How to Build Your New Home On Time and On Schedule
A well-researched and comprehensive build programme is an integral part of any successful project, says Bob Branscombe — it’s key to building on time and to budget. So why do so few people get them right?
Project manager Bob Branscombe explains the importance of getting your building programme right
When you take on a building project, organisation is the key to success. Knowing what you need to do and when you need to do it is key to understanding the project and the best way to achieve the home of your dreams on time and to budget.
I am not going to suggest that a comprehensive build programme will avoid all the potential pitfalls in a selfbuild, but I will say that the lack of one will definitely cause several of them. Failure to plan is a fundamental fault in the self-build community — we tend to take for granted that time is the only resource available to us that is free, and so push planning down the list of things that need our attention.
What’s more, you need to consider the programme as a ‘ live’ document, in the same way as you would a cost plan or the project bank account — it needs revisiting, changing and amending throughout the project’s lifespan, and will grow and evolve as the scheme develops. For example, when you are looking at planning permission, your programme may simply consist of four weeks preparing drawings, 10 weeks for the planning application period and a build period of 48 weeks — giving a total project duration of 62 weeks. At this point, this is a rough es- timation but it still gives you the first piece of programming information to use for other tasks, such as securing the funding in principal, speaking to designers and suppliers to understand lead-in periods, and establishing if and when contractors are available based on your likely start date. If any of these cannot be accommodated, you are able to redraw the programme to reflect the reality, and it has been no more than an administrative exercise — the clock is not yet ticking.
As your drawings evolve, you get a greater understanding of the scheme, and any peculiarities or bespoke aspects — this should also cause you to
“Remember: thinking costs nothing — impatience or lack of planning usually costs more!”
look at your rough programme again and double-check any assumptions made up to this point. Remember: thinking costs nothing — impatience or lack of planning usually costs more!
Once you are in for planning, you will have a decision date — the first fixed point of your programme. At this stage you will be speaking to builders and designers as your project moves towards specification and detailing stages. You can use this time to fasttrack the building control design aspects, particularly if your planning permission is non-contentious and likely to pass through. If you have a tricky planning application, then the time waiting for a result is not going to be used spending money on design detailing until you know where you stand. Hence we can deduce that the planning probability informs the programme — an easy planning process makes the eight to 10 weeks productive. Contentious planning, on the other hand, is essentially eight to 10 weeks of little or no progress.
When you get to the actual construction programme, the restraints of your project start to become more pertinent. If you have a time cap on your funding availability, this will inform the programme completion date accordingly. If you have a more gradual flow of funds, your programme may be longer to enable money raising at key stages. The building method is relevant here too, with speedy methods being favoured often as much for the time they save as for the method itself.
I think it is a fair comment to point out that many construction programmes are little more than the start and finish dates with the works spread out between to broadly look like a typical bar (Gantt) chart. While this may make us (and our bank) feel happy that we have addressed programming, in reality we are missing such an opportunity to create a tool that is useful, adds value and gives us a level of control over the scheme moving forwards, as well as having a proper monitoring facility.
In simple terms, failing to plan is planning to fail; don’t pay lip service to the programme. It is an evolving tool that runs parallel to the cost control process and the works on site. Look at it every day and update it each week. Refer to it on site and gauge whether the work taking place is on time, ahead or behind the programme, and then ask why — asking as things are happening is the best way to stop minor concerns or issues becoming delays, claims and costs!
We consider the benefits of the selfbuild programme overleaf…
1 It identifies all the work tasks split down into trades/operations
It can either be a simple list of the general stages from excavation through to roof construction, or a more detailed step-by-step account with each stage broken down into the various tasks required to achieve completion.
2 It plots the duration of each task
By understanding the timescales of each task, a greater appreciation of the amount of work and the resources required to carry out that work is established — equally, if the timescale for a task seems long, greater resourcing can be considered to reduce this. For example, bringing in extra plastering gangs to work on several rooms or floors at once to increase the production rate.
3 It arranges these tasks in order of their completion
By plotting these tasks in a bar chart layout, we can begin to see how they relate to each other. By knowing when the windows are required, and how long they take to fit, we can understand when we need to pay the deposit and order them, and how many operatives we will need on site to unload and fit them. By planning each trade and task this way (especially when acting as your own project manager) you can manage your site resources to reflect the work required.
4 It enables the critical path to be identified
Critical path analysis is the single most important aspect of the planning process. In simple terms, you are trying to figure out the order of works in the shortest possible overall timeframe, and identifying which tasks require the preceding task to be completed before there is any hope of carrying out the next one. You are looking for bottlenecks, in other words.
Take the roof, for example: the rafters have to be fixed to a softwood wallplate, which has to be bedded on the brickwork. We can see that no matter how much we want to get the roof on, the critical path is the brickwork, followed by the wallplate, after which the roof can start. However, simultaneously, non-critical path items can be accelerated and carried out — therefore, we could envisage fitting the windows as the wallplate is being fixed, as the two items of work are not on the same critical path.
5 It forms a contract document
With a set of contract documents, you are tying your contractors down to complete the works to a specified standard, to an agreed fixed price and to a planned completion date. The programme provides the means of proving this date prior to everyone signing up, which is invaluable.
By tying down the contractor to an agreed programme, you also have an obligation written into the contract. If the contractor is late, the potential for liquidated damages (thought of as a penalty clause) becomes relevant. Similarly, if he is delayed due to issues outside of his control, the real impact on programme can be established clearly, with all parties understanding how and why delays occurred, and whose fault it is.