Over the last few months it has become increasingly apparent that some builders in Perth’s booming construction market are not spending the time and effort to produce quality construction programmes.

We believe that incompetant “planners” are being employed to produce rubbish and non-sensical programmes.

As the premier Project Planning consultants in Perth, JCA is being appointed by clients to review these poor programmes, and we have increasingly found that what has been submitted to those clients is rubbish, unusable (both for Client and the builder themselves), and we report back accordingly. The builder then has to engage a competant planner to fix up the stuff ups (which many times means JCA gets called in).

It is true that some of the builders are using their untrained inhouse staff to produce these programmes, just because they know how to turn on Microsoft Project. With no training on critical path methodologies, or ability to produce a reasonable, realistic and detailed programme of works, the result is a useless bar chart of no meaning.

Unfortunately there are some one man band “consultant” planners in Perth who are also preparing such rubbish for the builders. They have no excuse, and should not be practising.

We say take a look at what you are preparing for the builder and ask yourself if you would be prepared to accept that to build the project yourself.

We have had some interesting discussions with clients recently who have taken initial poor advice from Quantity Surveyors and other non-Time Planning consultants on how long construction projects will take.

As all skilled and experienced Project Time Planners/Schedulers would know, we never give advice on the cost of projects, because that’s not our role, and not what we practice day in and day out.

Some Non-Time Planning consultants seem to be using rules of thumb guesstimates based on value of works to arrive at a meaningless guess of duration for a project. Unfortunately this sort of practice is very much fraught with error, and ultimately means the consultant and/or client gets egg on their face when a real Time Planner tells them the real story.

Time Planning is not an art of rule of thumbs…

it is a methodological process of calculating durations for broken down pieces of the project and logically sequencing these together with due respect for buildability, available resources and external constraints.

Next time you Hear a Quantity Surveyor, Cost Consultant, Structural Engineer or other non-Planning Consultant giving a client TIME Planning advice, tell them to pull their head in and stick to their area of expertise.