The Planning Hierarchy

Planning, in the field of Project Management, is one of the most important knowledge areas any aspiring construction professional should master.  You plan nearly everything do you in your daily business and especially when it comes to managing projects.  But just like leadership, there are many levels of planning and its done at varying levels by different persons or groups.

Managers at a high level don’t want to have to read through 100 pages of a schedule to know the road map of the start to finish of a project.  They rely on milestones or summary activities to give them a sense of the effort that is going to take place and the magnitude of resourcing necessary.  Even higher are those who manage programs or portfolios of many projects.  These individuals manage planning at a strategic level which can be carried down even to the project manager level depending on the size of the project.  Consider the example of a caterer who is planning to serve a wedding party of 100 people.  The event planner may put together a schedule that looks like Figure 1 to define what needs to be done in the course of 8 hours

 
Figure 1

He doesn’t need to put in all the details of the steps involved in doing each of the activities he or her has listed however, that level of planning would be left up to the Chef, the Setup Manager, or the Hostess. 

Construction Task Planning

It’s no different in construction.  Project Managers and major stakeholders will put together the strategic plan of what and when foundation packages or site packages, etc. will get done based on key and contract milestones in a project.  The tactical planning of where a particular crew starts, how it coordinates with adjacent crews or work activity is on the people who are most closely responsible for that work.  That individual will take a package of work, let’s say a foundation, and create a step by step plan from start to finish to perform the work within the allocated time frame utilizing the proper resources to achieve success.  You can call it a checklist, a task plan, a daily plan or in the case of the Oracle Prime Task Application shown in Figure 2, a “Work Plan”.   

Figure 2

Last Planner System

The Lean Construction Institute defines this concept as Task Planning according to its Last Planner System.  The technique builds an additional echelon of planning and monitoring so that the schedule remains a strategic picture of the project thereby enabling project teams to reduce the amount of detail. Many of today’s schedules tend to become more of a checklist than a planning tool that are constantly changing due to variables in the field that defy the complex logic within them.  By putting the responsibility down to the lowest level leader (Last Planner) where the work is occurring, and having those individuals collaborate and commit to the work plans each week, project teams report an increase in communications and coordination of daily work between trades and subcontractors. There is also a marked increase in the accountability that comes from the resulting analytics as the tasks are progressed week to week.

Summary

Regardless of weather or not you adopt the Lean principals in your organization, strategic and tactical planning needs to be applied in one way or another.  Responsibility for this being done falls on both managers and craft leaders and, in both cases, there needs to be delineation between who does activity planning and who does the task planning and who is held accountable for each.  They must be in sync with each other which means the task planning needs to be done with consideration of the scheduled activities and the constraints that may or may not exist that could alter the work plan execution.  Collaboration/Communication and commitment by stakeholders will lead the process to success every time.