What is a project plan in construction? #
A project plan is an internal planning document construction firms put together to help them understand the overall timelines/costs of a job and where they stand at any given point in time. A good project plan will contain a schedule (for both the phases of work and the human resources to be allocated to the job), budget information, contractual scope of work by phase, and a list of the required materials and equipment by phase.
A project manager should be able to go to her/his project plan at any point in time and understand whether the company is ahead or behind schedule, and also understand whether the job is likely to come out ahead or behind on profitability.
Project plan content #
The project manager, working with the estimator and her/his contact at the GC, puts together:
- Overall schedule for the work to be performed based on the scope that’s been bid. Labor, equipment, and materials purchase/delivery timings are also worked out and added to the schedule.
- List of tasks/milestones that will help her/him to track the progress of each phase of work.
The project manager working with the estimator/finance team also puts together the final budget.
All of those things together constitute the project plan for the job.
Creating and managing project plans in Knowify #
Knowify offers comprehensive project plan creation, management, and tracking tools. Compared to traditional project planning, which can involve multiple (locally-run) software tools and limited transparency across the organization, Knowify puts everything in one place and takes the actions of each user—for example, a timecard submission, or a new purchase order—and makes their impacts on the job immediately available to the project manager. As a result, the project manager gets real-time intelligence on job performance, and can make better, more timely decisions than ever before.
