Justin Hall

09 October 2020
Museum Expansion
Dear Sponsors,
With the schedule decreasing in overall time, my team and myself had to set down and
review the schedule to come up with a plan for meeting the new deadline. After careful review,
we have decided that our initial approach would be to contact the subcontractors on the project
and discuss with them the schedule decrease and ask them to review their schedules to find any
areas that may be able to be compressed. With 25 subcontractors, if we can get 10 of the
contractors to reduce their overall schedules by 1 day, we could see a potential schedule
compression of 10 days, bringing the total scheduled duration of 79 days, providing us with 2
days to combat any unforeseen circumstances.
With the subcontractors reviewing their schedules for any areas they can compress; my
team and I will also review our work assignments to see if there is any where we can compress
the schedule. The most efficient way that we can see to compress our schedule will be to split
our crew into two separate entities. Both crews will be working in parallel to each other. We
predict that working the crews together will help decrease the schedule by another 8 to 10 days
without putting strain on the quality of the project. Both adjustments to the schedule will not
require any additional funding for the project. This will help us to maintain our budget and profit
margins currently set for the project.
As we await the answer back from our subcontractors, we developed the contingency
planned that follows. In the event that we would not be able to compress our schedule by
adjusting the overall durations of various tasks, the next area we will look at will be to adjust our
working hours for all parties involved. What this means is that we will adjust our schedules from
working five days a week at eight-hour days to working six days a week at ten-hour days. By
increasing our work schedule by twenty hours a week, we can safely compress the schedule up to
twenty five percent, putting our overall duration of the project at sixty-seven days. This will
leave us with twenty-two days to combat any unforeseen circumstance that may arise.
The negative effect of this contingency plan is that it will require all subcontractors to
adjust their proposals to include the extra overtime along with adjusting the company’s budget to
include overtime for our work crews. However, to counterbalance this situation, compressing the
schedule by twenty five percent will also help decrease the overall budget of the project with the
overtime included. As we move forward on the project, we will continuously look for avenues to
increase the efficiency of our schedule while maintaining our budget and the quality of the
project.

Thanks,
Justin Hall
Project Manager
Personal Reflection on Project Scheduling
As I started this course, I had been involved with scheduling of project for several years.
The main platform that I utilized was MS Projects 2013, so I was familiar with the Gantt charts,
resource loading, resource leveling, etc. Even though I was familiar with these areas, I can not
say that I was as efficient in these areas as I needed to be, nor did I understand them exactly like
they should have been. This class has helped me dig deeper into the scheduling aspects and
requirements for projects. I work to have my project scheduled with the proposal when I submit
it. This works in multiple ways for me. It allows the client to see that I have thoroughly worked
through the project and looked at every task needing to be completed along with planning it out
to meet their deadlines. It also allows me to ensure that I have account for all these tasks in the
estimate and already have a planned strategy of how to execute the project if we are awarded. I
have also learned that even though I have knowledge of a subject, there is always more to learn.
Some of the areas of this course was no more than a refresher for me, however, it was a well
needed refresher. One thing I have learned over several years is that even though I once knew
how to do a task, if I do not maintain my knowledge of that task then it will be harder for me to
jump right back into it.