Continue reading »]]> 1) Can Clevor improve productivity of any project?

Clevor adds value as the scheduling flexibility in the project increases.  For this reason, we generally add the most value to complex projects such as industrial process plant expansions or for multiple projects that share resources and require one schedule.  There are many variables that affect scheduling flexibility such as: length of the project, the number of different types of resources (space, equipment, skills, etc.), the quantity of man hours involved, and many other factors.  In order to see if Clevor is suitable in your situation, we recommend you provide us with the details of your project(s) and we can provide you with estimates of the percentage of savings we expect you to get based on our experience with other projects like it.

2) How does Clevor work?

Clevor exploits the fact that for any project of given scope, it is possible to carry out the project with numerous alternate project execution scenarios. A project execution scenario tells exactly what resources should be deployed when and exactly what tasks should be assigned to them. Each of these scenarios enables one to complete the project. However, the outcome in terms of project cost and project duration will differ.  In most medium size projects the number of these alternative scenarios is in millions.  Evaluating these scenarios enables management to exploit the flexibility available to them such as alternative resource deployment over the project duration, alternate task assignment, and alternate resource assignment for tasks. Clevor enables project management to find the best execution scenario which yields the lowest total cost.

3) We find schedules are good for reporting but not for driving the work – how can you beat what our supervisors are currently doing?

In most industrial projects, there are literally millions of different ways a project can be executed so schedules are frequently used as guidelines to drive work and supervisors tend to execute on the fly.   This makes it difficult for managers to see the long term implications of their decisions, foresee bottlenecks, and anticipate the obstacles to meeting their milestone dates that are often far into the future.  Our approach is to use a computer to build say 50,000 detailed schedules with an associated 50,000 financial statements.  It is simply not possible for a human being to consider thousands of tasks, multiple resource types, competition for these resources amongst all of the tasks while respecting all project constraints, and the financial implications of each of their options.  They may be able to do some of this analysis in their head or in a formal schedule, but certainly not all of it which is how we add value.

4) How do you account for all the day-to-day changes that affect the schedule?

Based on the experience of our customers, approximately ninety percent of the optimized schedule is executed as per the plan.  The remainder is due to unpredictable events such as weather, equipment break down, and absenteeism. In these instances, the Project Management staff makes necessary adjustments to task assignments based on the situation.  At the end of the week, the actual progress made based on their changes is taken into account in the next update and re-optimization.  We have not heard any complaints from the project managers or his supervisors on this account.

5) How do you actually create double-digit savings on a project?

It is important to first point out that the savings we quote are based on experience of past customers with projects they have optimized and executed. The savings come from improved productivity.  For example, by making sure that you deploy just the right number of the right resources at the right time and then assign just the right tasks, Clevor is able to make sure that the resources have close to a full shift of hours assigned to them and that the sequence of the tasks is such that no one has to wait for anyone or anything.

Another way of saying this is that the optimized schedule minimizes waste. Waste is defined as any expense that does not add value for the customer such as waiting for something or someone, moving people around too much between jobs, giving them too much time to do a task etc.  The problem of waste is exasperated by the fact that people who are idle usually don’t sit by themselves in a corner – they are usually talking to someone who is trying to get their work done, delaying them also!

6) Can you prove to me that double digit productivity will happen on my project?

No we can’t, we need to understand your operations in order to evaluate our ability to add value to your operations.  Once we have the details of your project(s), we can give you estimates of % savings we expect based on our experience with other projects like it.  To figure out whether its worth speaking with us further we consider you:

1. Look at our customer list, all of whom are repeat customers
2. Look at our customers testimonials
3. We can put you in direct contact with our customers
4. Consider our approach – we know it is much more thorough than conventional methods
5. Consider our no risk offer: provide us with a resource loaded schedule and we will tell you exactly how much savings we can generate by optimizing it at the detailed level

7) Doesn’t it take too much time to do all this detailed scheduling?

Clevor will certainly spend more time with management to set up the initial schedule than managers are used to.  At the same time, managers are often used to having frequent meetings to figure out the status of their projects, establish priorities and to respond to pressing problems.  Once Clevor is established, operations generally run so smoothly that it is common for Project Managers to spend less time on these details.  So yes, there is an initial investment of time required by management but there is also a payoff moving into the project of having smoother project execution that requires less of the managers time.  Of course the payoff also goes beyond the manager’s time and into the financial benefits of optimization mentioned in FAQ #5 and #6.

Another common mistake companies often make is to have the Project Manager do all their own scheduling.  We believe that the time of Project Managers is far too important to be spent on this activity.  We recommend you hire an in-house scheduler to help build an optimized schedule or hire Clevor personnel who can build the schedule for you.  Our customers have always found our Scheduling Consultants to be very easy to work with and value them as an asset to the execution of their projects.

What if the data is not good – won’t you just have garbage in and garbage out?

Whereas good data is always what you want, it is also said that “Perfection is the enemy of Good” and we agree.  Please don’t wait for perfect data because you will never get it.  If you are executing your projects with your present data, then, that is good enough for Clevor to produce results. As your project is executed, errors will be identified and corrected and the system will be re-optimized on a weekly basis. An important observation is that many of our customers have had this concern in the beginning but they have had positive experiences and seen savings.

9) Our customers have such a big impact on our projects – how can you schedule around this?

A customer can affect the schedule in a number of ways – they may not be able to coordinate the activity of other contractors whose work can affect yours, they may not be able to release equipment and space for you on time, and they can even change your scope of work.  Clevor can enable you to respond to these issues in the following ways:

1. Taking into account the new constraints imposed on your work, Clevor can very quickly tell you your best response. Our experience shows that in some cases, you may still be able to get the project on time and without any additional cost.
2. Responding to significant events like changes in scope or delays from other contractors by re-optimizing the schedule.  The effect of these events on project cost and completion date is extremely detailed so you can use it to ensure compensation is handled properly. Our experience shows that once your customer knows how you are calculating your additional cost, they come to trust you and that makes the process easier to handle
3. Clevor can include the tasks to be performed by the customer in the optimized schedule which helps communicate to the customer what your future needs are for equipment, space, or materials so you can get your job done faster and at lower cost

10) Doesn’t this change the whole way we run our projects?

Yes, Clevor is designed to gather the collective information from your people and to do a comprehensive analysis of the project that is not otherwise possible.  In that sense, the manner in which information is gathered, analyzed and interpreted will change which will impact how your projects are run.  However, Clevor leads to very dependable decision recommendations that result in smoother running and more orderly projects which appeals to everyone.  People like to work in well organized work places and our customers tell us that the presence of Clevor often results in improved morale, more respect for management, and in some cases less employee turnover.

11) Optimization doesn’t look practical, isn’t it a more theoretical approach to managing projects?

Clevor has been around for 10 years, with the first four years being spent on R&D and the following six years being spent in the field by companies to optimize their projects.  By now, hundreds of projects have been optimized using Clevor.  The technology is well proven and has a very strong approach to conducting analysis and providing decision recommendations on difficult to solve problems such as how many resources should I hire, when should they be hired, and in what order should their tasks be assigned so that I can maximize the productivity of project execution.

Continue reading »]]> There are often numerous interpretations of what productivity is and how it affects the execution of a project.  In this post, I think it would be useful to cover three forms of productivity improvement that are often considered during project execution:

1) doing tasks faster – if you ask most project managers how to improve productivity, this is what they will think of which means getting their tasks done faster by getting their men to work faster.

2) using different methods to complete a task – another way to improve productivity is to use different methods such as larger pieces of equipment or using different approaches to complete a task

3) Improving the utilization of your resources – resources such as people and equipment can often be delayed because they are waiting for materials to arrive, another resource such as a crane to help them with their task, another task to get done such as the setting of a foundation so you can do your task of placing the equipment, etc.

Clevor focuses on the last productivity approach which is to improve the utilization of resources.  The quantity of resources such as people or equipment affect this significantly and project managers will often err on the side of hiring too many people than too few in order to get their project done on time.  The most common scenario is to hire too many of one type of resource and too few of another which results in execution bottlenecks and idle time.

You can’t operate all your resources at 100% utilization and sometimes better utilization of one resource will result in poorer utilization of another.  Clevor is able to evaluate all of this in much higher detail than conventional methods do which allows us to identify execution scenarios that result in lower project costs and faster project completion.

Continue reading »]]> In the last decade, a number of very large projects have been undertaken in Alberta, Canada. Their experience has been that although engineering and procurement activities precede the construction activities, it is necessary to make sure that the engineering and procurement activities are prioritized in such a way as to minimize the total duration of the project.

This means that engineering should start on those sub-projects or tasks that will take the longest to procure, construct and commission. This is some times referred to as “Construction driven Engineering”.  See the figure below. Many companies understand this concept. However, they cannot execute this concept very well with their traditional project management tools.

Continue reading »]]> Matrix organizational structure is very popular amongst firms that work on multiple projects for different customers.  This structure provides major benefits both in terms of better utilization of staff as well as deepening of the knowledge and experience of their staff through work on multiple projects.

Continue reading »]]> Whether a schedule is built on a computer or held together in bits in pieces in someones head, scheduling is a critical business process in  the management of projects.  Only a schedule tells who will do what and when they will do it. It is solely responsible for making sure that all the tasks are assigned the resources when needed and that the project or combination of projects meet the deadlines that are expected of them.  Schedules also enable accurate costing of a project based on all the details of a project such as the tasks that need to be done and the resources needed to do them.  The following represent developments in scheduling practices that have occurred over the past 50 years.

Critical Path MethodIn 1957

DuPont and Remington Rand Corporation developed a project management method designed to address the challenge of shutting down chemical plants for maintenance and then restarting the plant once the maintenance had been completed.  They called it the Critical Path Method (CPM). It is based on the reality that in any project some tasks together control the duration of the whole project. Therefore, if any of these tasks are delayed, the whole project will be delayed. All other tasks have a float, which means that they can get delayed at least a little without affecting the duration of the whole project.

In 1958, the management consulting firm, Booz Allan Hamilton Inc., developed a similar technique, called Program Evaluation and Review Techniques (PERT) for US Department of Defense’s US Navy Special Projects Office, as a part of the Polaris mobile submarine-launched ballistic missile project. This project was a direct response to the Sputnik crisis. This was in the middle of the arms race between the US and the then Soviet Union.   Both CPM and PERT produced the following benefits: Predicting the time required for the completion of the project and identifying the tasks that must be completed on time to meet the project completion date. Since then, Critical Path became the way to manage projects. In the 80’s the Critical Path was the basis of managing projects with computer systems. It enabled faster processing and an ease of data management but adding no significant additional capabilities.

Matrix Management

During the 60s and the 70s, some of the largest US Companies, such as General Electric, were using Matrix management structures to better use specialized resources across product lines and across professional projects. This organizational structure is still used because of the benefits of sharing the resources as well as the deepening of the knowledge of the staff working on multiple projects.

Theory of Constraints

In the 80s, an Israeli physicist, Eli Goldratt, while helping a friend who was in the manufacturing business, realized that the production through any manufacturing facility (throughput) is controlled by one or more “bottleneck resources”. He suggested that the way to improve the throughput would be to make sure that these bottlenecks are fully used. Note that this focused mainly on increasing the throughput of the manufacturing facility. It did not deal with other complexities such as due dates of the different production orders, costs and ability of companies to use different machines for the same operations, just to name a few. These concepts were later developed into the Theory of Constraints (TOC) by him. It makes it clear that all the constraints must be taken into account when developing schedules. This is generally referred to as ”finite resources” scheduling.

Clevor Observations

Every schedule has a critical path, as DuPont found out. However, one can also build millions of different schedules for the same project. Each of these schedules will have different implications on not only project duration (the evaluation criteria of critical path method) but it will also have implications on total project cost based on resource utilization rates.  The best schedule (called the  optimized schedule) does have a critical path but it may include adding additional men or equipment to a task to get it done faster (factors critical path method doesn’t consider).

Every schedule will also have bottlenecks due to the competition for resources. However, it is almost always possible to get more resources, albeit you may have to pay for them.  As you remove one bottleneck, others appear down stream so it is critical to look at the project as a whole and identify the right quantity of men and equipment, at the right time, with the right task assignments to manage your bottlenecks as a whole.

Matrix organizations have major benefits but they are also complex and have major problems, especially in terms of the priorities of different projects and the resource  planning and utilization.  No one individual is responsible for the schedule as a whole and complex production process and streamlining operations for maximum productivity is difficult to achieve.

Observed Types of Schedules

1. Task-loaded schedules: These are schedules that include a list of tasks that need to be done.  Resources are not allocated to each task so it is not possible identify who will do what and when. Generally the execution of projects based on these types of schedules tends to be on the fly with very short term project visibility (one to two week look-ahead).

2. Resource loaded schedules: These schedules are detailed enough to show which resource will do what and when; and they also show that the resources would be available when needed. When working on one project at a time, they produce better results in terms of predicting project completion dates but they are still limited in the flexibility they can exploit and execution is still often driven on a short term look-ahead basis.  When working with multiple projects with shared resources, they are very difficult to make and we seldom see them.

3. Clevor optimized schedules:  These are  resource loaded and all the scheduling flexibility and scheduling constraints are fully explored by creating thousands of scheduling combinations. The optimized schedule yields the strong results in both predicting project completion dates as well as improving the utilization of resources for lower project cost and faster project completion.

Continue reading »]]> There are often numerous interpretations of what productivity is and how it affects the execution of a project.  In this post, I think it would be useful to cover three forms of productivity improvement that are often considered during project execution:

1) doing tasks faster – if you ask most project managers how to improve productivity, this is what they will think of which means getting their tasks done faster by getting their men to work faster.

2) using different methods to complete a task – another way to improve productivity is to use different methods such as larger pieces of equipment or using different approaches to complete a task

3) Improving the utilization of your resources – resources such as people and equipment can often be delayed because they are waiting for materials to arrive, another resource such as a crane to help them with their task, another task to get done such as the setting of a foundation so you can do your task of placing the equipment, etc.

Clevor focuses on the last productivity approach which is to improve the utilization of resources.  The quantity of resources such as people or equipment affect this significantly and project managers will often err on the side of hiring too many people than too few in order to get their project done on time.  The most common scenario is to hire too many of one type of resource and too few of another which results in execution bottlenecks and idle time.  Since you can’t eliminate idle time completely, we believe its critical to evaluate resource utilization as a whole across the total cost of the project instead of looking at each resource in isolation.