organization. These strategies are the focus of Chapter 2, a high-level introduction to CS for organizations that are willing to adopt collaboration.

The team also developed a Maturity Model for Collaborative Scheduling (MMCS) to organize the team’s recommendations for implementing CS. Chapter 3 explains how the maturity model identifies the current state of a project’s CS. The MMCS provides practical recommendations and examples of how projects can be improved by increasing collaboration across five pillars: scheduling significance, planners and schedulers, scheduling representation, goal alignment with owner, and communication. Chapter 3 also offers scenarios that illustrate how CS can be applied to current construction projects, and Appendix A contains the MMCS questionnaire and scoring rubric.

Finally, as Chapter 4 describes, RT-362 developed ways to understand the benefits of and barriers to CS implementation across multiple projects. It identified collaboration improvement opportunities at the project level in terms of five key performance indicators (KPIs): cost, schedule, safety, quality, and teamwork.