In-House Construction Progress Monitoring System

All lump sum contractors should be contractually obligated to impose and implement a progress monitoring system. A good system need not be expensive and should not increase contract costs, no matter what a contractor may say. 

Notwithstanding whether the contractor implements its own system, it behooves owners to develop in-house systems for confirming contractors claims quickly and with reasonable accuracy. As already mentioned, the preparation and implementation of a progress monitoring system require the following elements  

A semi-detailed cost estimate prepared with the procedures and guidelines included in Chapter 19 could easily be dissected into a multitude of comprehensible construction activities that could be integrated, at the Project Manager s option, into a manageable number of discretely sized units. Every single activity could be assigned consistent relative values based on field hours 

The proposed estimating system has the capability of breaking down the work activities to the level of each instrument and each pipeline. This level of detail is not required in an in-house system and would defeat its main reason for existence, confirming contractors reports quickly and accurately. A system based on 100 to 200 activities, depending on project size, would provide a good level of accuracy and, once set up, could be easily implemented. The maximum value of each activity should be kept below 5% of the total. 

Once the work has been broken down in activities, relative values must be assigned to each of them in a uniform manner that can be related to simple physical units. The values could be assigned either as work units (W.U. s) related to field labor or as a fraction of the value for the entire work. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages and the Project Manager must have the flexibility and foresight to tailor the monitoring system to the project needs. 

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IN-HOUSE CONSTRUCTION PROGRESS MONITORING SYSTEM EXAMPLE... 

In-House Construction Progress Monitoring System Example... 

The construction activities are broken down to reflect the MPS and the appropriation estimate breakdown and "loaded" with the corresponding hours from the estimate. The resulting construction progress curve becomes the base for the in-house monitoring system discussed in Chapter 15. 

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