Speaker 1: Finishing a construction project on time and on budget is every builder's goal. So how do you set yourself up for success? Whether you're renovating a bathroom or building a new home from the ground up, every construction project starts with a plan. A construction plan is a document that outlines the tasks, resources, and requirements needed to complete a build on time and budget, and typically includes a breakdown of all the tasks required to deliver a finished build, a detailed project timeline that outlines when tasks need to happen, major milestones like contract approvals, inspections, or draw requests, dependencies between related tasks that need to happen in a certain order, resource assignments showing which build team or subcontractor is responsible for the work, and important design, planning, and closeout documents like blueprints, contracts, budgets, permits, inspection reports, and construction change orders. Unexpected weather, supply delays, overbooked crews, and faulty workmanship are just some of the factors that can throw construction projects off schedule. Having a plan makes it easy to spot overages early so you can address issues quickly and minimize the impact of delays. Construction planning and management sets the stage for success because it gives everyone a clear timeline to follow, with critical information documented in a single source of truth. So before you start scheduling your next build, take time to gather all the project details from deadlines and budgets to resources, stakeholders, and materials. Once you've got these basics in hand, here are five simple construction project planning steps you can follow. The first step in construction planning is simple. Make a list of all the different tasks, deliverables, and other milestones that stand between you and project completion. You can use a work breakdown structure to itemize everything and get a sense of scope for your project. Then, group tasks into phases to keep your plan neat and tidy as you build it out. We organize tasks in our template into three phases. Phase 1 – Pre-construction. This phase is where design, planning, and permitting happens. Think of pre-construction as all the things you need to have in place before the actual build begins. Phase 2 – Construction. The construction phase is the heart of the action. You'll need to coordinate closely with supers and subcontractors to understand the level of effort required to complete their tasks, as well as the availability and scheduling of their field crews, to make sure your plan doesn't fall behind. Phase 3 – Closeout. Once your build is complete, you're ready to move on to the closeout phase. This phase includes final inspections, client walkthroughs, punch list completion, and closeout documents. The next step in the planning process is to assign a timeline to the work needed to get your project done. Be as realistic as you can about task timing at this stage. Review past schedules to compare your plan vs. actual timeline and assess how work really unfolded. Don't forget to take external factors into account as well, whether it's seasonal impacts on weather or potential delivery delays. You can't frame the roof before walls have been built or hang drywall before the electrical and plumbing have been installed. That's why dependencies are a critical part of a construction project plan. Adding dependencies between tasks makes sure work happens in the proper order and gives everyone a clear sense of how their tasks impact others. Work won't get done on its own. You need people to make that happen, and that's where resource assignments come in. Make sure you assign every task and milestone on your schedule to the person or team responsible for the work. That way there's no question as to who's doing what and when deadlines are. A construction plan is a living, breathing document that will evolve as your work progresses. That's why it's important to review your timeline regularly and keep it up to date. This will make it easier for you to get ahead of delays and issues before your entire project goes off track. In construction project management, you have schedules to wrangle, budgets to balance, and people to keep happy. And changes in one stage of construction can have a domino effect on the rest of your schedule. That's why building out a comprehensive project plan is so important. A Gantt chart makes it easy to plan, manage, and communicate your construction schedule so everyone's working towards the same project goal. There are lots of different ways to go about creating a Gantt chart for your construction project. Let's take a closer look at how you can build and manage a project schedule of your own in TeamGantt using our template as an example. We've already mentioned three major phases you might consider for your plan, but don't be afraid to break your project down into smaller phases as you build your schedule out. This enables you to easily see how each stage of your project is progressing and makes rescheduling multiple tasks a whole lot faster. Color coding tasks by project phase, person, or team responsible, or even priority is a simple way to make sure your Gantt chart is easy to scan and understand. Resource management can get a little tricky in construction planning because you've got so many different subcontractors and schedules to balance. With TeamGantt's workload features, you can avoid messy scheduling conflicts and overbooked field crews. Simply click the Availability tab at the bottom of your Gantt chart for a heatmap view of the number of tasks, or hours, each person on your project is currently assigned to each day. Select any cell to see a pop-up of all tasks assigned to that person or label on that day. Every construction project has certain milestones you need to hit to ensure things are tracking on the right direction. You might set contract approvals, inspections, draw requests, or even phase completions as milestones on your project plan. This construction plan example shows milestones as a yellow diamond on the Gantt chart. The light blue vertical bar indicates the current date. Using TeamGantt's hourly estimation and time tracking features brings a powerful benefit to your project. You can see how actual work is tracking against your plan, making it easy to identify existing or potential overages. Simply look for the thin striped line that appears in the middle of each task bar on your Gantt chart and note its color and length. Here are some red flags to watch out for. If the striped line is red, that means this task or group is over budget. More hours have been logged than were estimated for the task. If the striped line is longer than the progress indicated for a task, that means this task or group is at risk for overage because it's eating up budgeted hours faster than progress is being made. And if you don't use these features, you can still get an at-a-glance view of your project progress and trouble spots with the Project Health Report or Portfolio view. Have you ever built a beautiful project schedule only to have a customer request or delay put a wrench in your plan? It happens. Adding dependencies to tasks can speed up schedule adjustments and make sure work continues to happen in the right order. If you move one task on the schedule, all the dependent tasks move right along with it. Of course, if your schedule changes, you'll need to communicate the new plan to your subcontractors and customers. Post updates and attach change orders to your project's discussion tab so nothing gets lost in the mix. With TeamGantt's mobile app, field crews can pull up the latest schedule and get notified of changes in real-time no matter where they're hard at work. The final stretch of any construction project plan is full of little details as you work to knock out the punch list. Here's an example of how you can use task subgroups in TeamGantt to keep track of all the moving pieces. Simply add each fix as a task under your punch list subgroup and assign punch list items to the person responsible to avoid confusion about who's doing what. You can even color code punch list tasks by subcontractor. Keeping up with all the closeout documents you'll need to wrap up a job is no simple feat. It can take a long time and a lot of wrangling. TeamGantt makes it easy to store and manage closeout documents in a single centralized hub. Upload a digital copy of each closeout doc to your project's closeout task in your Gantt chart or create a subgroup with an itemized task for each closeout item, so all your paperwork is organized and accessible in one place. Ready to plan a construction project of your own? Save time building your next schedule by using our free in-app template. TeamGantt takes the sweat out of construction planning, scheduling, and management. And because everything happens online in real time, chasing down updates will finally be a thing of the past. Your team and subcontractors can even use TeamGantt's mobile app to log their progress out in the field so you always know where your project stands. Sign up for a free TeamGantt account today and get started quickly with our free construction plan template. I hope you found this video helpful. 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