Rolling Contractor Updates up to Master Schedule on Const. Project

[Andrew Lavinsky]

Saw Rod Gill's posting on MS Project vs. Primavera which prompted me to post
this and see if I can pick the group's collective brains.....

I am working with a company that manages construction. They have schedules
arranged in tiers, with the overall schedule being tracked at a tier 1-3
level, and the contractors tracking their own schedules at tier 4+. The
contractors may track their schedule using any scheduling software, not
necessarily MPP. We are not using "master" schedules as typically identified
in MPP parlance, but rather a "master" schedule as an overall schedule of the
entire project (i.e. no linked subprojects, etc.)

The goal is to roll up the credit (% Complete and/or Physical % Complete,
but most likely the latter) from the tier 4+ schedules to the tier 3 master
schedule. This process will be performed by dedicated schedulers. Effort
and cost is not relevant to this exercise at this point.

As Rod described it in his post on 8/19: "For example we have trackers in
Excel to report progress in the shop for Pipe fabrication and trackers for
teams on site to report pipe installation progress. Using Pipe numbers
Project can update progress at a pipe level (through VBA) even though the
tracker works at drawing level (up to 20 drawings per pipe) and Project is
mostly at Pipe level." That's pretty similar to some of our examples,
although we have a number of different types of tasks to track, not just Pipe
construction.

Just curious how other folks have met this challenge, and if there are any
recommendations I can garner from their experiences.

Thanks in advance. Responders who also attend the Project Conference may
get rewarded with a free beer.

 

[Rob Schneider]

Gosh. My brain hurts. Why no go straight to the beer and discuss there!

--rms

www.rmschneider.com

 

[Andrew Lavinsky]

Cold beverages taste better when you work for it (says my wife pointing to
the lawn mower).

-A

 

[Brian Kennemer]

Andrew,

In it's simplest form you could have Excel sheets that contained the names
of the tasks which you want to update in your master schedule and then you
could have the contractors update those sheets with % complete or Physical %
Complete. Then you could do a simple import from the excel sheet that merged
the data from the sheet into your schedule using a KEY field for each task.

 

[Andrew Lavinsky]

So just to capture this, I have a couple of options that have been presented:

1) Use standardized spreadsheets, track the roll up manually.
2) Use standardized spreadsheets, import into the project file on a periodic
basis (Brian's $0.02)
3) Use some sort of combination of spreadsheets and VBA to import (Rod's
original post in another conversation which prompted my inquiry)
4) Use SharePoint lists in conjunction with EPMLive's ProjectPublisher (or
other tool) to capture the process (thanks Rob, that's worth a beer, well
a domestic American beer at any rate)

Thanks everyone. Appreciate any additional tips or suggestions.

-A

 

[Rob Schneider]

I'll bring along a selection of single malt.

--rms

www.rmschneider.com