How to Manage Delays in Construction Projects

Managing delays in construction projects is a challenge that most project managers face at some point. In this blog, I’m going to share a general strategy to help you avoid and manage delays effectively. These insights, inspired by conversations with lean experts and my experience in the industry, are designed to give you actionable tips you can implement right away.

The Key to Avoiding Delays in Construction

The main takeaway is this: the key to avoiding delays is preventing variation from happening in the first place. While it’s essential to know how to overcome delays when they occur, the best approach is to avoid them altogether by preventing the factors that cause them.

Critical Scheduling Tools

There are several key scheduling tools that can help prevent delays by spotting potential issues early:

1. Master Schedule: This is your big-picture plan that reveals strategic problems.
2. Takt Plan: Identifies sequence issues and ensures everything is networked together.
3. 6-Week Make-Ready Look-Ahead Plan: Helps make work ready by asking critical questions about people, equipment, materials, and resources. If the answer is no, you’ve identified a potential roadblock.
4. Weekly Work Plan: Transitions from a high-level plan to a 100% committed and coordinated plan.
5. Daily Plan: Ensures that tasks for the following day are clear and free from roadblocks.

Each of these tools is designed to prevent variation and delays by aligning tasks, resources, and schedules effectively.

Key Questions to Ask to Avoid Delays

To further ensure success, here’s a quick checklist to help you avoid delays on your construction project:

• Do you have a well-designed trailer?
• Are all your schedule deliverables visualized on boards?
• Are your zone maps and logistics plans visible and up-to-date?
• Are you proactively identifying potential issues during meetings and huddles?
• Have you aligned your supply chain between the first planners and last planners?

By keeping these elements in check, you can prevent a lot of problems from arising on the project.

Using the Crystal Ball Analogy

I often refer to scheduling tools as your “crystal ball.” In “The Lord of the Rings,” the Wizards use a crystal ball to see into the future and understand what’s happening. The same applies to your construction project. Your schedule deliverables are like crystal balls—tools you can use at set times to look into the future, identify potential problems, and determine what needs to be done to prevent those issues from becoming delays.

Each of the schedules I mentioned earlier allows you to see the future of your project. By looking ahead, you can anticipate roadblocks and prevent them, which is the key to reducing variation and delays.

Why Buffers Are Essential

But let’s be honest, not all delays are preventable. When you can’t avoid variation, buffers in your system become your best friend. In the Takt system, buffers allow you to account for unforeseen delays without derailing the entire project.

There are two types of delays to be aware of:

1. Foreseeable Delays: These are the delays you can anticipate and plan for. For example, if you know the crane has to take a certain path, and it might hit a bridge, you can reroute it in advance.
2. Unforeseeable Delays: These are the ones you can’t plan for, like a natural disaster or sudden design changes. While you can’t prevent these, buffers will help absorb the impact.

Buffers act as a cushion for your project, helping you absorb delays without panicking, rushing, or causing additional problems.

How to Create Buffers

Creating buffers is simple but strategic:

• Start with your Macro-level Takt Plan and use a calculator to determine if you’re in the right range for your schedule.
• Afterward, do a pull plan to verify the sequence and work with trades to optimize zones.
• The goal is to incline your macro-level takt plan without affecting your trade partners’ durations. This creates time buffers ahead of critical milestones.

Buffers are like the bumpers between a boat and a dock—if the waves hit, the boat won’t be damaged. The same applies to your construction project. Buffers help protect it from the unexpected.

Absorbing Delays: Key Strategies

If you encounter delays despite all efforts, here are some strategies you can use to absorb them:

• Interrupt the takt time or sequence and eat into a buffer.
• Isolate the delayed area from the rest of the plan.
• Add swing capacity or bring in additional crews without overburdening resources.
• Rezone the successor areas into smaller zones to recover time.

Your trade partners won’t overuse buffers, so you can trust them to manage delays appropriately. Transparency is key here, and with clear production planning, buffers can be managed effectively without disrupting the entire project.

The Golden Rule: Align Work with Capacity

When managing delays, always ensure that work aligns with the capacity of your system. You never want to exceed your system’s capacity because that can lead to overburdened resources, decreased productivity, and even more delays.

Rather than limiting work in process, focus on aligning it with the system’s capacity. Whether you’re bringing in extra crews or working overtime, the goal is to recover from delays without exceeding what your system can handle.

When to Ask for an Extension

If you’ve followed all the steps above and there’s still a delay, it’s time to ask for an extension. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, a delay is unavoidable. In these cases, having an intelligent conversation with the owner and possibly submitting a time impact analysis is the most responsible course of action.

Need Help Managing Delays? Contact Us!

At the end of the day, I want this process to work for you. Whether you need help setting up buffers or aligning work in process, we’re here to help. Our team specializes in building takt plans, implementing the Last Planner System, and supporting construction projects. Just reach out to us, and we can assist you in managing delays on your next project.