After many months (years?) of no apparent action following the publication of the National Development Plan, various bodies are now awakening to the reality of the resource requirements in order to be able to effectively manage and spend the billions on infrastructure projects.

It was always going to be a tough challenge: R800 odd billion over three years. Someone was smoking something to actually believe that this was viable. Dwell for a minute on the realities of project spend patterns. Firstly, no spending pattern is ever linear, or in terms of Rand over time, would it ever represent a consistent average from start to finish. Thus represented, it is the area under the curve that amounts to the total project spend.

Forward to reality: project spending patterns have the s-curve feature: they rise slowly as concept, design, procurement occurs and then start to climb steeply as deliveries and construction follow. It then tails off at commissioning and handover. The essence of this that there is a peak, and for the area under the curve to meet the project budget, the peak is considerably higher than the average.

What does this mean? Most likely it means that resource needs are not linear and have the same peaking nature. So when estimates are produced reflecting the numbers of resources needed, are these factored by the time axis? Most times not, and we invariably get the classic multi-tasking that is imposed on the scarce resources. This then adds to the potential delay in due performance dates being met. Multi-tasking creates its own delays, and anyone who believes otherwise should attend a few workshops that demonstrate this admirably.

Let’s then add another classic activity that for some pernicious reason remains the foundation of project planning: critical path scheduling. How many projects ever give consideration to the only development that has had the most time and cost saving successes on projects over the last 50 years? It’s called critical chain scheduling. As an aspirant believer in this process, it continues to amaze me that management does not know that it even exists let alone how it works. Far worse is the regular experience one has in presenting the process to the potential users, who most times praise the fundamentals that define the process, but return home only to be faced with the common response - business as usual.

Well, the NDP could do a lot worse than, once the reality of limited skilled and experienced resources has sunk home, have a good look at adopting a critical chain scheduling philosophy. It may just assist in preventing the project durations and costs to emulate the dreadful experiences we seem to have with most major projects such as Medupi.

The usual responses continue to be heard to using such a significant variation to standard procedure. It is too difficult: management won’t understand it. Perhaps then we need to study the experiences of major USA and Japanese projects as examples that have proved the point. The main changes occur in the human behavior of project management due the discipline imposed by critical chain principles: prioritising projects, assuming most durations are overestimated, aggregation and buffering of the safety before it’s lost, starting on time and measuring progress in time and not money. It not only sounds sensible, but it actually works.