Successful construction project management consists of many tasks, jobs, and serious planning. You have to be on top of everything; you must have negotiation skills, problem solving skills, team-building skills, and of course, you must use the latest technological advancements and software. The list can go on and on. But this time let’s focus on the construction manpower schedule and how to manage them using software.
What is the construction manpower schedule?
A construction manpower schedule is used by field contractors who are performing work on the field and use manual labor. Usually, you would have workers who work in teams. Each one of them has some kind of skill or strength. With a manpower schedule, you assign your team to perform specific tasks and are able to monitor which tasks your team is performing and where they are assigned.
Who makes the construction manpower schedule?
It depends on the size of the project and the structure of the company. But in order to have the best results, a manpower schedule should be made by the leader who will manage field work. The site manager or team leader is the person who knows his team’s strengths and weaknesses. He knows which person is better fit for specific scope, and he also knows the sequence in which the works should be executed in order to have the best overall performance and work order.
Construction software usage and how to schedule manpower
Ok, let’s see how easy it is to schedule your manpower for your construction project by using the software. PlanUpPro is made just right for this specific task. In one of our previous articles, you can read how to determine the scope of concrete works and set your team. I suggest that you read it before continuing further. Now that we have set our team and scope for our concrete work, we can go to the Schedule tab and start to assign our team to tasks.
The best part is that the software will give you an output of how many workers you need to assign per task. And this information updates daily based on your performance. For example, right now, for the task of building and setting up forms, you need around 56 man days.
Let’s create a construction manpower schedule.
For our project, we have a team of six people, and each one of them has different strengths and weaknesses. We know how many man-days we need per task, and we are now able to assign our team to tasks just like in the example.
Productivity change management
When you work on site, there can be many reasons why work can stop. Some days your team will perform better, and some will not. PlanUpPro uses the latest AI advancements, and it monitors based on your daily performance how well your team performs, reschedules many possibilities, and gives you the best output your team can deliver with the existing conditions. I am saying existing conditions because you can always improve your performance, and you will do it because in the main dashboard you have all the data and you can start to shape your works, try different techniques, and see whether they make any difference.
How productivity affects our example?
Let’s see how changes in productivity will affect our schedule. I have added few extra days where performance was lacking. As you can see for some tasks we have to increase and some decrease man-days. With a few clicks, you can decide when to increase and decrease.
Absence of workers
Any manager knows that staff does get absent, they leave, or suddenly you need more guys on another project and you have to share them. And this can be one of the reasons why projects get off track with deadlines because no one monitors the impact of that. With PlanUpPro, you can easily track how it affects you. Below the schedule, you can see whether we have assigned 6 workers, and in red, you can see that for the 18th of March, we had 5 guys working on site. Hence, we had five guys working on the 18th; we will also have to change this in our schedule because we were actually lucky to have one man per day.
Why do you need to schedule your manpower?
Labor costs are getting higher and higher. They can take the biggest share of the whole tender. A good manpower schedule avoids wasting money and minimizes such issues as:
- workers sitting idle on job sites
- high staff turnover rates
- unproductivity
- excessive overtime
- cost overruns
- schedule delay
Conclusions
Monitoring and scheduling your manpower with the right tools is easy. By using construction software such as PlanUpPro, you can easily track where your team is assigned, what tasks they are doing, whether they have been allocated to perform all tasks, and how many man-days still need to be spent finishing the tasks. Also, changes in site performance or the absence of staff can be clearly visible and easy to manage when using the right tools. You can then analyze these data and decide whether you need any improvements or changes.
Author – Emil Berzins. Follow me on 