Bryan,

Grey hair or just plain losing it. Mine’s retained its colour, just less of it these days!!!

Okie....let me share a joke with u all....

Part-1

One day a man was having a conversation with God when his whole life flashed before his eyes as a series of footsteps on the sands of time. He saw that there were two pairs of footprints, but during the most difficult periods of his life there were only one set of footprints. He asked God "You said you will be with me throughout this journey, but why have you deserted me during the most critical times of my life??" to which God answered "Son, I did not desert you, I was always with you...you see only one set of footprints because during those difficult times in your life, I was carrying you in my hands"



Part-2

Another day I was having a similar conversation with my Project Manager (PM) when my whole project flashed before my eyes as a series of footsteps on the sands of time. I saw that there were two pairs of footprints, but during the most difficult times in the project there were only one set of footprints. I asked my PM "You said you will be with me throughout the project, but why have you deserted me during the most critical times of the project??" to which the PM answered "Son, I did not desert you, I was always with you...you see only one set of footprints because during those difficult times, I was sitting on your head!!"

I often think that planning is a bit like growing up
At 16 you think you know it all
at 40 you realise you know nothing so try to learn more and keep quite and at 60 you realise you still know nothing and will never learn it all.
Planning is like that but in my opinion a job with a lot of delay is not neccessarily a quality job or one that will expose you to the good bits of management
That said without some experience you wont be able to see whats happening until its too late and you wont have the skill set to do the what ifs.
So I doubt that you will be a good delay analyst, the more jobs you see the more you will see a similar thread running through the bad ones, the easier it will be to define that thread and get on with finding out what happened, you will learn where to look.

I’ve only just joined, and I am confused.

What does a delay analyst do?

Tell you that you are in delay? - Thats a planners job

Present you with a series of what ifs as a way out? - Thats a planners job

Tell you how you got into the situation in the first case? - Thats a planners job

So what is an experienced delay analyst? - An experienced planner.

David,

More very true words, yes there is a lack of experienced planners out there - but there appears to be as big a lack at senior and very senior management level of any appreciation of the benefits of having a planner on site. Especially the smaller projects. Lets have one planner covering 5 small jobs - and through no fault of his/her own, time only allows him/her to have a minimum input. Job goes wrong, well what was the planner doing?????

A very old but relevant saying "Fail to plan, plan to fail" springs to mind.

Davids,

I have just spent 5 days over the last couple of months or so showing someone working for a contractor how to do a TIA and explaining the JCT extension of time / LD clauses. It was a live claim and I took him through the process.

Even after 5 days, a live example and plenty of discussion on the workings of the JCT contract, I could still easily spend another 2 or 3 days further explaining the contract provision and the finer points of TIA.

Thats 7 or 8 days (60 to 70 hours). Reduce that to a 2.5 hour lecture, say twice a week and that’s 12 plus weeks on one subject and one contract!!!!! Or to put it another way, about one whole college term. Don’t think a course would be short of information to pass on, just short of time.

Hi Andrew

I expected to see you at the NUF for our annual self-appreciation day!

I agree with what you say about higher education and planning and programming. Eee, when I were a lad…Ray Oxley was one of my lecturers at Sheffield Polytechnic and we had four hours a week (I think) for three years. Now I think, on most undergraduate courses, it is an optional module on predominantly management based courses (apologies to my colleagues in academia, you know I love you and am only jealous of your positions).

Again, I may be wrong but my recent and not so recent experience, is that most construction graduates are really construction orientated managers – I am not suggesting they are inferior, far from it, their ambition, application and stamina scares me (or am I just getting old). the trouble , after spending a spell as a planner with a contractor (and again who else provides on the job training these days) they want to progress to contracts management or project management. So there tends not to be the depth of experience or desire to study the subject further.

The main provider of delay and disruption courses is, of course, your friend and mine, Mr P. I do think this might be changing soon but I don’t think two-day course, although better than nothing, are the answer. The Kings College MSc degree Construction Law & Dispute Resolution is obviously the premier qualification for those who are interested in the legal side, I don’t know how much practical application of D & D analysis techniques there is on the programme.

Maybe what is needed (and I might suggest this) is say, a part-time study diploma. Courses though do have to pay their way and I am not sure if there is enough demand out there without licences to practice.

Regards

David

David

Sorry to have come into this one late but as you know, sometimes I am a bit derogatory about some of those who now are calling themselves expert planners and expert delay analysts but who have not planned a live job in anger in their lives. Whilst ‘expert’ is a subjective word, I believe that to be an ‘expert’ delay analyst you first have to be an ‘expert’ planner.

I strongly disagree with Nigel, if I am correct in what he is suggesting, when he equates Experience to Academic Learning. Whilst ‘academic learning’ may be no substitute for ‘on the job experience’ it is a short cut to advancing our knowledge. Society would not progress if we did not study and take on board what our predecessors have learnt or discovered – we can’t expect to discover everything about a subject for ourselves. ‘Academic learning’, in my opinion, is about finding out best practice and what other do and have done prior to us arriving naively in the scene and investigating and examining objectively techniques, procedures and so on.

Academic rigour, the methodology of research, does allow the development of techniques that that could not have been previously considered by practitioners. Bar charts, CPM, linked bar charts, AdePT and so on all came out of research studies to improve on what practitioners at the time were doing. Similarly, techniques such as Time Impact Analysis were only formalised as part of academic research. The next thing, maybe System Dynamics (see the work by Terry Williams) could be the next best thing but hardly likely to have been developed by we mere ‘grunts’ in the field.

Similarly I am not convinced by the ‘experience’ argument. It does of course, as others have intimated, depend on what and how good that experience has been. If all projects a planner has been involved with have exceeded the programme times and all delay claims made have been thwarted, well maybe that level of experience does not count for much.

Anyway, going back to David’s original question I did some research a few years back about how those who dealt in claims acquired their knowledge. The sources of knowledge were:
Experience/self taught
Text books/journals/papers
Short course/seminar
Undergraduate course
Postgraduate course
Other practitioners
Any other
The overwhelming indication was that most practitioners gain their knowledge through experience or are self-taught, 88% of respondents indicated this as their primary or secondary source of knowledge. My view at that time was that this ought to be a cause for concern, especially to centres of higher education as only 8% of respondent gained their knowledge from undergraduate or postgraduate courses even though 75% of respondents were holders of first or higher degrees. I am currently helping to update this research and I hope, but do not expect, the situation to have changed.

To put this into some sort of context, how would you feel if the Expert in a medical negligence case admitted he had picked his knowledge up as he went along, or conversely, that he had read a few books and as this seemed to be a growth area thought he would have a go.

Now for a blatant plug… a friend of mine who has studied formally and who is an ace practitioner has written a book and I recommend it as an accessible read into a sometimes complex subject. About Time: Delay Analysis in Construction, by Stephen Lowsley & Christopher Linnet, RICS Books (2005).

If I have offended anyone please accept my apologies – I did not intend to.

Regards

David

Hi Andrew,

You are totally correct; when I was a site agent, I made it my business to be able to any work that I was in charge of, driving 631s, D9s,etc, to cutting out steel in a pipe jack hole through. The men that work for you appreciate it and you are the ultimate "expert witness" when you become mixed up in disputes. Also you understand the loss of production that very long hours inflict on workmen.

Having been trained as a land surveyor, became an engineer by osmosis and being a Q.S. by inclination wasn’t bad training either.

As you say, H&S and the unions have precluded our sort of training.

Andrew
When I started my accommodation allowance was more than my salary
At the weekends I used to drive a dumptruck and made more for that than the other 5 days put together.

My experience was similar. It was then cheaper to employ a Junior Engineer as a chainman rather than pay the going rate for a labourer. As you say the experience was invaluable. Who can blame anyone who has served the "apprenticeship" of working unpaid overtime and weekends for recouping some of the early days investment.
I also recall hat all engineers used to do a two week rolling programme but they were never called "Planners".

Not an easy one
Probably go for planner 1 as he has seen a job from start to finish
Tough one though

I think there’s got to be a mix of experience and knowledge.

Knowing just the mechanics of delay analysis isn’t enough as that will only give you a theoretical result when the correct one usually entails a mix of the theoretical tempered with common sense and experience.

Experience. Academic learning - for want of a better phrase - is all well and good but the actual experience of ’doing it’ is usually far better.

We have all come across those highly qualified people that are no doubt excellent in theoretical situations but put them into a practical area and they lose out to the old hands that can barely read and write but have been there, seen it and not only got the tee shirt but built the factory that makes them!

Not quite in the same field, but I once knew a highly qualified computer engineer that could design from computer chips up to finished computers. But when wiring a plug, didn’t have a clue which colour went where.

Subjective opinion, aren’t they all, but from my (fairly well) qualified and, years of, experience that is the situation as I see it. Youngsters with theoretical knowledge will learn quicker and have a better understanding eventually but it does take experience.

Cheers

Nige