Pre-Construction Planning: The Five Must-Do Items to Leave Precon Right

Pre-Construction Planning: The Five Must-Do Items to Leave Precon Right

We’re going to talk about planning and design of precon. Now, there’s a lot more to this than what I’m going to cover now, but let’s go ahead and do one small segment and see where we end up. I want to talk about the question directly: If you had to pick something, what are the key things that you would pick? What are the most impactful things in pre-construction that we have to remember?

And I’ll close with this statement: I think it’s immoral and unethical to hold a project team accountable for a project they didn’t plan. I think it’s immoral and unethical to hold a project team accountable for a project they didn’t plan. And so these are the minimum items.

Let me walk you through the five must-do items.

The Pain of Starting Without a Plan

Here’s what happens when you don’t do proper pre-construction planning. You start the project. You mobilize. And then you discover problems. The crane is too small. The switchgear won’t be here for six months. The zones are too big. The trade partners can’t hit the schedule. And now you’re reacting. You’re fighting fires. You’re stressed. And the team didn’t plan this project together.

And here’s the problem: you’re holding the team accountable for a project they didn’t plan. That’s immoral and unethical. The team needs to plan the project together. They need to see the plan. They need to tear it apart. They need to make it right. And then they own it.

Without proper pre-construction planning, you’re guessing. With proper pre-construction planning, you’re prepared. And there are five must-do items that separate guessing from preparation.

Must-Do One: Create the Macro-Level Takt Plan

One of the most important things you can do on your project is create a macro-level Takt plan. And I’m going to put that in a timeline. I think that your macro-level Takt plan is best anywhere between the proposal I would actually do one for a proposal all the way up to schematic design, between those frameworks.

I want to take you to a really neat board here and explain why we would want a macro-level Takt plan. And even if you use CPM, I would always do a macro-level Takt plan at a high level and make sure that you have what you need. This is a macro-level Takt plan. I remember an executive one time telling me, “Jason, if you can’t see the plan in one to five minutes, you don’t have a plan.”

You might be curious why we’re showing a schedule that is running past substantial completion. This project is actually on track. This is basically their baseline strategy. And when the team was able to see this, they were like, “Hey, can we optimize how fast we’re able to get in here in the interior space? Hey, the structural upgrade phase is a little bit disconnected. Is there any way that can narrow by adjusting zone sizes? Hey, for the interiors, instead of 10 zones at 10,000 square feet, can we do 15 zones at 7,500 square feet?”

And that is actually what the team ended up doing. And this phase actually ended up hitting the milestone because everybody knows the smaller your zone size, the faster you go. So they were able to look at this from a strategic standpoint and say, “Okay, this is how I’m going to optimize move-in. We’ll really line out the occupants.” The demolition phase, that’s probably already optimized, but we have one little gap here. Can we add a second crew way early on so they’re trained and onboarded?

We have this schedule is correct. This baseline strategy is correct because it has trade flow. The trades can actually move from area to area to area. Anytime you see a schedule where they’re stacked into one zone with too many people or one trade is supposed to be in 18 different areas on the CPM schedule, no. No. No. And some more, no.

So what happens on these baseline schedules is that we actually map out what’s realistic and then we have realistic opportunities to accelerate. We can re-zone to accelerate. We can optimize a bottleneck, meaning like let’s say that there’s like an underground electrical room or something like that and we can actually prefabricate that underground electrical. We can look at the sequence. We can optimize the start of phases with great sequencing.

My point here is that seeing a macro-level Takt plan is actually key and we can do so much with it. Macro-level Takt plans are amazing. The other thing that I like them for is that this is what they should look like before you come out of pre-construction: torn apart, commented on, questioned, criticized. Just like you’re making a good movie at DreamWorks. We’ve got to have the plan on one page to where everybody understands it and just redline the crap out of it so that you can get to a solid plan that will work for you out in the field.

So here’s a quote if you want to write it down: I don’t care if your first plan is right. I care that the team can see it so the team can make it right together.

Must-Do Two: Manage Long-Lead Procurement Weekly

If Jeff came and said, “Hey, J Money, I need you to run a project for me,” and I was a superintendent, I would literally be like, “Jeff, can you hold on one second?” And Jeff would be like, “What the hell? Does he have to go to the bathroom?” And I would literally come out of my office with a piece of paper and say, “Jeff, what kind of building is it? And what things do we need to order right now for long-lead procurement?” And he’d be like, “Jason, I didn’t even tell you what the job is.” I’d be like, “I don’t care. We need to get we’re already late for switchgear. We’re already late for curtain wall.” And Jeff would be like, “Jason, are you high?” And I’d be like, “Jeff, for the love of God, we’re already late. We have to get our long-lead procurement on. What if the owner won’t pay for it? Jeff, I’ll pay for it myself.”

Like one of the biggest problems that we have in the industry is that we don’t start soon enough. I promise I won’t be too long with all of this. But there’s a great book and it’s written way back in the day. It’s called Calum K. It’s a book about a builder, a superintendent literally back in the day that recovered a project. And this is like at this point like 150 years ago in the United States. And guess what? He’s dealing with unions, railroad lines, politics, labor shortages, procurement issues. So when we’re like, “Oh, COVID-19 and supply chains,” we’ve had this problem for hundreds and hundreds of years. Every book I read says the same thing.

It literally comes down to two things. If you want to take notes, you have to start early enough. I’ve learned this from master builders. We have to start sooner and we have to monitor weekly.

This is just a little bit of a tease to my construction homies that I love. I’ll go to job sites and 98% of them, this is what happens. I’m like, “Hey, what are the biggest problems you’re dealing with?” “Okay, labor shortages and material procurement.” “Okay, let me see your procurement log.” “What’s a procurement log?” “Okay, you don’t use a log. That’s super fine. Just show it to me in Procore.” “Well, I don’t have it in there.” “Okay. Well, all right. It’s probably in the schedule. Can you show me your procurement in the ” “No, we don’t have it in the schedule.” “Okay. Who manages their procurement?” “Well, our trades do.”

And then I’m like, “Oh.” Like, have you ever seen that scene in The Naked Gun where they’re trading guns back and forth in a hostage scene and everybody in the audience slaps their head? I’m like, “No, we can’t. That is not the right answer.” We as the general contractor have to work with the trades, monitor it weekly so that we see real-time if there’s a mistake.

Here’s the key components of a procurement log:

• Required on-job date: When do you need it on site? Work backwards from there with buffers.
• Conditional formatting on each step: Shop drawings submitted, reviewed, approved, ordered, manufactured, shipped, received. If any step goes red, you immediately know to recover the supply chain.
• Weekly monitoring: Track it every single week. Don’t wait for the trade to call you and say, “Sorry, it’s going to be three more weeks.” You should already know the problem and be recovering it.

A lot of times people are like, “Oh, I ordered this a year ago and I got a call yesterday from the trade saying it’s going to be three more weeks. Sorry owner, we have a delay.” Well, why are we surprised? Why were we not tracking it weekly? Why when we were looking at these, didn’t we see a problem in each of these steps real-time and recover it? Because we weren’t paying attention. We weren’t taught this.

And so, one of the most impactful things you can do to get out of pre-construction is to make sure you are managing your long-lead procurement as fast as possible.

Must-Do Three: Create Norm-Level Takt Plans (Post-Pull-Plan)

This is one of the critical ones. Create norm-level Takt plans. If you start your project with a macro-level Takt plan and you can do this with CPM or Takt so if you’re mainly CPM, that’s super fine, not a problem then you create your macro-level Takt plan. Tear it apart with the team. Make it a team plan. Make sure everybody owns it. Then you can build your work breakdown structure and CPM. But you need to see your entire plan on one page.

And one of the things that I really like as I zoom into this is that your macro-level Takt plan should be your slowest speed plus your risk analysis plus a reference class. Meaning if you’re building a laboratory, your reference class is historical data on the last 15 laboratories you’ve built. And if the last 15 projects you’ve built took 18 months and you’re promising 15 for this new one, that’s probably not smart.

So your macro-level Takt plan is your slowest speed plus your risk analysis plus your reference class. Then when we re-zone, meaning we do our pull plan, when we do our pull plan that helps us to create the sequence. And in the pull plan you actually work with the trade partners to find out the smallest zone size that’s reasonable.

Now when you do your norm-level Takt plan, which is post-pull-plan, that’s your optimized speed plus risk mitigation strategies plus your reference class mitigation strategies plus buffers. The way we do that is in a calculator. You plug in how many packages of work you have for trades, how many zones you have, and what your Takt time is. And the calculator will basically say, “Okay, you’ve got five zones planned right now. Well, if you go to nine zones, you’ll go from 95 days on your phase to 69 days. Or if you go to 11 zones, you go to 75 days and the trade partners have eight additional days for each of their scopes.”

So this calculator allows you to know how you should zone a project. And that’s important because then and only then you pull plan with the trades and you pull plan one representative zone. And when you pull plan that, that is the base of everything that we do.

All a pull plan is is one sequence in a zone of a Takt plan. And all a Takt plan is is multiple pull plans zone by zone. That’s it. So Last Planner 2.0 is Takt 100%. Last Planner 1.0 is simply one area. If you all love the Last Planner System, then the next step is to love the Takt Production System. That’s what creates your base and that’s what creates your norm-level production plan. If your project needs superintendent coaching, project support, or leadership development, Elevate Construction can help your field teams stabilize, schedule, and flow.

Must-Do Four: Create a Risk and Opportunity Register

The other most important thing is you should as the PM or the project executive create a risk and opportunity register. That risk and opportunity register is going to be created from those fresh eyes meetings. Every risk that we know or opportunity to gain more money should be mentioned on that register.

Let me give you two examples. Let’s say that one risk is the crane will be there too long and the size of crane is a $300,000 risk to your budget. Well, now you start looking into it and you find out that you could actually do two smaller ballast cranes, save the 300 grand and still have the capacity for the formwork. That’s an example of a risk.

Let’s look at an opportunity. This is kind of silly, but if you have good financial projections, let’s say that you have a guaranteed maximum price as a CM at risk, but your concrete budget is lump sum, and you realize that on the project you could actually hire two more field engineers because your budget looks strong and that would help your self-perform lump-sum budget, and that you could rent yourself your own equipment for the project, at least the forklift, as a part of your overall budget and gain $30,000 to $40,000 additionally on equipment rental gains. That’s something you would put in your opportunities column.

The bottom line is having a risk and opportunity register will set the team up for success to get rid of their risks and to realize their financial opportunities. And that happens once you do a little bit of research on your reference class. Basically what it is is don’t build a building unless you’ve done research on previous buildings. And you can even if you don’t have research, you can use AI to get some pretty good information. If you’re building a building, understand what the 10 to 15 types of those buildings look like, how long they took, how much they cost before, and make sure that you’re not undercutting that by a lot.

Must-Do Five: Host a Fresh Eyes Meeting

That brings us to the fresh eyes meeting. That means every job that goes out the door gets reviewed and the project team gets to stand and deliver. And what happens is you have something like this. It has the overall summary, the overall production plan, the first 90 days, every sequence to look at, all of the procurement items, overall work density areas, budget categories, how the team is organized. Like everything is on here. And we should just rip this thing a new one, just tear it apart and be mean because we don’t have a plan until the entire project team has reviewed it, torn it apart, and had a fresh set of eyes for it.

And guess what? If some of you are like, “I’m not letting Jeff touch my project and look at it,” no, no, no, no, no. Do you want to go home every day and be stressed about it by yourself or do you want to share the burden of this project with the team? I promise you, your mental health will be better if you share it. So the fresh eyes meeting is absolutely crucial. So that’s the fifth major thing that I would do.

A Challenge for Project Teams

Here’s what I want you to do this week. If you want to know, according to my research and opinion, what are the most impactful things that you must do in order to leave precon the right way, here are the five:

1. Macro-level Takt plan – See the entire project on one page, tear it apart, make it right together
2. Long-lead procurement – Start early, monitor weekly, recover problems in real time
3. Norm-level Takt plans – Pull plan with trades, optimize zones, gain buffers
4. Risk and opportunity register – Document risks, identify opportunities, prepare the team
5. Fresh eyes meeting – Peer review, stand and deliver, share the burden

And this is not done very often. You can’t come to most projects and find a great master plan, procurement, pull plans starting to be done, the risk and opportunity register, and the fresh eyes meeting happening. And ideally, it’s not one fresh eyes meeting, but hopefully you get enough reviews. I’d rather there be three. One of these days when we’re really good at this, we will have reviewed that project three different times before we go out into the field.

As we say at Elevate, it’s immoral and unethical to hold a project team accountable for a project they didn’t plan. Do the five must-do precon items. Plan together. Own the plan together. Execute together.

On we go.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is the macro-level Takt plan the first must-do?

Because you can’t see the plan in one to five minutes without it. The team needs to see the entire project on one page, tear it apart, and make it right together. That’s how you build ownership.

Why monitor long-lead procurement weekly instead of monthly?

Because if something goes red, you need to know immediately and recover. If you wait a month, you’ve lost four weeks of recovery time. Weekly monitoring catches problems in real time when you can still fix them.

What’s the difference between macro and norm-level Takt plans?

Macro-level is slowest speed plus risk plus reference class. Norm-level is optimized speed plus risk mitigation plus reference class plus buffers. Macro happens at proposal to schematic. Norm happens post-pull-plan with trades.

Why do you need a risk and opportunity register?

To document known risks and identify financial opportunities before mobilization. The team can eliminate risks and realize opportunities instead of reacting to problems after they’ve already hurt the project.

What happens in a fresh eyes meeting?

The project team stands and delivers. Peers review the entire plan production, procurement, budget, team organization, everything. They tear it apart. They make it better. You don’t have a plan until it’s been peer-reviewed.