Project Planning for Complex Construction Projects

Challenges with Project Delivery

A construction project delay is rarely bad luck — it’s typically a misalignment between the plan, a disconnection with the original assumptions, complex schedule logic, and delayed decision making.

For owners, contractors, and project management consultancies, the issues below are the usual suspects and pain points:

• The Executive Leadership Team are frustrated that when reviewing the project the risk register doesn’t touch the critical path.
• Executive level dashboards read green while the sense is that work is late with continued slippage expected.
• The Project Director is continually frustrated by a schedule that continues to grow - but crews are still blocked and work continues to be delayed.
• The project team is constantly reacting to critical paths that keep oscillating and float that seems to evaporate.
• Design deliverables, procurement, supply chains and permits aren’t modelled as constraints, as a result the Project Leadership Team are faced with dates that are “optimistic by default”.
  
• The Project Owner gets frustrated when the project team’s and contractor’s narratives continuously don’t reconcile.
  
• Our baselines and current programs are diverging; our lack of schedule change control hides reality.
  

At What’s Critical we are able to:

• Reconnect risk to schedule logic with diagnostics that show where risk actually moves dates.
• Drive for one truth so reporting matches reality enabling critical decisions to be made.
• Assist teams stabilise float by simplifying the project schedule logic, ensuring work sequences are represented accurately and “make sense”
• Identify the construction productivity challenges and ensure that the real workflows are integrated and address progress blockers.
• Ensure that critical elements are included in an integrated plan so slippage is visible — and preventable.
  
• Communicate one truth in two dialects - board‑grade clarity up, site‑level to drive execution and traction downstream.
  
• Help establish an honest baseline and reporting rules that reveal drift early so recovery starts sooner.
  

“Unfortunately the construction industry has confused scheduling with planning.

We make the plan explicit and document it — strategy, assumptions, work flows, resource constraints — with a schedule as the output of the planning, not the construction schedule being mistaken for planning. ”

Matthew Boot - Founder, What’s Critical