The pre-construction phase
The success of a megaproject is often determined very early on before people and materials show up on the scene, beginning with the selection of a project team that will work on the construction project from beginning to end. This team is made up of members like the construction project manager, engineering manager, and procurement manager.
By choosing key people to continue throughout a large project, instead of assigning novel teams for each phase of a construction project, each team member will feel more ownership of the role and responsibility for the entire project.
Other early legwork involves assessing potential threats to the project over time. Identify the risks involved in the project, like changes in regulations, availability of skilled labor, and any associated costs. By identifying key risks, you’ll develop a recognition of what could change if the worst case scenario came to pass for each and plan ahead. When you work in a simulation platform like ALICE, you're able to quickly simulate all these risk scenarios and account for the potential time and cost impact.
As always, choose a delivery strategy based on the owner’s involvement and cost and time expectations, and create cautious estimates for time and budget. As the project moves on, continued study of labor hours, commodity pricing, costs of shared services, and other factors can help keep the project on track.
This extended preparation period will set a solid foundation for a larger project, while leaving flexibility for unknown elements that may crop up in the future.
Construction planning and scheduling software can help
What sets large construction projects apart the most is that they come with long timelines and high associated risks. By addressing each risk factor that could come into play over the length of the project you can mitigate the risks as much as possible.
While project managers typically rely on years of industry experience to navigate the factors involved in a job, megaprojects require preplanned procedures and deliberate execution to be successful. Luckily, there are tools available to help predict the unpredictable. ALICE is artificial intelligence software that can help identify and plan for risk factors.
After a construction project plan is made, it’s essential to control and manage the project accordingly.
Because all contingencies can’t be accounted for, it’s tough to establish a steady schedule of progress that moves along exactly as expected.
Instead, what you’ll need is a parametric platform that can update scheduling as inputs change. Because ALICE has the ability to resequence the whole construction schedule in seconds, it can help contractors from bidding and estimating, right through the management process to improve your odds of making deadlines, completing a project successfully and reducing the risk of margin erosion through expensive liquidated damages.
