Practical, experience-based project management lessons for project engineers, developing project managers, and field professionals.
Friday Field Notes #09: Time Impacts Matter Too
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FRIDAY FIELD NOTES #09 Time Impacts Matter Too Good morning team, This week’s topic: schedule impacts associated with change. 1. From the Field When project teams identify a change, the first conversation often focuses on direct cost. Labor, equipment, materials, disposal, trucking, and subcontractor pricing are usually easier to see and quantify. The schedule impact can be just as important, but it is often discussed later or not documented at all. A change may interrupt planned production, delay access to another area, require resequencing, extend equipment rentals, or keep supervision onsite longer than expected. Even when the added work itself is relatively small, the disruption around it can affect the project well beyond the direct cost of completing the task. 2. Leadership Perspective Good leaders help the team look beyond the immediate task. Asking how a change affects the remaining work often reveals impacts that will not appear in the first cost calculation. 3. Field Observation Schedule impacts are easiest to understand while the sequence is still fresh. Once the team adjusts and moves forward, the revised plan can begin to look like it was always the plan. That is why the project record should capture both the original sequence and what changed. A short schedule narrative, updated look-ahead, meeting note, or written notice can help explain how the event affected planned work. The goal is not to claim a delay every time something changes. The goal is to evaluate the effect while the team still has enough information to make an informed decision. 4. Spreadsheet Tip This week’s formula: NETWORKDAYS Use this formula to calculate the number of working days between two dates. =NETWORKDAYS(B2,C2) If Cell B2 contains the start date and Cell C2 contains the finish date, Excel will count the weekdays between them. To exclude company holidays listed in Cells H2 through H15, use: =NETWORKDAYS(B2,C2,$H$2:$H$15) This can help when reviewing schedule durations, change impacts, submittal turnaround periods, and required response times. 5. Question for the Week How would the potential changes on your current project affect the sequence or duration of the remaining work? 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...