Changing decisions impacts timing
For those familiar with flow charts and critical path planning in their everyday work, the meaning will jump right out!
However, not everyone is involved with very close and precisely timed junctures in their ordinary work patterns.
Achieving your desired project completion date hinges on a series of activities, availabilities, choices, decisions and actions that must converge appropriately. They are the functional elements that exist within each phase and aspect of your project, and are strategized by your design team at the front end of the project. Also built into the plan are allowances for flexibility in situations not entirely predictable at the start.
In other chapters, we have discussed the importance of sound decisionmaking, and how changing a decision that has been put into motion can cause damaging ripple effects. Because one factor is part of a whole group of coordinated steps in your project path, a critical change can bring everything to a standstill.
Your design team wants to bring your project in on time! You have probably made it clear to them that other things depend on that “deadline.” In business projects, timing is always a critical factor. Whether remodeling, making an addition or building a new facility, everything from staffing to funding stipulations may hinge on your team bringing the project to completion “on time.”
In residential projects, a family may be displaced temporarily, a special event such as a wedding may be planned around the project’s completion or a long-distance move may be linked to the project completion timeframe.
Client and contractors alike will be functioning under the pressure to stay on point with the critical path plan. The responsibility belongs to both.
When a client waffles on a decision, there are consequences. In some more extreme situations, the whole project must go on hold. In others, a specific “path” within the project must be delayed, changed, cancelled or merely flounders.
It’s important to understand that “A” and “B” in a set of steps along the project path might need to be completed in order for “G” “P” and “L” to continue! If “B” suddenly changes, the “G” up ahead may have to be re-done or undone. Time. Money. Labor. Delivery schedules. All are at stake.
That is one of the reasons that your professional team is conscientious in securing “Authorizations” and “Change Orders” for all activities along the way. Those tools, in addition to the details in your primary contract, proposal or agreement, are insurance against the corruption of a smooth path to completion.
When you are asked to verify, sign or initial still another item, it is a good opportunity to pause, review and re-think the decision or choice reflected in that “insurance” document! Try to think of it as a benefit rather than an annoyance! Your design team is responsible for dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s. They have their eye on that critical path timing that will get your project in as desired, on time.