All posts tagged Construction Science

Someone asked me recently if getting a job as a scheduler would be difficult without a college degree. That is not an easy question to answer because it really depends on the industry and employer’s preferences. I personally do not think a college degree is mandatory, but certainly those four years in college should count towards experience. College forces you to learn new skills every semester. At the same time, I have met field-tested individuals who, like the tin man, seemingly need a piece of paper to prove their worth. And it is entirely possible that neither the college graduate or the highly experienced individual has been formally trained for scheduling. A little more effort is therefore necessary on both their parts.

The dictionary tells us that a profession is a paid occupation, especially one that requires a formal education and prolonged training. Doctor, lawyer, accountant, and engineer are widely recognized as professions. In many instances a license or certification is also required. There is a sanctioning body, and an individual can lose their privileges for various infractions.

Does that mean that scheduling is not a profession? There is no mechanism to stop individuals from being schedulers unless companies refuse to hire them. Employers effectively decide who is a scheduler. But do these employers understand scheduling well enough to vet potential candidates? Not always. The right degree listed on a resume is certainly helpful, as well as relevant experience. So scheduling is perhaps a quasi profession based on the expectations of the job market.

Before anyone gets too excited, I am not trying to diminish scheduling by calling it a quasi profession. Rather, I am simply acknowledging by my fraternity brother the doctor has to live up to a higher standard than I do. And I think scheduling deserves a little more leeway. Should a scheduler be formally disciplined for using negative lags? Are constraints allowable? It is a slippery slope to let some group arbitrate what constitutes proper scheduling.

I often think of project managers when I think about schedulers. Project management is also a quasi profession. I meet project managers all the time. Their backgrounds vary considerably. In some cases “project manager” seems more like a job title than anything else. A person can get promoted tot.  project manager. Not something you would say about the legal profession. “Yes, you have done such a great job as a paralegal that we are promoting you to lawyer!”

The Project Management Institute is (in its own words) “the gold standard of project management certification. PMI is quite adamant that project management is a profession. But for many years PMI has had a curious problem: fewer members than certified Project Management Professionals (PMPs). I noticed this back in the late 1990s, and the rift just keeps getting bigger and bigger. As of 2016 (PMI has not released data for 2017 yet) here are the numbers:

• 740,000 PMPs
• 470,000 members

PMI requires continuing education in order to maintain certification. And we can assume that some PMPs have retired or died during the many years that certification has been available, but I doubt that explains the difference. And besides, not all members are PMPs. The reality is that thousands of people are leaving PMI after obtaining their certification. Your boss tells you to get certified. But once you are certified that is probably the end of the discussion.

Moreover, PMI does not make a college education a prerequisite for certification. But similar to my beliefs, PMI treats a university degree towards experience. Someone with a degree needs a minimum of three years of project management experience in order to sit for the exam, while a person with no degree needs five years. A four-year degree counts as two years of project management experience. I think that is fair. Not everything one learns in college is directly related to project management regardless of the major.

Gold standard or not, PMI does not have the ability to restrict who can be a project manager. Once again, it is the employer who decides what constitutes the prerequisites for project management. But project managers have the advantage of many peers. You are not alone in the organization. A large company could have dozens of project managers. Some of them are probably PMPs.

Several years ago, PMI began offering a certification for scheduling: Scheduling Professional (PMI-SP). This certification does not require PMP certification, and the prerequisites for relevant experience are different: 5,000 hours without a 4-year degree and 3,500 hours with a degree. So a university diploma basically counts as slightly less than one year of work experience. But for someone who only schedules projects part-time, it could take well over a a year to obtain the additional 1,500 hours of experience eliminated by a 4-year degree.

At the same time, however, we must recognize that someone cannot become a proficient scheduler without mastering a scheduling software program. It may be the most important criteria. A 4-year degree and lots of field experience are not good enough to get a job as a scheduler. Computer skills are a necessity, and it is certainly true that the scheduling software programs are complex. Learning the software is an essential part of the training required to be a scheduler.

My father was a civil engineer who started his own construction company in the 1950s. He learned nothing about how to be a contractor in college and he frankly never gave it much thought. By happenstance he started working for a small general contractor and then met two gentlemen who believed he could run his own firm. He figured out his own way of estimating projects based on his dissatisfaction with how he had first been taught to estimate.

The irony is that my dad expected me to become a civil engineer when clearly my future lay with running a construction company. My father did work for Black & Veatch for a few years prior to his long career in contracting but I had no illusions about designing anything. I switched my major to Construction Science (yes, that is where my company’s name comes from) after my freshman year on the advice of older fraternity brothers who were in the Construction Science program.

Kudos to the universities that realized years ago they should be teaching students how to run their own construction companies! Construction Science (Construction Management, et al) is a very common major today. But in my day some construction companies were still more fixated on a traditional engineering degree for probably the same reason as my dad: tradition.

So unlike my father, I learned estimating in college. Not to his standards, of course!

Keep in mind, when my dad started his construction company a license was not required in many states. Any guy or gal with a pickup truck and some tools could call themselves a contractor. The customer decided who was qualified. And on public works in particular the ability to get bonded was a considerable hurdle. An insurance agent could decide if you were indeed worthy based on your assets. Every financial decision my father made was in consideration of how it might affect his bonding capacity.

Getting back to scheduling, I spent perhaps six weeks during my last semester in college learning about CPM scheduling and building my own schedule. That experience alone obviously did not give me a huge advantage over my coworkers at my first consulting gig who never studied scheduling at all. But it helped me to get up to speed a lot faster. My boss also liked the fact that I was losing my hair. He thought that looking older than my years would command more respect from clients. Thanks, I guess.

I studied Critical Path Method scheduling in college – not a typical subject in the 1970s. The personal computer was just being introduced and no software existed that could calculate a CPM schedule on such a device. Primavera Systems did not release its flagship program, Primavera Project Planner or “P3”, until 1983. How would someone even practice CPM scheduling without a computer? My college professor had such a program that he ran on the university mainframe.

Looking back, I realize why CPM scheduling was a senior level class in college. Our professors wanted us to first study not just estimating but also surveying, concrete and masonry design, steel design, drafting, soils analysis – the entire scope of a project. You cannot build a proper schedule without understanding the project scope. It all ties together.

After college, I latched on with a consulting firm that owned its own scheduling software, which they ran on a “mini-frame” computer. Think of something the size of a soda vending machine and you have the right mental picture. But it was not exactly user-friendly: input was via a keyboard with no monitor. Make a mistake and the duration of a task might contain part of the activity description. A duration of “s” was certainly possible. I had to check each line in the computer printout very carefully.

The consulting firm that hired me in 1983 had already been scheduling projects since the 1960s, and two of the original partners were still involved in the day-to-day operations of the firm. I was in fact surrounded by schedulers. I accompanied my boss to jobsite visits to learn the proper procedures for updating a CPM schedule. I never touched any software for my first four years – for the simple reason that data entry was cumbersome. My hourly rate made me too valuable.

Nevertheless, I certainly understood what this proprietary software required from me. Most importantly, I fully understood how the forward and backward passes work based on my studies in college. All scheduling software programs use these algorithms to calculate the longest path of activities and the float values. When the firm purchased Primavera Project Planner in 1987 I quickly learned the features of that program – a much easier task after four years of practice with a simpler program.

Scheduling has always been a profession for me but clearly I had advantages. I studied CPM scheduling in college (formal education) and improved my skills at work (training) as a full-time scheduler surrounded by schedulers. In addition, I had access to several scheduling software programs which allowed me to practice CPM scheduling. For me, scheduling is a profession because I made it a profession.

I meet too many “schedulers” today that are being rushed by their employers to possess knowledge and skills that are simply not there yet. If you skip the formal education then more training and experience will be required. PMI gets it, and so do I. When I started my own consulting firm in 2010 I decided that training would be a major focus. And later this year I will be taking this a step further. Stay tuned!