Practical, experience-based project management lessons for project engineers, developing project managers, and field professionals.
Friday Field Notes #01: Forecasts Are Not Budgets
|
FRIDAY FIELD NOTES #01 Forecasts Are Not Budgets Good morning team, I'd like to try something new. Every Friday, I'll send a few short project management observations, leadership thoughts, field lessons, and spreadsheet tips that may help as you continue developing as Project Engineers and future Project Managers. Most of these topics won't come from textbooks. They'll come from things I've seen on projects over the years—some that went well and some that didn't. My hope is that these notes help bridge the gap between training and the realities of managing work in the field. This week's topic: forecasting. From the Field Forecasting problems are rarely caused by bad math. More often, they're caused by good people working with outdated assumptions. I've seen projects where the field team knew productivity was slipping weeks before it showed up in the forecast. The information existed, but it never made its way into the numbers. By the time everyone agreed there was a problem, valuable time had already been lost. Forecasts tend to get blamed when projects miss expectations, but in many cases the forecast wasn't the problem. The project team simply wasn't updating it with what they were learning. Leadership Perspective Good project leaders create an environment where bad news can be brought forward early. If people are afraid to mention a problem until they have a perfect solution, the project may lose the time needed to correct it. Forecasting is not just a financial exercise. It is also a leadership exercise because it depends on honest communication. Field Observation One pattern I've noticed is that field concerns usually appear before financial concerns. A superintendent may notice a crew is moving slower than expected. A foreman may start requesting additional labor. A PE may notice quantities aren't tracking as planned. Those observations are often the earliest warning signs available to the project team. Good forecasting starts by paying attention to what the field is telling you and translating those observations into updated assumptions. Spreadsheet Tip This week's formula: SUMIFS Use this when you want to total costs, hours, quantities, or other values based on one or more conditions. =SUMIFS($F:$F,$B:$B,"02100") In this example, Excel adds everything in Column F where the cost code in Column B equals 02100. A more useful version is to reference a cell instead of typing the cost code directly into the formula: =SUMIFS($F:$F,$B:$B,A2) If Cell A2 contains the cost code, this formula will total everything in Column F that matches that cost code. This can be useful for labor hours, equipment costs, trucking quantities, waste totals, or any other project data that needs to be summarized by category. Question for the Week If you had to update your project forecast today, what field information would you use that is different from what you knew 30 days ago? Have a great weekend, Dan |
Friday Field Notes
Practical, experience-based project management lessons for project engineers, developing project managers, and field professionals.
Good morning team, This week’s topic: look-ahead schedules. 1. From the Field A look-ahead should represent what the project team actually believes is going to happen over the next few weeks. That sounds obvious, but I’ve seen look-aheads continue showing activities that everyone onsite already knows are not going to start on the dates listed. At that point, the document stops being a planning tool and becomes an exercise in updating dates. A useful look-ahead should reflect current field...
Good morning team, This week’s topic: project schedules. 1. From the Field A project schedule is obviously a planning tool, but I’ve found that its real value comes from how well it helps people understand what is supposed to happen next. A schedule can be technically correct and still be difficult to use. If the field team cannot tell what areas should be available, when subcontractors are needed, or what activities are driving the next few weeks of work, the schedule is not doing much to...
If you’re new here, Friday Field Notes is a short weekly newsletter built around practical project management lessons from the field. I originally started writing these notes for Project Engineers I was helping develop. The goal was simple: give them something useful they could read in a few minutes and apply to a real project. A lot of project management is learned through formal training, procedures, software, and project controls. But some of the most important lessons come from...