Construction Planning and Control

Explore how project control integrates with management to monitor budget and schedule, detect deviations, and apply corrective actions using daily measurements and cost, time, and quality controls.

Establish the performance measurement baseline (PNB) from the approved plan, then monitor time and cost with project performance measurement, breaking work into measurable packages via a work breakdown structure.

Explore key project control formulas, including cost variance, schedule variance, budget at completion, estimate at completion, standard deviation, and CPI, SPI, in a probabilistic environment.

Apply the project control cycle within the project management lifecycle to plan, execute, monitor, and adjust costs and schedule, using corrective actions to stay on track.

Plan to achieve goals, decompose the project, build an integrated schedule and risk baseline, monitor progress, diagnose deviations, and implement corrective actions to control construction projects.

Identify project goals in preconstruction planning, then build a detailed plan with schedule and budget, and test assumptions to minimize time and cost risks before construction begins.

Contractors drive project execution under a project manager who leads estimators, schedulers, superintendents, accounting, and admin staff, while owners and designers provide funding and documentation.

Establish baselines for schedule, budget, and communication using the critical path method, linking activity duration to quantity and resources, updating with change orders, and detailing cost accounts in a CBS.

Explore the scheduling component of project control, linking activity durations, sequences, and dependencies through CPM while noting physical, contractual, and managerial relationships in construction.

Explore the five common scheduling types used in construction: checklists, schedule boards, bar or Gantt charts (including the modified version), look-ahead schedules, and linear scheduling.

Explore advanced scheduling methods in construction, focusing on CPM as the backbone and critical path to baseline tracking, and PERT for uncertainty with most likely, optimistic, and worst-case durations.

Define project tasks within a work breakdown structure, assigning duration, cost, and resources, and categorize activities into administrative, procurement, and production to meet milestones using CSI MasterFormat.

Discover how to determine task duration using daily production rate and labor productivity, under normal conditions, with consistent units, and apply to a drywall example.

Explore how construction activities relate through dependencies, predecessors, successors, and parallel tasks in the project schedule. Understand the four relationships: finish-to-start, start-to-start, finish-to-finish, and start-to-finish, lag and lead concepts.

Review the estimating process and its role in project control, including lump-sum contracts, unit price, and bid proposals and the quantity takeoff that informs costs and schedules.

Discover how CSI master format structures construction estimates with 50 divisions, linking general requirements, products, and execution to accurate cost planning.

The CBS breaks down the original budget into cost accounts and elements, aligned with the WBS and CSI master format, to track costs and the project schedule.

See how the costs report links cost to date with current period costs, forming a baseline against the budget and guiding integrated project control through schedule and cost analysis.

Explore schedule of values, its use in lump-sum contracts, and how construction costs, fees, and contractor profit are allocated, billed via requisitions, including front loading considerations.

Integrate schedule and budget by assigning scheduled values to every task, including direct costs and profit, then match costs to durations to forecast cash flows and profitability.

Understand planned versus actual values in construction by examining productivity, learning curves, and assumptions about crew, equipment, and uninterrupted eight-hour workdays.

Explore earned value management through a precast concrete curves example, comparing planned value, earned value, and actual cost to track daily progress and invoicing.

Learn to measure and analyze project progress with earned value management, emphasizing accurate units completed, milestone progress, start/finish methods, and weighted or equivalent unit techniques to assess status.

Learn to calculate progress by applying the units completed method, criminal milestone, and start-finish methods to measure task completion in construction projects.

Explore three progress methods: cost ratio, expert-based estimates, and weighted or equivalent unit calculations. Convert dissimilar subtasks into a common unit using weights based on dollar value or labor hours.

Apply earned value management to measure progress on activities and whole project using six methods, tied to the schedule of values and fixed or variable budgets, including cost plus contracts.

Compare fixed vs variable budget approaches in different delivery methods, including design-bid-build and design-build, and assess earned value management through cost and schedule performance.

Learn the three core components of earned value management—plan value, earned value, and actual cost—and how they reveal schedule progress, cost performance, and overall project health.

Monitor construction project progress with earned value management by comparing earned value to plan value to compute the schedule performance index and schedule variance.

Assess cost performance by comparing earned value with actual cost using CPI, SPI, and CV to determine if the project is under or over budget and to gauge spending efficiency.

Explore how the s-curve visualizes project progress using budgeted cost of work scheduled, earned value, and actual cost, enabling variance analysis and forecast of end date and cost.

Explore tracking Gantt charts, control charts, and SPI and CPI charts to compare actual versus baseline schedules, monitor costs, and forecast future project performance.

Identify causes of variances in cost and schedule for construction projects, including poor estimating, scheduling, mismanagement, scope creep, and change orders.

Conduct root cause analysis from collected data, diagnose schedule and budget deviations, implement corrective actions, and report progress with weekly status reports and earned value management tools.

Analyze data to identify trends in project performance, compare them with variances, and forecast future outcomes using trend charts like CPI and SPI to inform corrective actions.

Explore how to calculate estimate at completion (EIC) using CPI, SPI, and remaining work to forecast the updated project budget, with practical examples and method comparisons.

Calculate the estimate to complete (ETC) by deducting actual cost of work performed from the new budget to reveal the remaining money needed to finish the project.

Explain variance at completion, the difference between budget at completion and estimated completion, signaling over or under budget; positive VAC indicates savings and uses EAC, BAC, SPI, and CPI.

Calculate TCPI to stay on budget at completion, using work remaining over budget remaining, and interpret CPI to determine the needed performance improvement for the remaining work.

Analyze project percentages using planned value, earned value, and actual cost to assess schedule and budget, then forecast with completion estimates and performance indices.

Explore productivity definitions and the factors that influence crew output, linking labor management to activity durations and showing how to boost project performance.

Define productivity as the rate of output per labor hour, distinguishing it from production, the actual work completed, and use a production model to compare input against output.

Compute the productivity index by comparing planned budgeted labor hours to actual hours. This ratio reveals how efficiently crew resources are used and whether productivity improves.

Identify internal controllable and external uncontrollable factors affecting labor productivity, and apply planning, material management, training, and strong leadership to reduce interruptions and maximize productive time.