A medium sized contractor with £40m turnover had a requirement for high quality project planning function. They were getting poor results from their agency resources in terms of capability and turnover. This resulted in very poor quality schedules and a diminished ability to defend their contractual entitlements for delays caused by others.
The Challenges
- High turnover and low capability of project planners sourced from agencies
- Lack of understanding on how the programme is to be used in administering NEC3 contracts
- Project team’s wasted by “software” jockeys who needed their hands held for even the smallest tasks
- Messy and unclear programmes for all projects leaving the sub-contractor vulnerable to delays caused by third parties as they could not demonstrate their entitlement
Our Solution
We put in place best practice project planning principles and deployed our team across their entire portfolio of projects.
Because we had control of the full project life cycle we were able to ensure that commercially robust programmes were in place from the beginning of the project. We were able to then deliver clear and progressive impact programmes to support pro-active delay claims and a constant push for changes to contract dates.
In addition we implemented data analytics and visualisation on their larger projects and we are currently moving towards combining this to an overall portfolio view to provide the business with a full bottom up view of their ongoing works.
Key Outcomes
- We are now the trusted partner to deliver project planning and controls for the business due to our pro-active approach and strong domain knowledge.
- Reduced headcount of project planners by 20% due to our improved efficiency and decreased time wasted by the project team in “hand-holding” agency staff who didn’t understand the details of what they were planning.
Final Thoughts
Small contractors often struggle with sourcing the best project planning people. By partnering with Laminar they were able to access some of the very best people at a lower overall cost than they were paying for agency resources.
