LECTURE NOTES ON

CONSTRUCTION
PROJECT MANAGEMENT

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 INTRODUCTION

The Need for Project Management

The construction industry is the largest industry in the world. It is more of a service than a
manufacturing industry. Growth in this industry in fact is an indicator of the economic conditions
of a country. This is because the construction industry consumes a wide employment circle
of labor. While the manufacturing industry exhibit high-quality products, timelines of service
delivery, reasonable cost of service, and low failure rates, the construction industry, on the
other hand, is generally the opposite. Most projects exhibit cost overruns, time extensions,
and conflicts among parties. Figure 1 is an example of a complicated project. Table 1, also,
exhibits some magnificent projects that suffered from huge cost overruns.

Figure 1 Example of a complicated project

Table 1 Magnificent projects with huge cost overruns

Project Cost overruns (%)
Suez Canal 1,900
Sydney Opera House 1,400
Concorde Supersonic Aero plane 1,100
Panama Canal 200
Brooklyn Bridge 100

In general, the construction industry is more challenging than other industries due to: its unique
nature; every project is one-of a kind; many conflicting parties are involved; projects are
constrained by time, money and quality; and high risk.

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The Construction Project

A project is defined, whether it is in construction or not, by the following characteristics:

- A defined goal or objective.

- Specific tasks to be performed.
- A defined beginning and end.
- Resources being consumed.

The goal of construction project is to build something. What differentiate the construction industry
from other industries is that its projects are large, built on-site, and generally unique. Time, money,
labor, equipment, and, materials are all examples of the kinds of resources that are consumed by
the project.

Projects begin with a stated goal established by the owner and accomplished by the project
team. As the team begins to design, estimate, and plan out the project, the members learn
more about the project than was known when the goal was first established. This often leads
to a redefinition of the stated project goals.

The Project Scope and Goals

You can’t hit a target if you don’t know what it looks like. Similarly, you can’t possibly reach
your project’s goal if you don’t know what it is. When you understand your goal, you can begin
to define the specific parameters of the project. This is often referred to as a project’s scope. It is
necessary to know that a scope is not a goal. Scope statements define both what a project will
involve and what it will not involve.

Breaking Your Project into Phases

How does all this goal and scope analysis relate to Project? When you start a new project schedule,
one of the first things you will do is to enter individual tasks. Knowing your goal and scope
helps you to identify the steps you should be performing to accomplish them. Before you create
your first task, you should probably begin to think beyond the scope of your project to more
detailed project parameters. These parameters help you determine what tasks to include in your
project. For example, you might consider:

- Deliverables: These are tangible products, services, or results that you’ll produce during
your project. Somewhere in your project should be tasks that reflect the delivery of each
deliverable.
- Key Dates: In addition to the project end date, do you have to meet other key dates
along the way?
- Completion Criteria: How will you know when you’re done? Do you start up the new
service and that’s it, or do you have to test it for a week before your job is done? Knowing
your completion criteria gives your team something specific to aim for and helps you
create the last phase of your project.

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 - Expectations: Knowing what you expect from your team, management, and yourself
can help you identify some tasks. If you expect your team to hold a quarterly debriefing
meeting and submit a progress report, you might include such a task in your project. If you
expect management to sign off on a prototype, a task such as Prototype Approval is logical.
- Potential Risks: Identifying potential problem areas can help you build in some checks
and balances to help avoid or minimize them. For example, you may create tasks that
contain terms such as Q&A, Testing, Review, Debrief, and Revise to monitor or fix
problems along the way.

The Project Life-Cycle

The acquisition of a constructed facility usually represents a major capital investment, whether its
owner happens to be an individual, a private corporation or a public agency. Since the
commitment of resources for such an investment is motivated by market demands or
perceived needs, the facility is expected to satisfy certain objectives within the constraints
specified by the owner and relevant regulations. The project life cycle may be viewed as a
process through which a project is implemented from beginning to end. This process is often
very complex; however, it can be decomposed into several stages as indicated by the general
outline in Figure 2, the solutions at various stages are then integrated to obtain the final outcome.
Although each stage requires different expertise, it usually includes both technical and managerial
activities in the knowledge domain of the specialist.
All stages from conceptual planning and feasibility studies to the acceptance of a facility for
occupancy may be broadly lumped together and referred to as the Design/Construct process,
while the procurement and construction alone are traditionally regarded as the province of the
construction industry.

Figure 2: Project life cycle

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There is no single best approach in organizing project management throughout a project's life
cycle. All organizational approaches have advantages and disadvantages, depending on the
knowledge of the owner in construction management as well as the type, size and location of the
project. It is important for the owner to be aware of the approach which is most appropriate and
beneficial for a particular project.

The Project Manager

The project manager is the individual charged with the overall coordination of the entire
construction program for the owner. These include planning, design, procurement, and
construction. Among his/her duties:

- Clear definitions of the goals of the project.

- Investigate alternative solutions for the problems.
- Develop a detailed plan to make the selected program reality.
- Implement the plan and control the project.

Construction Manager:
The construction manager is a specialized firm or organization which administrates the on-site
erection activities and the consulting services required by the owner from planning through design
and construction to commissioning. The construction manager is responsible for design
coordination, proper selection of materials and methods of construction, contracts preparation for
award, cost and scheduling information and control.

PROJECT PLANNING

This chapter deals with preparing projects plans in terms of defining: work breakdown structure,
activities, logical relations, durations and activities direct cost. Terminology of project planning
will be presented and discussed. Project network representation using different graphical methods
including: activity on arrow and activity on node are presented.

Introduction

Planning involves the breakdown of the project into definable, measurable, and identifiable
tasks/activities, and then establishes the logical interdependences among them. Generally,
planning answers three main questions:
What is to be done? How
to do it?
Who does it?

In construction, for example, plans may exist at several levels: corporate strategic plans, pre-tender
plans, pre-contract plans, short-term construction plans, and long-term construction plans. These
plans are different from each other; however, all these plans involve four main steps:
- Performing breakdown of work items involved in the project into activities.
- Identifying the proper sequence by which the activities should be executed.
- R epresentation of activities.
- Estimating the resources, time, and cost of individual activities.
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Project Planning Steps

To develop a project plan:

1. Define the scope of work, method statement, and sequence of work.
2. Generate the work breakdown structure (WBS) to produce a complete list of activities.
3. Develop the organization breakdown structure (OBS) and link it with work
breakdown structure to identify responsibilities.
4. Determine the relationship between activities.
5. Estimate activities time duration, cost expenditure, and resource requirement.
6. Develop the project network.

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

1. The WBS is described as a hierarchical structure which is designed to logically sub-

divide all the work-elements of the project into a graphical presentation.
2. The full scope of work for the project is placed at the top of the diagram, and then sub-divided
smaller elements of work at each lower level of the breakdown.
3. At the lowest level of the WBS the elements of work is called a work package. A list of
project’s activities is developed from the work packages.

Effective use of the WBS will outline the scope of the project and the responsibility for each work
package. To visualize the WBS, Figure 3 shows a house construction project.

House

Civil Plumping Electrical

Foundations Walls/Roof Piping H/C Water Wiring Fittings

Figure 3: WBS and their description

As shown in Figure 3, Level 1 represents the full scope of work for the house. In level 2, the project
is sub-divided into its three main trades, and in level 3 each trade is sub- divided to specific
work packages. Figure 3 shows another example for more detailed WBS, in which the project WBS
is divided into five levels:
Example 2

Level 1 Gas development project

Level 2 Recovery unit 300 Process unit 400

Level 3 Train 2 Train 1 Gas treating Separation and stabilization

Level 4 Instrumentation Structural steel Civil Piping

Piping
Level 5 fabrication
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Project Activities
The building block (the smallest unit) of a WBS is the activity, which is a unique unit of the
project that has a specified duration. An activity is defined as any function or decision in the
project that: consumes time, resources, and cost. Activities are classified to three types:

Production activities: activities that involve the use of resources such as labor,
equipment, material, or subcontractor. This type of activities can be easily identified
by reading the project’s drawings and specifications. Examples are: excavation,
formwork, reinforcement, concreting, etc. each production activity can have a certain
quantity of work, resource needs, costs, and duration.

Procurement activities: activities that specify the time for procuring materials or
equipment that are needed for a production activity. Examples are: brick procurement,
boiler manufacturing and delivery, etc.

Management activities: activities that are related to management decisions such as

approvals, vacations, etc.

An activity can be as small as “steel fixing of first floor columns” or as large as

“construct first floor columns”. This level of details depends on the purpose of preparing the
project plan. In the pre-construction stages, less detailed activities can be utilized, however, in
the construction stages, detailed activities are required. Accordingly, level of details depends
on: planning stage, size of the project, complexity of the work, management expertise.

Activities Relationships

In order to identify the relationships among activities, the planning team needs to answer the
following questions for each activity in the project:

- Which activities must be finished before the current one can start?
- What activity (ies) may be constructed concurrently with the current one?
- What activity (ies) must follow the current one?

A circle of activity precedence will result in an impossible plan. For example, if activity A
precedes activity B, activity B precedes activity C, and activity C precedes activity A, then the
project can never be started or completed. Figure 4 illustrates the resulting activity network.

Figure 4: Example of a circle of activity precedence

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 Example 3

Figure 5 shows a double-span bridge. Break the construction works of the bridge into
Activities. The plan will be used for bidding purposes.

Hand rail

Road base right

Road base left
Deck slab
Precast beams

Figure 5: Double span bridge

A list of the double-span bridge activities is shown in Table 2

Table 2: Activities of the double-span bridge

Activity Description
10 Set-up site
14 Procure reinforcement
16 Procure precast beams
20 Excavate left abutment
30 Excavate right abutment
40 Excavate central pier
50 Foundation left abutment
60 Foundation right abutment
70 Foundation central pier
80 Construct left abutment
90 Construct right abutment
100 Construct central pier
110 Erect left precast beams
120 erect right precast beams
140 Fill left embankment
150 Fill right embankment
155 Construct deck slab
160 Left road base
170 Right road base
180 Road surface
190 Bridge railing
200 Clear site

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Example 4

Suppose that a site preparation and concrete slab foundation construction project consists of
nine different activities:
A. Site clearing (of brush and minor debris),
B. Removal of trees,
C. General excavation,
D. Grading general area,
E. Excavation for utility trenches,
F. Placing formwork and reinforcement for concrete,
G. Installing sewer lines,
H. Installing other utilities,
I. Pouring concrete

Table 3: Precedence relations for Example 4

Activity Description Predecessors

A Site clearing ---
B Removal of trees ---
C General excavation A
D Grading general area A
E Excavation for utility trenches B,C
F Placing formwork and reinforcement for concrete B,C
G Installing sewer lines D,E
H Installing other utilities D,E
I Pouring concrete F,G

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Drawing Project Network

A network is a graphical representation of the project activities and their relationships. A

project network is a set of arrows and nodes. Before drawing the network, it is necessary to
ensure that the project has a unified starting and ending point. The need for this start activity
arises when there is more than one activity in the project that has no predecessors and the end
activity is needed when there is more than one activity that has no successors. Also, networks
should be continuous (i.e., each activity except the first and the last has both preceding and
succeeding activities).

There are two ways that are commonly used to draw a network diagram for a project:

1. Activity on Arrow (AOA) representation.

2. Activity on Node (AON) representation

Activity on arrow network (AOA)

In this method, the arrows represent activities while the nodes represent the start and the end
of an activity (usually named as events) (Figure 6). The length of the arrow connecting
the nodes has no significance and may be straight, curved, or bent. When one activity depends
upon another, both appear on the diagram as two arrows having a common node.

Figure 6: Basic patterns of AOA diagrams

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The following are some rules that need to be followed when constructing an AOA
Network diagram

- Each activity must have a unique i – j numbers, where i (the number at the tail of the arrow)
is smaller than j (the number at the head of the arrow).
-It is recommended to have a gap between numbers (i.e., 5, 10, 15, etc.). This will allow for
accommodation of missed activities.
- Avoid back arrows.

In some situations, when more than one arrow leave the same node and arrive at another node,
dummy activities must be used. The dummy activity is an activity with zero duration,
consumes no resources, drawn as dashed lines, and used to adjust the network diagram. A
dummy activity is also used when one activity depends upon two preceding activities and another
activity depends only upon one of these two preceding activities as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7: Use of dummy activity

Activity on node network (AON)

This method is also called the precedence diagram method. In this method, the nodes represent
activities and the arrows represent logical relationships among the activities. If the arrow
starts from the end side of an activity (activity A) and ends at the start side of another activity
(activity B), then A is a predecessor of B (Figure 8). AON representation allows the overlap
or lag representation on the relationship arrow connecting activities.

Figure 8
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 Comparison between AOA and AON

While both networks can be used to represent a project network, there are some
differences between them:
- There is no need for the use of dummy activities in AON representation.
- AON are more easily to draw and to read.
- In AOA, an activity can only start when all its predecessors have finished.
- AON allows for overlap/lag representation.
- AON allows for the representation of the four types of relationships while AOA
allows only for the finish to start relationship.

PROJECT SCHEDULING

Since real-life projects involve hundreds of activities, it is important to identify the group of
critical activities so that special care is taken to make sure they are not delayed. All these
statements are the basic objectives of the scheduling process, which adds a time dimension to
the planning process. In other words, we can briefly state that: Scheduling = Planning + Time

Scheduling is the determination of the timing of the activities comprising the project to enable
managers to execute the project in a timely manner. The project scheduling is used for:
- Knowing the activities timing and the project completion time.
- Having resources available on site in the correct time.
- Making correction actions if schedule shows that the plan will result in late
completion.
- Assessing the value of penalties on project late completion.
- Determining the project cash flow.
- Evaluating the effect of change orders on the project completion time.
- Determining the value pf project delay and the responsible parties.

Preparation of construction schedule-

i.) The project is divided into number of operations and the sequence of these operations
can be derived after knowing their relationship properly.
ii.) The quantity of work involved in each operation has to be calculated.
iii.) The time required for completion of the project as well as the different activities are to
be calculated. This can be done from the quantity of work involved and the rate of performing
each work.

Advantages of scheduling-

i.) By studying the schedule of any work and the many alternative methods of execution, we
can choose the best one.
ii.)It gives a clear idea regarding the required men, materials and equipment at different stages
of the work.

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iii.)Since the starting time of each work is known, proper arrangement and requirements can
be done prior to the starting of the work.
iv.)Resource utilization is optimized.
v.)Actual progress of the work is monitored with the actual plan. If there is any delay, proper
remedial measures can be taken to avoid such delays.
vi.)Interrelationship of various activities at different stages are known, thus we will be able to
fix them according to their priority.
vii.)Total duration of the complete project is known.

Methods of scheduling
1. Milestone Charts
Milestones mark significant events in the life of a project, usually critical activities which
must be achieved on time to avoid delay in the project. Milestones should be truly significant
and be reasonable in terms of deadlines (avoid using intermediate stages).
Examples include:
Installation of equipment;
Completion of phases;
File conversion;
Cutover to the new system.

2. Gantt Charts (Bar charts)

A Gantt chart is a horizontal bar or line chart which will commonly include the following
features:
Activities identified on the left hand side;
Time scale is drawn on the top (or bottom) of the chart;
A horizontal open oblong or a line is drawn against each activity
indicating estimated duration;
Dependencies between activities are shown;
At a review point the oblongs are shaded to represent the actual time
spent (an alternative is to represent actual and estimated by 2 separate lines);
A vertical cursor (such as a transparent ruler) placed at the review point makes it
possible to establish activities which are behind or ahead of schedule.

Example of a Gantt chart

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Which tasks is ahead of schedule? Which task is behind schedule? Gantt charts produced in
this form are:
Graphical;
Easy to read;
Easy to update.

There are no widely accepted standards for Gantt charts. Automated tools are available which
produce Gantt charts directly from activity networks or from a full definition of the tasks.
Automated tools have features which assist the planning function including:

Display of original and latest time for task;

Display of person(s) allocated to tasks;
Integration with other planning techniques (i.e. networks and milestones).

The Critical Path Method

The most widely used scheduling technique is the critical path method (CPM) for scheduling.
This method calculates the minimum completion time for a project along with the possible
start and finish times for the project activities. Computer programs and algorithms for critical
path scheduling are widely available and can efficiently handle projects with thousands of
activities.
 The critical path itself represents the set or sequence of activities which will take
the longest time to complete.
 The duration of the critical path is the sum of the activities' durations along the path.
Thus, the critical path can be defined as the longest possible path through the
“network” of project activities.
 The duration of the critical path represents the minimum time required to complete a
project. Any delays along the critical path would imply that additional time would be
required to complete the project.
 There may be more than one critical path among all the project activities, so completion
of the entire project could be delayed by delaying activities along any one of the critical
paths.

The CPM is a systematic scheduling method for a project network and involves four main steps:
 A forward path to determine activities early-start times;
 A backward path to determine activities late-finish times;
 Float calculations; and
 Identifying critical activities

Calculations for the Critical Path Method

The inputs to network scheduling of any project are simply the AOA or the AON
networks with the individual activity duration defined. The network scheduling process for
AOA and AON networks, however, is different. To demonstrate these two techniques, let’s

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consider a simple 5-activity project, with activity A at the start, followed by three parallel
activities B, C, and D; which are then succeeded by activity E. The AOA or the AON networks
of this example are presented in Figure 9

Figure 9

Activity-On-Arrow Networks Calculations

The objective of arrow network analysis is to compute for each event in the network its
early and late timings. These times are defined as:
- Early event time (ET) is the earliest time at which an event can occur, considering
the duration of preceding activities
- Late event time (LT) is the latest time at which an event can occur if the project is
to be completed on schedule.

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