Developing a detailed project estimate and schedule that are aligned and that stakeholders can agree to is a very important step in achieving project success
Establishing a cost and schedule baseline to measure progress against is a critical component for assessing if project objectives are being met. Evaluating changes against the baseline requires a robust process and team discipline. There are many moving parts when a project is being executed. It is important to understand what the plan is and how the project is performing against the plan.
Petroglyph Projects applies straightforward, intuitive, and results-oriented processes targeted towards producing actionable data driven insights.
Consisting of a wide-ranging set of offerings, our focus is on generating meaningful value for our clients and bringing forward the right solutions.
The team at Petroglyph Projects has the proven experience and expertise to provide the schedule development and support you require, no matter where you are in the project lifecycle.
By deploying expert human and technical resources, we integrate all the project details and facilitate the development of a reliable schedule, in a highly effective manner.
Our planning and scheduling support services are tailored to our client’s needs and range from complete end to end project support or on an as needed basis when and where needed throughout the project lifecycle.
Our planning and scheduling support services include the following:
A plan developed with the input and buy in of the project team exponentially increases their ability to execute a project with success.
A schedule quality assessment evaluates all components of the schedule’s model, structure and development methodology against established benchmarks and best practices for a complete, reliable and logical schedule.
This process includes the evaluation of all components of the schedule structure and development methodology, review of the Schedule Basis, and an assessment of the model’s comprehensiveness.
A schedule quality assessment can apply to schedules created internally, or received from external parties like contractors for the execution of a specific scope of work.
The evaluation of the characteristics of the schedule provides a high level of insight to the project team on how confident they can be in the schedule’s quality. The subsequent report highlights how well your schedule scores in both metrics and logic and provides recommendations to increase the quality of the schedule model.
Our Interactive Planning Sessions involve facilitation sessions designed to help the planning team move the project schedule to the next phase.
Most useful when teams need to plan interface management points in the execution, assess the feasibility of alternative strategies or obtain agreement on the right next steps to obtain successful outcomes.
Whether your team is considering developing a new schedule or needs to assess the viability of alternative strategies or what-if-scenarios we’ll provide a structured session informed by multiple decades of proven project performance to help the team move forward.
A fully integrated schedule is crucial to the execution and delivery of any large project.
An Integrated Schedule Development Process ensures the plans of the project partners/stakeholders are aligned horizontally and vertically to fully reflect the entire scope of the project.
Developing an Integrated Schedule is the process to guarantee that specific timing has been specified and associated to each milestone, and that all project players have fundamental alignment on key project dates.
We will work with you to develop the best approach to integrate multiple plans into an executable project schedule. The scope and complexity of the project will determine our level of engagement.
The deliverable, a Master Project Schedule is one that accurately reflects the full scope and has been agreed to by key stakeholders and partners.
The Schedule Basis memorandum will be issued together with the schedule, as it is critical that all key assumptions, methodologies, and parameters are clearly documented to support analysis and changes in the future.
1. Data integration & validation:
Liaising between the planning teams, contractors, project owner and other parties involved in the project to obtain and validate the required project documents and schedules is the first step in the integrated schedule development process.
This step is critical to ensure the project schedule contains the raw data and inputs from all stakeholders.
If we’re working to build the schedule or estimate in a specialized linear scheduling software, pipeline estimating software or construction project scheduling tool, documents are imported or translated from software solutions currently in place ie: P6, MS Project and or excel workbooks.
Additional data inputs from project documents may include PEP, CEP, basis documents, alignment sheets and schedules, land acquisition data, survey data, engineering data and more.
2. Building your project schedule
Once all the data has been gathered and validated for accuracy and completion, we will build out your schedule in the preferred project planning tool. This can be a P6, Powerproject or Tilos schedule.
The outcome of this step is the first draft of master schedule of the project, which is validated for logic, methodology and data accuracy. A Tilos schedule template dramatically reduces future resource requirements from the internal project team during scheduling updates and changes.
Additional templates that accompany the master template may include those that automatically adjust to calculate the work rate for various crews, mass haulage and other deliverables when the project progress is updated.
3. Schedule scenario development and assessment
Schedule scenario assessments evaluate key milestones, quality & project readiness.
Typically begun after risk and feasibility assessments have been completed, and the project has been assessed to be in line with business objectives.
Scenario assessments can be used to assess mitigation options, what-if scenarios, strategic possibilities, feasibility of execution changes, opportunities for schedule enhancement and other relevant data to support data driven decision making in order to arrive at an optimized, realistic and reliable critical path to project completion. In a perfect world, this work is done before mobilization and construction starts.
4. Building your project schedule
This step can also include the creation calculation and baselining of one or more project spreads. Depending on the project needs, the deliverable can include spreads for engineering, survey and land data and for each contracting organization.
5. Testing and confirmation:
The project schedule templates are now ready for testing, revision and field usage.
We’ll work with the relevant parties to ensure schedule and estimate accuracy and adoption. In this phase we’re often retained to provide specialized software training to decrease ramp up time and expedite internal adoption rates.
Whether we’ve worked with you to arrive at a viable schedule or not, we’re available to analyze project progress against the baseline and provide quantitative data to validate or invalidate the performance of the team towards the project goals.
In some cases, the project team has data to suggest progress has been made but can’t always substantiate where along the ROW. Or, earned value is in dispute and needs a deep dive into the data to support or defend claims.
You cannot improve what you don’t measure.
Without regular monitoring of schedule progress, delays clashes and other unforeseen events can derail the project progress.
Regular monitoring and reporting on what’s done, where enables any deviations from the baseline to be caught and adjusted before things get too far off track.
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Victoria, BC V8V 4B1
Canada