Chapter Two: Project Scheduling Techniques - Construction Schedules - Fifth Edition
Michael T. Callahan is President of CCL Construction Consultants, Inc. He maintains an active international consulting practice in the measurement and responsibility of delay, along with the quantification of additional performance costs and other construction and design-related matters. The author of Termination of Design Contracts, he also prepares a monthly newsletter summarizing current design and construction case decisions for Construction Law Digest. Mr. Callahan has lectured throughout the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Far East on design and construction-related topics. He is a member of the Kansas, New Jersey, and Missouri bars by examination. He is also a frequent arbitrator, negotiator, mediator, and a regional advisor to the American Arbitration Association.
H. Murray Hohns, PE, Fellow ASCE, was a Construction Consultant, Mediator and Arbitrator in private practice. His specialty was construction delay, those responsible, and its consequences. He founded Wagner-Hohns-Inglis-Inc. and built it into one of the country’s 250 largest Consulting Engineers. The author of several books on dispute resolution, he worked on projects in all 50 states and overseas, and managed major construction projects for their owners. Mr. Hohns also wrote a monthly expert commentary for a compilation of reported construction cases for over seven years. He was former President of the Project Management Institute, the National Academy of Forensic Engineers, and a member of the Board of Directors for the American Arbitration Association.
Originally from Construction Schedules: Analysis, Evaluation, and Interpretation of Schedules in Litigation and Dispute Resolution
§ 2-1 Project Scheduling Overview
We noted in Chapter 1 that this book does not include instructions or examples of how to do a network schedule. We do need to comment, though, about the scheduling technique you will encounter and must understand. As part of that understanding, we recommend that every attorney or construction consultant/expert who is or wants to be involved in delay-claim dispute presentation add a copy of the latest Associated General Contractors of America manual, Construction Planning & Scheduling to your library. This manual was first put together by an impressive group of industry leaders in the last decade of the Twentieth Century. The book is filled with all sorts of background-setting information that will help establish what contractors expect to do, must do and believe they can do with their “project schedules.”
The AGC manual, however, does not express any standards for scheduling or for explaining good practice. The AGC manual does not explain that each activity should relate to another with only the start activity without a predecessor and only the finish activity without a successor. The AGC manual does not explain how constrained dates can interrupt the forward pass and present a critical path that represents only part of the activities and may not begin at the start activity and may not end at the finish activity. One can begin to understand good scheduling practice by consulting the American Association of Cost Engineer International’s Forensic Schedule Protocol (29R-03) as well as publications 23R-02 Identification of Activities, 24R-03 Developing Activity Logic, 32R-04 Determining Activity Durations, 48R-06 Schedule Constructability Review.
The words “project schedule” have different meanings to the owner, contractor, subcontractor, design consultant, and, most especially, to courts of law or other dispute resolution triers of fact involved in the construction industry. The project schedule may just mean the contractually stated final completion date and/or interim completion dates for phases of the work or it may refer to the process of sequencing and scheduling individual activities or tasks which are required to complete the project.