Introducing ICS-CONSULTING

What ICS-Consulting Is All About

ICS-Consulting provides guidance and assistance to its Owner, Contractor, Design Professional, Surety, and Construction Manager clients in development or improvement of their in-house Construction Project Time Management capabilities.

Setting up a Project Facilitation (Planning or Scheduling) Department for the first time requires special expertise because there is much more to organizational development than what is involved in merely producing and maintaining a Project Schedule. Our contributions include initial planning, staffing, standardizing procedures, training, software selection, corporate rollout, and long-term oversight.

Why ICS-Consulting Was Created

Unless one has had hands-on experience standing up a Construction PTM department from scratch, the challenges can be overwhelming. Merely knowing how to plan and schedule a project is hardly sufficient preparation for the challenges that loom ahead. Even the most seasoned Planners and Schedulers would struggle through the various stages of operational development and implementation. We created ICS-Consulting to fill this institutional void. On our staff of seasoned Construction PTM practitioners are several individuals who have founded or improved Construction PTM organizations for some of the largest companies on the continent.

Whom ICS-Consulting Is Intended to Serve

Our consulting services are intended to serve organizations involved in Program or Project Management on any medium-to-large North American construction project. Construction Project Time Management is all about monitoring and exploiting the usage of time on one or more construction projects. Our consulting clients tend to divide into two groups.

  • Constructors: Those who construct projects for a living. For these organizations, who the project goes, the company goes. Executives have a moral and legal responsibility to provide the Project Team with the tools, instruction, guidance, and assistance they require to effectively administer Construction PTM on their projects. Collectively, they need the capability to monitor all projects in a consolidated manner.
  • Owners: Owners and their contracted representatives (Construction Managers and Owners’ Representatives) have a vested interest in how projects under their auspices fare from day to day, weekly, monthly, and ultimately. A well-designed and skillfully administered Construction Project Time Management program can provide vital insights so that preventive and proactive actions can be taken to avert or mitigate troubles.

How ICS-Consulting Is Organized and Functions

ICS-Consulting is most often retained to address one or more of the following concerns:

  • Scheduling Specifications Writing: Scheduling Specifications are only effective if they are tailored to both the Project Scope as well as the Project Execution Strategy. The days of treating Scheduling Specs as boilerplate language, using copying and pasting, must be discontinued.
  • DAWN: ICS-Research has developed an alternative to the current method for handling the effects of Adverse Weather on weather-sensitive construction projects. Our methodology, called Disruptive Adverse Weather Neutralizer, is unique by disregarding excessive Adverse Weather altogether. The key feature of DAWN is a set of pre-defined Adverse Weather Variables and Tripwire Thresholds that are applied formulaically to real time weather conditions.
  • Project Performance Assessments: ICS-Consulting may be retained to determine why a given project is struggling to meet cost, quality, safety, or temporal goals. Often, the answers are revealed through a review of contemporaneous projects records, interviews with key Project Team members, and visiting the jobsite in person. Our findings are reported to our client’s point person, often the Director of Field Operations or Chief Operations Officer.
  • Project Surveillance: Admittedly performed far less frequently, ICS-Consulting has been retained from time to time to go under cover and figure out why project management reports don’t square with ultimate project achievement. When we are called in, Upper Management has serious doubts about the credibility of project reports. They fear that someone is cooking the books, so to speak. As a last resort, they may feel the need to send one of our consultants in incognito (e.g., hired on as a field scheduler), with a hidden agenda.
  • Construction PTM Stand-Up: As noted earlier, creating a Construction PTM operation involves a number of complicated and interrelated steps. We have deep experience in creating new CPTM operations, and can guide our clients through the maze of decisions, options, and alternatives.
  • Construction PTM Process Improvement: Few things in life are static; almost everything is in a constant state of change. This is especially true for advances in Construction PTM technologies, ideologies, and methodologies. Through ICS-Research, we have not only kept up with the latest improvements, we have invented many of them ourselves. It is prudent for any Construction PTM operation to revisit its processes and tools every decade or so. We can help.