---
title: Project Management™ for Construction
tags: []
---
# Project Management™ for Construction

This note discusses the applicability (or lack thereof)
of [[project-management-tm]] in [[construction-contracting]].

...
That's not to say that it should be overlooked in construction applications.
There's no better source for solutions to problems that our industries share.
Specialized practices like [[lean-construction]]
are decades behind [[project-management-institute|PMI]].
However, consulting Project Management™ for relevant insight
requires acknowledging its biases.

## Limitations

### Labor Management

Project Management™ assumes workforce deficits are difficult to fill,
and that significant changes are sign of process failure.

* Qualified employees are hard to find
* Project onboarding is extensive
* Diminishing returns start early and are severe

In construction projects, labor is highly dynamic.
Workforce necessarily varies greatly through the project's lifespan,
and labor reallocation is a regular (weekly) task.

* Qualified employees are relatively plentiful, cost is the bottleneck

* Onboarding is practically nonexistent,
    new employees are productive on their first day

* Diminishing returns start late and are less pronounced

### Basis of Progress

If you assume that labor is a strong predictor of cost,
and that your audience can convert between them implicitly,
then hours convey both schedule _and_ cost by their nature.

Project Management™ is primarily concerned with _schedule_,
because it assumes that labor is a strong predictor of cost.

* Labor is the greatest (if not only) project cost.
* Labor (and therefore cost) is effectively fixed for a given scope.

As such, Project Managers™ may discuss project cost in hours,
with no loss of detail.

In construction projects, labor is known to be a weak predictor of cost.

* Labor is almost always a minority of project cost.
* Functionally equal options have a large spread
  of possible hours-to-complete and total cost values.

As such, construction project managers must discuss project cost directly.

I believe this difference is one purely of language,
and doesn't represent a difference in philosophy.
However, it does speak to Project Management™'s tendency to overgeneralize.

### Material

The use of labor as a measure of cost is not a difference of philosophy itself,
however Project Management™ is only able to get away with conflating labor and cost
because it assumes Material cost is negligible,
or that it can be allocated as overhead.

What I'm calling Material cost
refers to direct costs not associated with labor.
These costs vary wildly,
even independent of installation requirements,
due to [[gold-plating]] and owner furnished scope.
