Much like the conductor who must understand the music, guide each musician’s contribution, and deliver a performance that resonates with the audience — all without playing a single note — the GC’s project manager (PM) orchestrates the timely and budgeted delivery of a building. They must harmonize the sometimes conflicting objectives of various trade contractors where any missteps with work, effort, and time can lead to diminishing results and profits, falling short of a perfect performance.

This article delves into the interplay of a project’s critical elements — work, effort, and time — and how their interdependence can make or break a project. By employing traditional time-based scheduling as well as Work Environment Management (WEM®), this article also includes a real-world case study that presents the power of project management, ensuring each component plays 
in concert with the others.

Understanding the Variables: Work, Effort & Time

These three variables dictate the successful completion of a project, yet their interconnectedness is often misunderstood. When a deadline looms and the schedule falls behind, the instinctive response may be to increase labor to get it done. Trade contractors often balk at the suggestion of bringing on more people when they are already losing productivity with people, materials, and tools stacked on top of each other in areas where damages to finishes will lead to back charges.

On the other hand, when a trade contractor is delayed due to late materials, time constraints are frequently overlooked under the old adage of “it takes what it takes [to do the work].” This can lead to escalating tensions, disputes in coordination meetings, contentious emails, change orders for the cost and time impacts, liquidated damage payments, and, worst of all, claims and 
legal fees.

Construction industry professionals should understand the need to manage work, effort, and time as well as the need to balance these with appropriate finesse and coordination.

Planning & Tracking for a Smooth Project

On the jobsite, everyone has work to do, a schedule to keep, and is facing similar resource constraints and labor availability challenges.

Proper project planning and tracking allows your team to proactively see the project’s flow — not just after the work is done, the deadlines are missed, or the conflicts and stacking begin.

By recognizing the ebbs and flows of each variable early on, the necessary labor and skills can be aligned to maintain the schedule, helping to ensure the project’s completion is both timely and within budget.

Beyond having the labor with the correct skills to perform the tasks required, it is necessary to plan and organize the work into a logical and effective flow. There are tools that can help with organizing the work, but experts are necessary to properly create and implement a useful project model.

Breaking Down the Work

Developing a useful project model and plan begins with breaking down the work. Using a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)¹ to facilitate the process ensures that your breakdown is complete and without gaps from either unplanned work or work that isn’t broken down enough to be useful.

A WBS focuses only on the work that is to be done, without regard to how much effort is required or how much time it will take. The effort should be a function of the work; but, unlike typical unit-based estimating practices, the planned effort is applied with consideration given to the specific job conditions, the means and methods to be used, and the tools available. In most cases, the effort may vary by the experience and skill set of the available labor. All of these factors must be reasonably known for the effort to be estimated in the project model.

Once the work is identified and the effort to complete the work is established, then the timing and sequencing can begin.

Timing & Sequencing

Timing and sequencing are two independent activities that must be managed separately. The scope of work remains constant and only changes if the contract changes. Similarly, the effort also stays the same and will only change if there are substantial changes to the conditions, means, methods, tools, or labor involved in performing the work.

The GC controls the timeline since its primary responsibility and profit relate to finishing on time and within budget. The GC also gives a sequence of time for when certain activities need to happen, as a “backward pass.” A trade contractor’s WBS is built based on the sequence of work, and therefore is a “forward pass” of the work that will happen onsite from their perspective as an expert in a skilled trade. This forward-looking plan informs the project’s overall cadence and resource allocation from the vantage point of those executing the work, according to Dr. Perry Daneshgari.

Synchronizing the Orchestra

The orchestration of a successful project happens through connecting the work (made visible and planned through a WBS) to the time (made visible and planned through a project schedule). Both elements must be appropriately considered to produce a useful schedule to communicate conflicts between the field crews and GC. Neglecting one can lead to assumptions and a flawed project model that does not generate profit for all parties, as well as a potentially late and expensive project for the end customer.

For tasks that are effort-driven (i.e., the work is fixed and an increase in labor produces a proportional reduction in the time required to complete the task), only the duration (time) or personnel (headcount) can be determined, but not both.

On jobsites where the owner and GC provide milestone dates and coordinated time frames for each trade contractor to complete their work, the maximum duration is set. With a fixed duration, labor is then calculated for each task. Laying these variables out on a timeline then allows the headcount for overlapping tasks to be summed to produce a labor loading curve. This labor loading curve should be compared to the actual available resources from the trades.

For example, an eight-hour task can either take one day or four days depending on the number of available resources. By identifying the available units (labor available for the work) and the duration (how long the task takes), work can be determined.

By modeling this scheduled plan, the trade contractor can prepare for the resources accordingly, such as requesting to do work out of sequence, externalizing more work (e.g., prefabrication or vendor managed inventory) to be done in parallel, or finding more labor resources (if necessary).

There are no shortcuts — what may seem obvious or trivial is often neither. Because of interactions between tasks and other events, both before and after, the model must be interconnected and cannot be expressed as just a line on a paper.

The symphony of work, effort, and time is a dynamic process and requires a dynamic model to remain accurate. Failure to develop a fully integrated model means that this entire planning process must be repeated weekly or even daily.

Most often, what changes throughout the life of the project isn’t the work (other than a few well-defined and negotiated change orders) or the effort required to complete the contracted work. Instead, the dates are what frequently change because of interference from other trades, material delays, design changes, and other factors that impact when the work can be done in a specific area.

To compensate for this, the work needs to be resequenced constantly while still maintaining all of the constraints. This most often happens with verbal direction from the overall project superintendent, discussions in weekly coordination 
meetings, or through various lean construction programs, which only pay attention to time without consideration of each trade’s WBS.

The project model representing the work, effort, and time in sequence is much more complex than these methods. The project model must be built to perform these tasks in a matter of hours for the trade contractor to meet the typical response and notification deadlines of their contracts. The response must be supported by updated labor loading and shifting to accomplish the established milestones given the new constraints and task sequencing.

Managing Resources: Money, Labor & Materials

The project model contains the labor resources needed to provide the effort necessary for the work. However, both money and material are required to complete the project, and, therefore, can create schedule constraints.

Money is managed in real time to ensure a healthy and predictable cash flow throughout the life of the project. Material is often outside of the control of the trade contractor and must be identified as a constraint in the project model. Material delays can happen for administrative reasons such as delayed submission or approval of submittals, failure to make a timely release of the purchase orders, or impacted production scheduling.

Logistics delays and errors can also result in schedule impacts that will affect the sequencing of work and the productivity of the installation team. Quite simply, any lack of needed money, labor, or material will impact the productivity, timing, and profitability of a project.

With that in mind, labor loading helps to predict material needs. Long lead items are associated with production and logistics schedules and are often carefully watched.

Exhibit 1 illustrates a lighting schedule with fixture delivery as a predecessor to the assembly and installation of the fixtures. Exhibit 2 shows that the delay in receipt of complete and correct fixtures has interrupted the installation tasks. Exhibit 3 shows the impact on installation productivity resulting from slower than planned progress, replanning of the work, and returning to complete the installation at a later time.

This productivity reduction translates directly into eroded profitability. Smaller, more commodity-type devices and equipment can be just as disruptive and are often overlooked. By tying the material procurement tasks into the schedule and project model, these become a part of the same program that produces the labor graphs and projections.

Essentially, work that is tied to material in the schedule can’t happen until the material is available, so movement in material dates will create an immediate and visible shift in the labor loading. This is an otherwise invisible impact that must be detected and recognized to mitigate the risk and damage.