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Webinar - # 9

Top Slide:

Good afternoon and welcome to our weekly webinar. It’s one o’clock so we will go ahead a get started. This week’s webinar we’re going to be talking about Impact Schedules and the different types of impacts that can affect the schedule and possible end dates, that the schedule may not make it on time. So we will talk about ways the schedules can be impacted and different ways that schedule can also be analyzed.

Housekeeping Items:

Again some housekeeping items, (read first bullet point). (read second bullet point). All questions and answers will be posted to the website. Again we will do ‘live’ questions at the end of the webinar where I will unmute the lines. Again the webinar slides and recordings will be made available within 5 days on the MnDot website. We have listed the address here below.

MnDot Webinars (first slide):

At the MnDot webinars’ website (switches to next slide).

MnDot Webinars (second slide):

On this page, click on the learning link(switches to next slide).

MnDot Webinars (third slide):

That will then take you to MnDot webinars’ page where you can also download a live question PDF on how to ask live questions during the webinar and also this is where you prior webinars for the recordings, the slides, and also the script. Also where you can reserve your next week’s webinar. Next webinar May 15th at one o’clock we will be talking about how calendars are being used on the MnDot project schedules.

Webinar “Live” Questions:

So again ‘live’ questions depending on much time we have and how many questions. We’ll try to get to some ‘live’ questions that come through the question box. I will unmute the lines at the end. You can also use the ‘Raise Hands’ feature.

MnDot Webinars (fourth slide):

A couple quick screenshots on the right hand side. If you haven’t used ‘GoToWebinar’ meeting box before or there is a box on the right hand side where you can submit a question.

Submit Webinar Questions:

Just a couple other screenshots on how to use the ‘GoToWebinar’ meeting box on the right hand side.

Raise Hand for Question:

You can also ‘Raise Hand’ to ask a question.

Introduction to Webinar:

Ok so, we’ll go ahead and get started. Obviously we have only a half hour so introduction to today’s webinar is about schedule impacts and (read slide).

Impact Schedules (first slide):

So only having a half hour, this subject, there is definitely a lot more to it. I am just going to try and hit kind of the high points. So just talking about projects in general, (read first bullet point). That is pretty much true for most of our projects and one of the reasons that we use a software like P6 is to capture things that happen during that project, when our project does not finish on time and within budget. (read second bullet point) Anticipating changes is part of construction. There is a lot of times that there is no way to avoid it but having some constructive ways that you can find out what happened, where it happened, and how it happened, it kind of what we will talk about today. (read third bullet point) We gave it the title of Impact Schedules but what we’re kind of getting to is that you if you have a schedule that has some kind of impact. Once you realize you have an impact then you are going into a kind of impact analysis mode, where we need to find out what happened, whose involved, and so forth.

Impact Schedules (second slide):

(read first bullet point) Again using a good baseline schedule to understand how we plan to build the schedule and then using the actual schedule which allows us to see the differences between the two. Obviously, (read second bullet point). If only all our projects could go that well, but obviously we know that we don’t live in an ideal world all the time. So (read third bullet point).

Impact Schedule Analysis (first slide):

So we’ll talk a little bit about Impact Schedule Analysis. First thing that you are going to do is you need to have the ‘As-Planned’ or Baseline schedule. (read first bullet point) We talked before about having a good baseline schedule so that once you start to incur changes we can verify and review the variances between our baseline and what we call the ‘As-Built’. (read second bullet point) So for those maybe haven’t been on some of the prior webinars are ‘As-Planned’ or Baseline is how we build the schedule before we have incurred any progress. The ‘As-Built’ represents what we are actually doing now and it’s occurring, you know, actually percent completion and so forth. So (read third bullet point). So we’ve established that there is some type of impact to the schedule,it needs to be addressed and we need to figure out where that impact is, what has happened, and what ultimately is the end result of our project not going to be delivered on time.

Impact Schedule Analysis (second slide):

So here is just a quick snapshot of Impact Schedule Analysis. When looking at a schedule, you’re going to need to look at your ‘As-Planned (Baseline)’, which again when we’re reviewing a schedule is always yellow in our bar chart. Compared to our ‘As-Build to Date’ which will be in blue. We can see here that our ‘As-Planned’ to date, we had planned to be up to this point but we actually only occurred this much progress (look at ‘As-Built to Date’ line). So we have still this much left to build (the green ‘To Build’ line. So we can assume that we’ve got a total impact for this timeframe and appropriating that responsibility, is it the contractor or the owner. Again that could be a whole other webinar in itself and we won’t really get into too much of that we will just talk about identifying the impact and ways to be able to view that within P6. Typically this is going to be your standard way to look at what’s happened to your schedule comparing your ‘As-Planned’ to what you have built, to what we have left to build and identifying where that impact is.

Types of Impacts (first slide):

So different types of impacts that can disrupt the schedule, one is disruptions. (read first bullet point) (read second bullet point) So one of the ways that we quantify an impact to a schedule is first by what we call a disruption.

Types of Impacts (second slide):

Next, very common is delays. (read first bullet point) Typically a delay is something that is going to come to owner from the contractor. (read second bullet point) Something is impacting the construction in a certain area and it’s delaying the amount of time that it’s taking to perform work.

Types of Impacts (third slide):

Next, types of impacts are changes. Obviously changes are a huge part of projects. Again this could get into a lot more depth but very simply we usually have a couple different types of changes that are issued on a project. One is what we call an Owner’s change. (read first bullet point) An owner change is obviously a change that the owner feels that needs to be inputted into the schedule or the project and if the contractor is given a change order, must perform the work. Next we have a contractor’s change, (read second bullet point). An example of that is might be a deferring site condition. There could be a difference between what the contractor finds in the ground compared to what the owner’s plans and specifications said was in the ground. So a contractor change is going to be issued to the owner from the contractor asking for a change request. Typically during changes, some types of these changes obviously can go back to causing delays (flips back to ‘Types of Impacts: Delays’ slide) or a loss of time. The change order could hold up the project or it could delay the project completely. (flips back to ‘Types of Impacts: Changes’ slide) So changes and delays kind of go hand-in-hand but determining the different types of changes is important obviously, it can determine how fast the work will happen.

Types of Impacts (fourth slide):

Next what we have for types of impacts is called suspensions. Typically (read first bullet point). Suspensions obviously are going to come from the owner to the contractor and those circumstances obviously can vary depending on what the suspension is. Next, suspensions (read second bullet point). So obviously suspension is the opposite of the delay, suspension is actually going to stop work.

Types of Impacts (fifth slide):

Then also another type of impact is termination. (read first bullet point) Obviously termination of work is obviously a last resort usually used by the owner for non-compliance or conformance with the plans or specifications. It is usually something that is a stop-gap measure for the owner to also remove contractor from the project. This obviously would be a major stoppage of the project and would affect the schedule dramatically.

Classify a Delay:

Talking a little bit more about the ways which is probably our most common impact on a schedule, so again we could do a whole webinar just on impacts but most common is a delay. Once a delay is recognized or an event has occurred (read first bullet point). Once an impact has been identified, identifying what type of an impact or in this case a delay is actually affecting our project. The way delays are typically in the industry are classified you have (read second bullet point), (read third bullet point), (read fourth bullet point), and (read fifth bullet point). So the owner really has to determine how this delay is going to be classified and that obviously will determine the process of how the project is going to proceed especially if it is a going to be a change order.

Analyze the Delay:

So when we look at our schedule we have to analyze that delay and looking at our small bar chart here. We have our time scale along the top and we’ve got our data date here in the middle and again everything to the left is progress while everything to the right still needs to be completed. Once we are able to compare our ‘baseline’ to our ‘actual’, we can now see that we’ve got an ‘actual’ up to the data date and we have remaining work leftover. We can compare that to our target and (read circles and text appear) we can see here that we’ve started to incur negative or our ‘variance with the target’ is -5 days and it starts with activity A3000. So one of the first things a project manager is going to need to do once they realize there is an impact in the schedule and that there is a difference between our ‘baseline’ and our ‘actual’ is identifying exactly where that difference has happened. You want to identify it at the first activity, and in this small example we are saying activity A3000 is our activity where our first ‘variance with our target’ has started and then we can ultimately see that it is affecting our project completion date as a whole.

Baseline vs. Actual Comparison – Bars (first slide):

Then using on screen (read first bullet point). Again this way we can use our bar chart to be able to see the difference and again we can set up specific layouts that will allow us to see the difference between our ‘baseline’ which is yellow and our green which still needs to be completed.

Baseline vs. Actual Comparison (second slide):

This is just another example. This is a way to use it at more of a summary level where we can see we have activities that we have our ‘actual’ compared to our ‘baseline’ and we can see based on different types of work and different parts of the project. So using the layout allows us to be able to see that information in more of summary or a roll-up level to get kind of a wider view of our project. We can see here that we got float here at the end showing it negative and that is our ‘actual’ compared to our ‘target’ telling us it’s behind this many days or here is our ‘variance from baseline’ which can be set up as a column. So using the bar chart and filters and layouts is a great way to visually see the difference between what’s happened. Obviously you can go in (goes back to previous slide ‘Bars’) and in this view you could actually go in and show the impact of an actual activity, identify an actual activity, ID, the name and (flips back to the ‘Baseline vs. Actual Comparison’ second slide) start to put that information together.

Baseline vs. Actual Comparison – Graphs (third slide):

Remember that when we have delays that time is money so we can compare the ‘Baseline’ to our ‘Actual’ in view of impact in a graphical sense so that we can see each of our different people that are working or groups that are working on a project and we can get a graphical view of our difference. We can see right off the bat that our budgeted is the yellow, our ‘actual’ is the blue and we can see that based on this right now for the first month of October we can see that we are actually performing or our hours at least are less than what we budgeted. Eventually we can see impacts and use our graphs as a good way to see that information.

Schedule Baseline Comparison

Then ultimately what we are doing we are comparing the impacts, our dates, our floats, remember the float is very important understanding where that negative float started. Like what we talked about earlier with activity A3000 that was our first activity we noticed that has become an impact so then we need to compare those dates to see what the overall impact of our schedule is.

Graph – Plan Cost vs. Billed

Also one of the things that can be done is because we’re tracking costs and resources, we can see here that we got a graph that, I lost something real quick hold on. (switched graphs) My handy spotlight tool we can see here that based on our P6 information that our planned was, this was our cost that we planned to incur. We can see here that what we actually billed was a lot less so that is going to tell us that we are not performing at the rate that we had planned and these graphs can be produced right out of P6 to run a comparison. To really start to show the overall impact and how that is happening and we look at our earlier slides that show our impacts and dates.

Graph – Cost Increase Over Original (%)

This is our impact and costs and we can see here that we got it cost increase of overall 22% compared to what we had planned to spend. This right here is where we start to see our impacts and obviously an impact at the beginning or front end of the schedule is going to have a major effect towards the end of the schedule.

Questions or Comments

Real quick before we get to the questions, we got about 5 minutes left. (read slide) Next week’s webinar will be May 15th at one o’clock, we will talk about using the MnDot use of Calendars in Primavera P6. So first I’m going to go ahead and unmute the lines. I have unmuted everyone and the first question I had is “Is this for the construction portion of project or the pre-design through the construction project?” That is a great question and I may have taken the perspective here that this may have only construction but that is false. This impact can definitely be used on the design side, I use contractor vs. owner example just because it is pretty familiar. But the impact schedule can definitely be used inside MnDot for the design phase which would be very important to understand and where the delays are coming from on the design side. So it can be used for both design and construction. Again I just kind of used the example of contractor vs. owner but it can be applied to either side. Any ‘live’ questions that anyone would like to ask? Otherwise I see that was the only question I had come in so far. James, you have your ‘hand raised’, do you have a question that you wanted, you are unmuted. I did have a couple raised hands, alright. If there are no ‘live’ questions then I would like to thank everyone for attending and look forward to do the webinar for next week. We will have everything posted online to the website here within the next couple days. So again thank you for attending, wait it looks like I have another question. Yep, ok some people may have connected to the webinar but may have not a connection by microphone so if you do want to ask a ‘live’ questions you would need some type of a microphone. Otherwise the question box on the right hand side is the best way to go. Alright so again thank you for attending this week and look forward to having you attend the webinar next week. Thank you and have a good day.