Project Management

ChatGPT is changing the way people work in every sphere of life, by automating tasks, improving customer service, breaking down language barriers, assisting in content creation, providing personalized experiences, and helping them make informed decisions. It is helping businesses and individuals work more efficiently, save time, and improve the quality of their work. In this post, we will explore a few use cases of ChatGPT in each phase of Project Management.

Completing the projects within budget is a subject of very high interest for project managers. Unfortunately. cost overruns continue to be very common.

In 2021, as businesses continue to digitize operations with a vengeance, the question arises: what sort of opportunity does this ‘enforced digitization’ offer to companies struggling with cost and time overruns in project management?

Your project’s schedule is the point where the project’s strategy meets project execution. The scheduling environment is very complex. To start with, we have key stakeholders like project owners, consultants, contractors, sub-contractors, and suppliers. Very often they have conflicting interests in many aspects of the project especially related to time, cost, and scope. The complexity is compounded by other factors like different scheduling tools, hybrid project life cycles, diversity in progress measurements to cite a few.

This article focuses on the key aspects the scheduler of construction projects must consider creating schedules that capture the strategic aspects apart from the activity sequences to develop effective schedules that support the project’s execution strategy.

In this post, I will attempt to throw light on the Procurement Phase in EPC Projects, specifically, the challenges and limitations that can affect this phase and potentially delay project completion.

Managing engineering projects by managing the associated document data flows is like bulletproofing your engineering progress monitoring system. It shuts down all the avenues for wrong reporting and delayed reporting by capturing data at the source. It provides accurate information at the press of a button. Enhances timely decision-making and improves the project’s velocity. If you can manage the progress of the document workflows, then you can manage the progress of the actual work.

It’s true that Quality comes at a cost. However, even though purchasing quality materials comes at an additional and often hefty cost, implementing quality management practices need not. Just as we prioritize the quality of the final product we need to prioritize the creating and implementing of processes that can ensure quality through all the stages of delivering that final product ie a completed project. And since rework and return trips cost time and money and a job isn’t deemed ‘done’ until it reaches 100% quality, how about going the extra mile to ensure that everything gets done 100% right the first time? Here are my thoughts on how that can be achieved.

A huge challenge faced by project owners, managers, and controllers is the non-availability of accurate timely project progress information. In most EPC projects getting access to this kind of information takes at least a week and sets up a bottleneck that can delay the taking of corrective actions, which in turn adds to schedule and cost overruns.

Are there any projects without a single change order or EOT or cost overrun? Could any project manager truthfully reply ‘Yes’ to this question? Doubtful. His reply would more likely be about the number of change orders he handled during his tenure or the entire project and the same about Extension of Time and cost overruns. In other words, change orders and EOTs and cost overruns are practically inevitable in today’s projects, despite an approved budget and timeline, scope document, an approved list of makes, signed-off Ts and Cs, BOQ, and drawings.