Executive Oversight: Aligning Resources with Project Timelines

Executive oversight - the active involvement of senior construction professionals in managing projects - significantly improves project success and efficiency, particularly when aligning resources with timelines. This requires experienced professionals with strong leadership skills to manage the numerous factors and risks that can alter a construction project's course.

Executives must ensure the business supports projects to maintain progress. To accomplish this, companies need proper controls in place, such as programme timelines and schedules with forecasted and linked workforce plans and budgets. This enables teams to identify and manage constraints effectively.

Key Challenges Affecting Timeline Alignment

Several factors can disrupt the timely delivery of construction projects, particularly when maintaining aligned schedules and resources. These factors ultimately represent different types of risk, making risk assessments and management crucial activities.

Here are the primary challenges construction professionals face when keeping projects on track:

Supply Chain Vulnerabilities

As demonstrated during geopolitical crises and global pandemics, supply chains can be surprisingly fragile. Unexpected events can wreak havoc on resource availability and deliveries, creating significant project disruptions.

Client Milestones

Another significant challenge involves meeting sensitive client milestones. Many clients rely on specific handover dates to begin profiting from their investment, such as with hotel projects. These hard deadlines leave minimal room for errors or delays.

Limited Specialist Resources

Certain trades and equipment require specialised skills, meaning fewer options exist and those available are highly sought after. This scarcity makes scheduling these resources particularly challenging.

Political and Economic Uncertainty

As governments change, funding for housing and infrastructure projects fluctuates. These shifts can dramatically impact construction projects over the longer term, requiring flexible planning approaches.

Consequences of Poor Resource Management

The challenges above represent just a few unexpected scenarios construction executives routinely face. However, the most significant impacts stem not from the challenges but from inadequate preparation or risk management. Mismanaging resource and timeline risks can lead to:

• Projects exceeding budgets
• Mistakes requiring costly rework
• Overworked or disengaged employees
• Damaged company reputation

Effective Approaches to Resource-Timeline Alignment

Fundamentally, construction companies organise and deliver resources according to their projects. This organisation must cover the entire project life cycle - from pre-construction to the defects period, typically a 12-month timeline where the company addresses client-identified issues.

Construction executives must ensure sufficient resources for each project phase. Resource trackers offer an excellent solution for managing this complexity. These tools show when resources become available as project phases conclude, freeing up needed personnel.

By entering your full project team as individual resources and allocating them against current and future projects, resource trackers reveal peaks and troughs in resource allocation. This visibility helps identify when direct labour becomes insufficient for the project's needs or when projects slow down, potentially leaving staff underutilised.

When resources become stretched, leadership teams must determine whether projects can use temporary resources, such as freelancers, ask existing workers to "flex" their schedules temporarily, or recruit new employees to meet demands.

Using Technology for Improved Resource Allocation

Key performance indicators (KPIs) often prove challenging to define in construction because companies track different resource metrics. Nevertheless, certain standard areas exist that most construction businesses can monitor to build a data foundation for resource decisions.

These include staff hours and your "daily gate" - the number of people signing in and out of the site, typically tracked through sign-in books or digital biometric systems. By monitoring daily sign-ins across the site, you can compare expected resources with actual resources, helping determine whether current resources suffice to deliver expected output and whether the project remains on track.

Connecting Long-term Goals with Resource Planning

Generally, businesses should develop a five-year growth strategy plan, reviewing it annually. Understanding how this strategy affects your resources proves critical for success.

For instance, if you aim to increase from nine projects to 12, your resource graph will likely indicate the need to recruit and train an additional project team. This might include three project managers, a design build manager, and a quantity surveyor to deliver the projects. You might also need an additional business development manager to generate the new sales leads necessary for growth. All these extra roles must be considered to meet your growth plan. This planning then filters down to your operational plan, which requires weekly or monthly maintenance.

In conclusion, successful construction executives maintain both project-specific views of resource allocation and timelines while also developing a long-term, strategic perspective on business development. Forward-thinking executives with growth mindsets effectively balance day-to-day project resource management with future-focused planning that enables expansion and success.

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