21 May Project planning and Gantt charts

Project planning and Gantt charts:  Project Planning is everything in the building industry & is often overlooked with most builders and sub-trades operating on a reactive basis week to week. Not only is this unprofessional but it slows the job down, is inefficient & therefore costly plus key dates have to be constantly revisited and pushed out into the future.

This is obviously frustrating for the client who may be waiting to move back in. The domino effect can have big consequences. On a recent post I showed an example of the first stage of planning which is a Mind Map. The photo above is a Gantt Chart I use which is what the mind map converts to once the job is programmed. Each task follows another and various colour coding indicates key dates, confirmation, information required etc.

Having such an organised start to a project means that all of the trades know when they are required on site, specialist material can be ordered and delivered when required and the completion date is known. Should a weather event or like push the project out a week, then all of these dates can slide forward and everyone can be notified.

The beauty of my software is that the owners have access to it online, even through their smartphones. They can see what is happening and scroll ahead to see how long they have for a decision to be made by them eg confirm tile selection, or lighting layout. The example above shows how many tasks actually happen one after the other over a 6 week period.