Today I write up the topic of the relevance on how a good project start can determent a good and satisfactory project completion for the parties.
In this article, I am going to make statements that will not reveal anything that has not been already included in any recognized project management institution. It will be in the second part of this article, where I would like to illustrate the side effects influenced by settling a robust baseline as a starting point, helping to achieve a project satisfactory completion.
After working on multiple projects, I listened on several occasion statements like … “This is a lump sum project; the schedule and the baseline are contractor’s problem. They only need to be aligned with contractual milestones” both from the client and contractor side. I quite often listened “let’s prepare a schedule showing achieving contractual milestone to satisfy the contractual requirement and we will work as per our internal schedule”.
In this framework, I found schedules made in Excel, schedules with contractual milestones and main activities tied down with constraints and without logic relations between activities or schedules with a logic not related to the project execution plan, but just a way to keep activities on arbitrarily chosen dates.
If we talk about resources and cost allocation, the situation does not differ from the statement above.
You could think this situation occurs only on small projects without a formal project organization, but no, I found this situation even in organizations with project management and execution as business core and with project value above USD 100 MM.
Let’s start from the conventional and orthodox perspectives:
The project baseline shall represent the intention of parties to successfully achieve the completion of the project. Therefore, in the baseline the project execution plan, resources, manpower and cost, shall be accurately represented.
This means that resources and histograms shall be associated and aligned with the schedule and how the project will be carried out. This would allow accurate monitoring of the work on progress versus the initial plan and it will help to forecast activities to be developed and future need of resources.
The principle is to have accurate knowledge of where the project is, to monitor its performance and determine the future course of actions toward its completion.
And now, let’s give a look at this picture from a different point of view.
Inherent to project execution is to deal with uncertainties; as on most occasions, it is impossible that the definition of project requirements includes every potential element that could interfere with the project execution and rule an outcome. This situation is the breeding ground of project changes and disputes.
The fundamental part of disputes and changes settlement is the assessment and demonstration of the impact associated with the claimed disruptive event, initially for discussion and amicable settlement between parties; and if negotiations are unsuccessful, it escalates to arbitration or litigation.
Support and demonstrate the impact associated with the disruptive event should be robust and the baseline is the best reference and base of comparison of the impact and the analysis, as the baseline is formally approved and accepted by parties.
It is at this time when having a robust and accurate baseline will play a relevant role and this role will not work only for the contractor, but also on client side. It should be kept in mind that when developing this kind of exercise, the logic of schedule and associated resources should not be drastically changed or rebuilt to demonstrate the desired impact.
In my experience on preparation and negotiation of disputes, I have experienced situations difficult to support and significantly reduced the chances of success or fair settlement of a dispute due to a weak baseline. Some examples are:
– The schedule is in excel and no PERT associated. How to demonstrate the impact of a schedule without any recorded logic in it?
– The schedule has been updated every month and never shown an impact, due to missing or wrong logic.
– Modelling the impact on the baseline, the schedule does not show any delay or move backward, showing a schedule linked to a big extent on Finish to Finish or Start to Finish relations.
– Logic in the schedule is overcritical on every single milestone associated with the client, then any disruption creates an impact on the end date.
– Claiming on increased inefficiencies and proceeding with a comparative analysis (measured mile), and resource allocation in similar activities does not exist or is incoherent per excess or defect.
To overcome situations stated above, in many occasions ad-hoc schedules are created for the sole purpose to support the claim and in most cases, the validity of those schedules are challenged; as the new schedule never was accepted by both parties or the new schedule put in doubt the fairness of what has been reported during the project life and up to which extent one was hiding part of the facts and the duty to notify has been neglected.
I strongly believe developing and agreeing robust and realistic baseline is a fundamental step at the beginning of the project, not only on project monitoring but also to have a fair referent to measure against in case of disputes.
Therefore, I find that a good and fair start in a project is necessary to have a fair and satisfactory completion, too.
