Managementors recently completed an eighteen-week project with Skanska, as part of their partnership to improve operational effectiveness and drive change through the project management teams. This phase of the work focused on Skanska’s project at the Blossom Street development in London, a contract on behalf of their customer British Land Plc, to renovate existing warehouses and generate new space for eight new office and retail buildings.
The Project
The main objective of the engagement was to improve and develop the existing Management Operating System (MOS) and create better contractor management controls, tools, and plans to drive on-time completion of project activities.
The enhancement of the Project Delivery Management Operating System started with the on-site activities, working with the Skanska Site Supervisors to log actual completion/progress; then developing labour loading tools to align and prioritise these activities with the sequenced programme. The project team then coached-in and implemented these new tools with the subcontractor management, which created the capability to generate more accurate plans.
With clear programme-oriented plans in place; the project team installed reporting tools which were used to accelerate pace and create accurate production metrics. By understanding the programme status in detail, along with programme-related labour requirements, joint reviews and planning sessions were more effective, enabling better production control, resource forecasts and horizon planning.
The most important aspect of the new development was the definition of usable units of measurement per package; turning programme line items and technical drawings into usable forecast volumes to monitor against. This allowed detailed progress performance reporting, giving Percentage Complete (PC) performance visibility of real plan vs actual statuses, per key subcontractor.
The Outcomes
The project approach resulted in a significant increase in subcontractor productivity rates, by controlling the labour on-site more effectively. The project also generated an upwards-trend in the activity count level across the whole site, which resulted in an increase in daily output and accelerated the completion of programmed workloads.
Peter Jones, Technical and Operational Efficiency Director says “We are now a more informed business than we were before, that’s absolutely clear – we’re adopting the principles that we were pushing forward during the projects and are using them alongside tried and tested tools in the market for short and medium term planning.”
