Mastering the Electrical Work on a Mega Project

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Electrical Construction and Maintenance

Dr. Perry Daneshgari and Heather Moore, MCA, Inc.; John Werner and Bob Warwick, IES Commercial, Inc.
Mon, 2012-07-23 14:58

Imagine being given the task of managing a 500,000-hour job scheduled to take place over the course of four
years. Most contractors and electricians would jump for joy if they landed a project of this magnitude. An
undertaking of this scope, however, carries with it a myriad of challenges and complexities. To help you realize
the many factors involved in such a large project, lets analyze and review a job that IES Commercial secured in
2009.
Put simply, a large job is really a group of small ones
strung together. Nevertheless, this particular $65
million endeavor was greater than the annual revenue
of 90% of all the electrical contractors in the United
States and Canada. Managing such an enormous
project requires extraordinary skill and know-how.
Day-to-day challenges on a variety of issues include:
Resources in this case, an unknown labor force
Schedules
Purchases
Billing and cash flow
Productivity
Subcontractors
General contractors
Turnover
Substance abuse
Cost
Lack of visibility at the task level
Coordination with other trades
Material price escalations
Job-site logistics, including tool and material movement.

The required tools for management and mitigation of the technical, business, and integration risks have to be in
place, trusted, and used if you want to safely navigate the difficulties of such work. In addition, plans for
organizational structure, reporting structure, information flow, and other elements must be made. Although the
tendency of many contractors is to treat this type of project as a typical job, this mind-set can lead to major
problems and financial loss. Lets review the processes and procedures that were used in this example to manage
the risks and potential pitfalls.

Setting the Stage

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Because this particular electrical project stretched over four years, it would be tempting to compare it to
working on four individual $16.25 million projects per year but its not that simple. The difference on this
project was that supporting infrastructure had to be shared with all other projects running simultaneously.
To organize this massive job for daily, weekly, monthly, and annual management in addition to the traditional
project and cost tracking tools we set out to add quality and integration tools to assure continuous monitoring
and correction during the job progress. Mitigation of the risks was clearly divided between:
1. Technical Risks, which are electrically driven, such as: Code; inspection; design (including
architectural, structural, and MEP systems); installation requirements; durability testing and QA/QC;
contamination testing; electricians knowledge; as-builts; and submittals.
The above risks were managed with industry-standard procedures, processes, and tools.
2. Business Risks, which are monetary in nature, such as: invoicing; timesheets; material purchases;
subcontractors payments; bonding; insurance; change orders; cash management; project organization
structure and personnel; and profitability.The above risks were managed with IESs existing business and
financial management systems.
3. Integration Risk, which is defined as bringing and aligning all of the pertinent elements needed to install
the job, such as manpower, material, and money.
These risks possess the most critical and unknown factors during the progress of any large or small project.
Any mishaps at the intersection of the three elements listed above are due to integration risk. These included
but were not limited to:
Coordination with other trades for design, layout, and physical work space
Scheduling of work
Reporting on work and quality of work
Response to changes onsite
Material problems, including logistics, and lay down areas
Managing requirements of the daily work, the entire project, the company, and the environment, such as the general
contractor, engineers, and architect/owner.

Managing the Work

Work Environment Management (WEM) was the tool used to manage the integration risk throughout this
project. WEM relies primarily on usage of the newly developed ASTM standard for construction Job Productivity
Measurement (ASTM E2691) as a feedback mechanism (see Measuring Productivity in Construction from the
March 2011 issue of EC&M or visit http://ecmweb.com/training/measuring-productivity-construction).
Starting with the project schedule, the following elements of integration were set in place:
Generals scheduled-plan (GSP)
Work breakdown structure (WBS)
Job productivity measurement (JPM) Set up, usage, and reporting
Electrical scheduled-plan (ESP)
Three-week look-ahead scheduled plan
Short interval scheduling (SIS) set up, usage, and reporting
Change management process and protocol.

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For this article, well explain IESs approach to setting the elements in place for managing the integration risk of
this project.

Due to the size of this project, one of the first elements of WEM that was built was the WBS. This helped the
project team see the project from the vantage point of the true work. IES had received little information on the
GSP early on, but the job still had to be built. By putting together a WBS (Fig. 1), the job became visible and
manageable in smaller sections. Once the WBS was created, the JPM baseline was established, and the project
manager for IES could then track job productivity on a weekly basis.
In addition to the JPM setup, establishing SIS tracking was critical for the project, because it would be physically
impossible to know what obstacles 100+ electricians encountered on a daily basis. The initial SIS reporting was
set up to come in from a handful of lead electricians. However, as the project grew and became more
complicated, the project manager decided to expand the usage to 15 field managers, each providing input on
their crews ability to finish scheduled work (on a daily basis) and what was getting in their way of doing so.
With the JPM and SIS tools in place, the job became more visible for tracking the special and common causes of
variation on the projects overall productivity. A weekly review of both measurements involved the project
manager, senior project manager, and east region director of operations.

Review of the Job Information

In the weekly review of the project, the jobs overall productivity was reviewed and analyzed. Figure 2 shows the
overall job productivity trend for the entire project. From here, the trend was broken down into cost codes to see
what was driving the overall trend (Fig. 3).
Figure 3 shows how the cable tray was specifically problematic, revealing less-than-anticipated productivity
from the labor productivity reference point. However, heavier weighted cost codes, such as feeder wire and
feeder conduit, were performed with higher-than-expected productivity on the project. Because those codes
comprised a higher weight of the projects overall budgeted hours, they helped the overall job productivity stay
above baseline, as noted in Fig. 2. Special causes of productivity variation were identified, explained, and noted
for further investigation on a weekly timetable. For example:
Cable tray (the blue line in Fig 3) became problematic because of the amount of coordination that was needed in the field
to install it. Photo 1 shows an example of the tight space in the ceiling with multiple systems, including cable tray.
Branch conduit (the yellow line in Fig. 3) trended slightly downward due to working in congested areas on the job site
where other trades were present. Photo 2 shows other trades material being in the way of areas where branch conduit
needed to be installed.
The feeder conduit cost code (the purple line in Fig. 3) went very well on the installation, according to the crew and work
observations.

SIS outputs were also reviewed in

this weekly meeting to determine
what obstacles were causing daily
ups and downs in scheduled work.
The overall jobs Pareto Chart of
obstacles showed that 11% of total
scheduled hours of work was
impacted by obstacles. The largest

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obstacle was other trades not

complete (Fig. 4).
Half of the trade interferences and
waiting on trades was due to
working with the masons. When the
masons were laying their courses of
brick, IES employees had to stand
by and wait to insert their
conduits. This resulted in a great
deal of non-productive time, which
affected the schedule. When the project manager and his field managers saw this, they approached the masons
to see if they could get a little better forecast of what walls they planned to work and when so they could layout
their own electrical daily work schedule in a more efficient manner. Once the mason interference declined, the
job productivity increased (Fig. 5).
Absenteeism plagued the job daily, which is to be expected when trying to manage a crew this large. To combat
this issue, the project manager used SIS input to determine if there were common absences or issues causing
absence that needed to be addressed. Upon closer assessment, it was discovered that the relaxed procedures
regarding personal days off (PDO) without adequate advanced notice to supervisors and foremen for
coordination purposes could have caused superposition of how many people can take PDO at the same time,
leading to unwanted consequence of absenteeism. MCAs own research from SIS data across the country
indicates that absenteeism is one of the top five reasons for not completing work according to the schedule.

Using the WEM Output to Manage Integration Risk

In addition to weekly reviews of productivity trends and obstacles, the project manager also used the original
WBS and weekly input from the JPM observed % complete to develop an ESP that coincided with the GSP.
The senior project manager and the east region director of operations were able to use the trends showing up in
the JPM outcome as a reference point. Additionally, they were able to pinpoint areas where they needed to
escalate issues or help respond to problems the job had encountered. They were also able to correlate the WEM
reporting with overall project financial health in a quarterly audit process.

Conclusion
Running a large project is not unlike running a company, with the difference of pace and the amount of risk
involved in one large undertaking. The technical and business risks alone on a job of this magnitude must be
planned and managed with your companys best people and quality procedures. However, its crucial to
understand that the integration risk is the largest unknown and has the fewest tools available in the industry to
manage. Setting up a WEM system is a first step to making this risk visible. IESs success on this project was its
usage and response to the information provided by these types of processes and measurement/tracking tools.
Dr. Perry is president and CEO of MCA, Inc., Flint, Mich. Moore is vice president of operations. They can be
reached at perry@mca.net and hmoore@mca.net. Werner is east region director of operations for IES
Electrical; Warwick is a senior project manager. They can be reached at John.Werner@ies-co.com and
bob.warwick@ies-co.com.
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