Project Time Management

Time is a crucial component of construction project managment.  In certan instances the early completion of a project can financially benefit the contractor.  Conversely, late project completion can lead to financial penalties.  Timeliness is also an important component of a contractor's reputation in the industry and may affect the contractor's ability to obtain work on future projects.  A typical construction project involves many mutually dependent and interrelated operations that, in total combination, constitute a web of individual time and sequential relationships.  When task requirements for materials, equipment, and labor are considered, the complexity of the process of planning and scheduling that is necessary for successful project time managment becomes clear.

Critical Path Method (CPM): CPM is a project management system that offers a basis for informed decision making on construction projects of any size.  It provides information necessary for the time scheduling of a project, guides the contractor in selecting the best way to shorten the project duration, and predicts manpower and equipment requirements.

     Critical path scheduling assumes that a project has been divided into activities of fixed duration and well defined predecessor relationships. A predecessor relationship implies that one activity must come before another in the schedule. No resource constraints other than those implied by precedence relationships are recognized in the simplest form of critical path scheduling. To use critical path scheduling in practice, construction planners often represent a resource constraint by a precedence relation. A resource constraint is a constraint deriving from the limited availability of some resource of equipment, material, space or labor. For example, one of two activities requiring the same piece of equipment might be arbitrarily assumed to precede the other activity. This artificial precedence constraint insures that the two activities requiring the same resource will not be scheduled at the same time. These restrictions imply that the construction plan can be represented by a network plan in which activities appear in a network, and no two activities can have the same number or designation.