Design Planning & Decision-Making for a Water Tunnel Program with NetPoint
June 05, 2023
Netpoint, Presentations
Early design-phase planning for long-term construction projects can be challenging in light of the ongoing design work and the uncertainty of the schedule in the distant future. Weeraya Orwatthana illustrates the benefits of using NetPoint on a multi-year public construction project to enhance team collaboration and support decision-making in the design and construction packaging scenarios. NetPoint clarifies key scheduling concepts and develops multiple scenarios for first, second, and third-level schedules to facilitate scope and schedule discussions among project team members. We will present the planning/schedule development process and different schedule formats and layouts that support discussions and assist the team’s decision.
Weeraya Orwatthana
Ms. Weeraya Orwatthana is a project control specialist with a diverse background in public and private construction projects. She is skilled in construction management, project management, budget and cost control and analysis, planning and scheduling, quality assurance and control, and risk management. Her scheduling software knowledge includes Primavera P6, MS Project, and NetPoint.
Definitely. It depends on the complexity of the project, but in order to manage it, you must try to understand what they are looking for. Even if we know that there are different levels for different teams (for example, project executives vs. day-to-day workers), we don’t know exactly what they’re looking for. The executive level and executive team might want to look at something in more detail. Once you know what they are looking for, then you can take a look at the various schedule levels and see whether those can support their goal. At times, you may not be able to use only a particular schedule level. A separate fragnet that includes reasonable activities from different schedule levels might be a better solution.
You need to have the schedule options before going to the quantitative risk analysis. Also, we don’t want to picture just one schedule option to do the risk analysis. We should do all the schedule options and multiple risk analyses because each of the options would have its own unique criteria, risk elements, and different risk ratings. The other element is that you need to have a risk register before doing the quantitative risk analysis. The schedule version that you’ll be using for the quantitative risk analysis might not be the same as your current schedule levels. You’ll start with a summarization of a particular schedule level, and you need to go back and cross-check with your risk register to add all the red risks or significant risks identified in your risk register to the schedule version for quantitative risk analysis. The schedule for the quantitative risk analysis should be the schedule that includes key components of the schedule, critical paths, key elements, and activities that reflect red risks or significant risks identified in your risk register.
No, they’re separated. Schedule level 3 is in one file with multiple pages, then a separate file for schedule level 2, and a separate file for schedule level 1. A separate file, especially for level 2 that include many options, would be beneficial to show a comparison among different options.
NetPoint allows you to do cost and resource loading as a linear, sometimes per-person and sometimes as a group. It depends on the complexity of the project.
In many of our projects we use both, but for planning we use NetPoint and for reporting we use P6.