TOP VITAL STEP IN SUCCESSFUL CONSTRUCTION (PART 3): WORK PORGRAM

Top Vital Step in Successful Construction (Part 3): Work Program

As discussed in part 2, the important item that must never being neglected is Work Program. For this discussion, we will go through a sample of a work program as shown below.

 

The above sample was developed by the aid of Microsoft Project 2002 software.

The work Program above is consisting of numbers of column.

The first column is the "I" column that represent the information of the following column such as the work listed in the following column have not been started even though it supposed had been start or it also collect the status of the work in the following column wether the work is behind , on time or ahead schedule.

The Second column: Task – The column where all the job or work that required to complete a project successfully being listed. All of the listed item in this column can be organise in phases. For example; One of the main Work that need to be done is building work. Under the main work there are still another few more item that need to be completed such as Piling work, beam work, slab work, column work, roof beam work, roofing work, brickwork and many other that required in order to construct a fully functional building.

The Third Column: Duration – The column where the period or number of day/months/year that is needed to completed one task. Each task might have same number of days/months/years/ or it could also be different which highly depend on the resources that are allocated for the task. However the sample above does not show the resources allocated for each task.

The Fourth column : Start –
In this column we can insert as when we want a task to start which is to be more accurate the date of the task to start. This column also being auto calculate by Microsoft project it self if the task is depend on the other task that need to be completed first before the next task can start. For example; refer to item 3 and 4 under Column ID.

The Fifth Column: Finish – This column normally being govern by the duration of each task that we insert in the second column and the dependency of the task. Let choose that we want Microsoft project to calculate and insert the finish date of a task we only need to determine and key in the duration that we need to complete the task. The next data required by Microsoft project before it can calculate the targeted date to finish a task is weather the task is independent or dependent. For example item 3 under ID column, The duration is 6 days, the start date is on 1/9/2009, therefore the finish date calculate by Microsoft project will be on 7/9/2009.

The sixth Column: % complete – In this column we will enter the percentage of a task complete when we update the status a task. If a task is already completed, than in this column we can enter the number to 100. The value of this column must be 0 – 100. 0 indicate the tasks have not yet start and 100 indicate the task already completed. However for the work Program above all value under this column is "0" due to the project have not started and the work program above is just an estimate for discussion purpose.

The next area in the work program is all the bar chart. This bar is as a result of the information that we enter in the first to the Sixth column. This is called Gantt chart. This Gantt chart will show how the dependencies between tasks are, when it starts and finish and also the important portion are the bar which are red in colour. The bars that colour red are all the critical path / task in this construction project. Delay in any of the task will resulted in the construction project not being able to be completed within the agree construction period if the is no drastic action taken to improved the output of the delay task. For example a critical task is delay, at the current situation the task only being carried out during day time, due to the result of the task being delay, the team can be push to work 24hours or resources for this task need to be increase in order to catch up with the delay.