CMPROMGT

Engr. Michael V. Almeida, CE, PMCE, MsCM

Assistant Professor
 The Angelite Prayer

Almighty God, we glorify you for giving us the Angelite

Charism. We thank you for the gift of Your Son, Jesus
Christ, who is the Way, Truth and Life. We bless you for
the continuous guidance of the Holy Spirit. Grant us,
we pray, courage and strength that we may give
perpetual praise to you in whatever we do. We ask this
through Christ, our Lord. Amen. Oh, Holy Guardian
Angels, guide us and protect us! Laus Deo semper!
 CHAPTER 8

Computer Application in
Construction Management
 Intended Learning Outcomes
• Describe and explain the importance of
Computer Application Construction
Management
• Describe, explain and apply computer
tools and techniques in controlling project
cost, quality and time
 Learning Assessments
• Recitations
• Assignments
• Quizzes
 Software Applications in Construction Management

• Computers have had a great impact on the field of construction

management. The use of software has revolutionized many
management tasks. Many software packages have been established and
applied in this field. The number of engineers and engineering students
learning to use software increases day after day. The main problem that
faces them is how to begin.
 Project Management
with Microsoft Project
 Project Management 1
Projects, their outcomes
What does it mean to manage a project?
The 'Systems view'
Project phases

Project Management 2
Pitfalls of ad hoc management
The shoot-from-the-hip style doesn't cut it
Discipline and flexibility
Common sense as a management technique
 Microsoft Project 1
Define the project
Establish a timeline
Arrange tasks

Microsoft Project 2
Track progress
Critical Path Management
CPM/PERT

Microsoft Project 3
Manage the resources
People and materials
Track costs
Projects, Their Outcomes and Project Management

• Projects are efforts to achieve objectives, within finite time and cost expectations. Projects are
contrasted with operational activities – the repetitive things performed regularly over time. In some
way the dividing line between projects and operational activities is not clear; often an operational
activity is a series of small projects. However, what is clear is, healthy projects have a finite end that
is reached either when the project objectives have been met or when the project is cancelled.
In this paper the term outcome will be used to mean any project result, whether it is a new or
changed product, event or process. Projects produce outcomes like newly design car models, an
annual budget, a great party, or a new procedure. The use of the outcome and its value after the
project delivers it are the underlying justification for the project.
 Some of the pitfalls of ad hoc management
Everyone does projects. The idea that all it takes to be successful is technical knowledge and lots of intensive hard work leads to unnecessary
stress, avoidable rework, unnecessary conflicts and a greater chance of failure.
As fun and exciting as it might be, managing in an ad hoc, seat-of-the-pants, shoot-from-the-hip way is not the most effective way when it comes
to managing projects. That is because projects often cannot be planned and carried out entirely from the top of your head. When you
experience being overwhelmed, or your outcomes are not as good as they could have been, it may be time for managing in a more structured
and thoughtful way.
For example, when you start thinking about moving an office, you probably realize that it can be quite complex. There are many dependencies,
such as if you committed to be out of the current space by a certain date, you have to make sure you can go somewhere, ideally to your new
space. If the new space is not ready, you have to find another temporary place and/or storage. If you cannot find a mover or schedule phone and
other installations, you may need to renegotiate the exit date. If the new space is not entirely ready, you need to carefully plan where and how
people will operate. As you can see, there is a lot of complexity in even a simple move. This is a project. Managing it like a project and in the
right way will improve your chances for success. Projects require a disciplined yet flexible approach.
Not managing projects the right way leads to unnecessary rework and costs, delays, unsatisfied customers and hostile relationships. Think about
the times that you or your customers have been impacted by
• late delivery of project results or by having to do unnecessary rework or by having yourself and others affected by confusion and chaos that
could have been avoided by better project planning and control. Think about the time, effort and money that could have been saved. Think
about the relations that were disrupted, in some cases irreparably so. In the unlikely case that you have no personal experience, think about
high profile projects like the Challenger space shuttle in which poor project management practices led to loss of life or the “Big Dig” in Boston in
which poor project planning, communications or control resulted in huge costs and delivery delays.
•

Managing projects well increases the probability of success and leads to better results, lower costs, less effort, shorter time, better relationships
and the ability to continuously improve performance across multiple projects. At the same time, it is necessary to not over manage. Too much of
anything is counter productive. In managing projects, the right balance between discipline and flexibility is best.
Most projects are managed by people who are drafted because they have a combination of being available, have subject matter expertise, and
are natural coordinators and/or good communicators. Many of these incidental project managers do a great job despite having had little or no
training in project management. That is because much of project management is good common sense and because good project managers and
performers combine acts of heroism, the acceptance of delays and other shortfalls, good leadership and management skills and the ability to
adapt well in moment to moment project performance.
Imagine how much better they might be with a more solid foundation.
• So, what does it mean to manage a project? It is the application of a broad set of skills to properly initiate, plan, execute,
control and close a project. The primary skills are scoping (i.e., describing and agreeing on project objectives and
requirements), scheduling, and estimating. Added to these core skills are managing risk and uncertainty, managing quality,
communicating, managing ourselves, and collaborating with others, including suppliers of goods and services and everyone
else who works on or is affected by the project. The people who are involved or interested in a project are referred to as
stakeholders.
To put projects and project management into practical context, it is useful to take a systems view. This view recognizes that
everything is operating in a system of interacting people, organizations, things and processes. Change or activity anywhere can
have an effect elsewhere. The more one can predict the effect, the greater one's control of the system's performance. In
complex systems, no one can ever predict the effect of actions with 100% accuracy. A project is a complex system. Project
management itself is also a complex system.

Figure 1, below, is a picture of project management as a system. The Unified Project Management Methodology (UPMM™) is
one of many views in use today to describe the various activities in managing projects.
• A single project is managed from Originating, the time someone communicates an idea that may someday become a project,
through Closing, the completion of the project, if in fact the project becomes a project and is completed.
Surrounding the performance of a single project are activities that support and direct the organization and its ability to
perform multiple projects in a complex, changing environment. These activities include Ongoing Improvement, the effort to
learn from past experience and improve the way you perform and manage projects; Portfolio Management & Governance, the
decision making needed to select, initiate and continue the right projects and to manage the optimum use of scarce resources;
and Multi-project Management, the process for looking across all of the projects being performed and managing them as a
group to avoid conflicts and promote synergy.
Effective portfolio management and multi-project management are among the most critical factors for successful projects.
They address many of the root causes of chronic problems in projects, such as the chronic over burdening of resources and
constant priority shifts that create confusion and impact productivity.
Collaboration and Consulting represents the critical need for teamwork, communication, coordination and the management of
knowledge and information.
 The importance of Project Management
• Projects are the means to achieve business objectives. They, along with ongoing operations represent the activities that make organizations run.
They deliver the goods and services that satisfy customers and owners.All organizations have projects. A project may be a large task or a
complex activity, in fact, any work that is done to achieve an objective on time and within budget.
When you change the way people work, you are managing a project. When you launch a new product you are managing project. Projects are
ideas in motion. They may be efforts to move an office full of people to another location, put on an event, merge two organizations, institute a
new training program, put together a budget, create a new product, change or produce a web site, put a new process into place, etc.
More and more people recognize that their ability to effectively manage projects is now key to their success within the organization. The ability
to better manage projects is a way to achieve the edge over competitors and deliver greater value to owners and customers.
Project management is a complex discipline. It requires years of hands-on experience and of study. There are techniques to learn and tools to
master.
Microsoft Project software is one of those tools. With this short tutorial we want to introduce you to the software in its most elementary form.
Even though we'll be covering only the basic application of MS project, we hope that you will gain an appreciation of its many capabilities and
will be drawn to study it in more depth afterwards.
 Getting started with MS Project - Update

• This tutorial was created using MS Project 2003. At the moment, the latest version of Project - Microsoft Office Project 2007 -
is now being distributed.
Fortunately, the 2007 interface is virtually identical to the earlier version. There are some functionalities that have been added
but, for the beginner it makes practically no difference.
You can study these lessons with version 2003 or 2007, as you wish, with no difficulties whatsoever.
If you then decide to look at the improved features in Office Project 2007,
I have created a tutorial for that which you can access at:
MS Project 2007 tutorial

Defining the project

Start by defining the properties of the project that you are going to manage.
You need to know the start date and the basic operating rules of the organization.
• First: break the whole project into individual tasks.

This may not be as easy as it sounds. You want the tasks to be small enough to be
manageable but,
not so small as to involve the atomic level. This will draw on the experience of the
project manager.

Normally, a task involves one person or a small group of people over a span of time
that can be measured in days.
• Don't worry that the tasks all last 1 day and start on the same day. We'll
get to that later.

Now, you will probably want to group tasks under phases.

In MS Project, grouping is done from the top down with Final total at
the very top,
with Subtotals below and so on.
 Defining a Timeline

• The next step is to define the duration of all the tasks.

Again, you will draw upon the experience and knowledge of the project manager and the
participants.
You want to obtain a value that is as realistic as possible for the duration of each task.
That may have to be negotiated.
If there's disagreement, a simple formula to establish a value has been around for years:
find an optimistic value, D(o), a pessimistic value, D(p) and a realitic value, D(r) .
Then: Duration = ( D(o) + D(p) + 4 x D(r) ) / 6
• You now have a duration for each of the tasks but they all start on the same day.
Obviously, you will have to specify the sequence of the tasks and the links between them.
In MS Project a task that must be completed before another task can start is called a predecessor.
The first task has no predecessor and each of the following tasks has to have at least one.
In some cases a task may have several predecessors meaning that several tasks have to be completed before
that one can start.
In other cases a task may be predecessor to several others - its completion can allow several other tasks to start.
 The importance of tracking progress
For over 40 years project manages have been using techniques to manage their projects effectively.
Some of these techniques were manual to begin with and were later computerized.
Two of those techniques were called Critical Path Management (CPM) and Program Evaluation and Review Techniques (PERT).
They were similar and you will now often find the technique refered to as: CPM/PERT.
The technique involves using network models to trace the links between tasks and to identify the tasks which are critical to meeting the
deadlines.
When you have a large number of tasks overlapping you really have to use the right tool to show which tasks
can be delayed and which must be on time.

Once you've identified the critical path, any delay on any part of the critical path will cause a delay in the whole project.
It is where managers must concentrate their efforts.
In MS Project, you use the Tracking Gantt diagram to show the critical path in red
and you can see the PERT diagram by looking at the Network view.
• Finally for this section, you'll want to track the degree of completion of
each of the tasks.

You could do that every day as you go along. As soon as something

starts to go off track, you can react and adjust accordingly.

It would be too long to go into the details of how to compensate for

delays and so on.
 Manage the project resources

You will need people to accomplish all those tasks that you've identified in the previous section. Those people
are resources that you have to manage well in order to achieve the project's objectives.
You may also need some material resources - equipment, supplies, specialized environments - that you will have
to schedule and pay for.
You can easily include the management of resources in MS Project along with the tasks because, after all, the
resources are essential to the accomplishment of the tasks in the first place.
You must start by identifying the resources available along with their costs.
Resource costs will be multiplied by duration to calculate project costs.
You have to open the Resource sheet to specify the projet resources and costs.
• To track costs, you insert a Cost column next to the Resources
column.

When you assign the resources to each task, the costs will be
calculated an displayed.
• You assign resources, people or material, to each of the tasks.

A task may have several resources.

• That completes this rather quick tutorial on Microsoft Project.

Of course, there are many, many other things that MS Project can do. We have
barely scratched the surface.

For example, we have assumed so far that everything will proceed as planned. But
what if it doesn't?

There are many functions to help you deal with delays, cost overruns, etc. You can
learn how to schedule overtime, split or overlap tasks and on and on ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyP0jsP8Vnw&ab_channel=
TeeVee