Home construction scheduling for the layman
The schedule for building a home is a complex beast involving hundreds of steps, complex dependencies, and many variable factors. A good builder manages all of this for the client. However, there are times where the schedule and the client intersect, and sometimes in less than ideal ways.
A big part of any home building project is picking out materials, colors, appliances, etc. If it’s a spec home, the builder does most of this (if a buyer comes along before the project is complete I’ll often allow the buyer to make whatever selections are left to be made). On a custom home, the homeowner makes these selections.
This can often become a scheduling problem, because for some reason it’s hard to impress on the homeowner how necessary their pro
mpt selections are to running their job smoothly. I think this partially arises when they see that some things don’t matter as much as others when it comes to making their selections. i.e. In some cases, while they are told it’s important to make a selection by such-and-such date, that date comes and goes and there’s no consequences as far as they can see.
This arises because of the fact that there is a Critical Path in the scheduling of a home. Some selections don’t lie on this path.
Critical Paths and you
All steps in the builidng of a home have to be completed to finish the home. However, all steps are not critical to advancing the schedule to the next level.
For example, picking out the wall paint colors are critical because the walls have to be painted before trim, cabinets, flooring, etc can be installed. Picking out the color of your shutters is not as critical because the installation of the shutters doesn’t hold up anything except the completion of the home. As Wikipedia says in the above link, “Any delay of an activity on the critical path directly impacts the planned project completion date”.
Other scheduling snafu’s
On a recent project the homeowner’s became concerned because the framing wasn’t going as fast as they thought it should. They didn’t see how we could meet our planned completion date.
The framing was, in fact, going slower than it could have. This wasn’t a concern to me because of the fact that the subcontractors who were dependent upon completion of the framing were scheduled to come at certain dates (based upon their own schedules) giving us much longer to complete the framing than we normally have.
The framing got finished, and all of a sudden there were a dozen new people on the job doing HVAC, plumbing, electrical, insulation. The homeowner’s were happy to see the progress!
At this point the project was right on schedule and I was happy with the progress. The next subcontractor to come in was the drywall taping and painting contractor. This sub lay right on the critical path. I try to avoid this situation as much as possible because it leaves the schedule of your project right on an outside party which can lead to problems, and on this project it did. The contractor stretched the job out so far it took him 6 weeks to do a 2 week job! Needless to say, neither I, nor the homeowners, were happy with this situation.
To add to the problems, the homeowners didn’t quite understand what I’m explaining with this post. Because the taper/painter was taking so long, I didn’t hurry on some other smaller jobs that needed done. These jobs didnt lay on the critical path, and didn’t ever have an affect on the finish date.
This house took 5 weeks longer than it was supposed to. The delay was directly attributable to the taper/painter. I now try even hard to keep subs off of the critical path.
Hopefully, this discussion will hep you understand a little more the things that go into scheduling the completion of your next home!
