As part of our “Have You Tried It” blog series, we are highlighting one of our recently released features within our Autodesk Construction Cloud portfolio that can make a big impact on your projects. Whether you’ve started using them or not, all the features highlighted in this series have the same things in common – they will improve your user experience and enhance productivity for your team.
This month, we’re highlighting the new Commitments and Metrics capabilities available within the work planning tool in Autodesk Build.
What is Schedule and Workplan in Autodesk Build?
If you are unfamiliar with the Schedule tool, here is a quick overview. Autodesk Build’s Schedule tool enables teams to gain real-time visibility into project schedules by centralizing schedules in the cloud, allowing teams to collaborate, connect, and interface with the most up-to-date information.
The Schedule tool allows importing schedules from Primavera® P6 (.xer and .xml), Microsoft® Project (.mpp, .xml) and Asta® Powerproject (.pp). The Schedule tool helps digitize and automate version comparison workflows by allowing users to visually stack up to 5 different versions of the schedule to quickly understand the trends and changes affecting each activity.
Workplan in Schedule empowers teams to build and use digital work plans to deliver projects on time and within budget. Project teams can collaboratively build detailed work plans and manage handoffs and roadblocks—all while viewing progress in the context of the long-term schedule.
The planning capabilities are highly flexible, allowing teams to create both independent or connected work plans – in the cloud – so teams can finally say goodbye to creating and managing plans in silos.
What is Commitments and Metrics in Workplan?
Teams need to be able to set a finalized plan, designate ownership of tasks, and track execution, while also gleaning insights that help to make projects more efficient. This new release makes it easy for trades to signify ownership of what they are responsible for, and for schedule managers to measure the reliability of their planning process, and measure how much of the “promised plan” was executed on time.
To execute efficient short-term planning, especially for teams using Lean construction or LPS system, it is important to be able to understand how their planning process has been done throughout the project, and understand how task completion from different stakeholders is going.
Commitments – Often times things can change, but it is difficult to properly track and accurately document what is completed on time. A new “Commit” action allows assignees to commit to tasks they are responsible for, confirming ownership and locking the assignee and date fields. Committed task dates can only be edited by Managers through the Replanning, which requires the selection of a root cause and documents the change.
Task color changes depending on status, using simple color coding to designate complete, incomplete, and committed status.
Metrics – In a newly added Metrics tab, which is only visible to project admins and schedule managers. In this tab, data from committed tasks can be used to build various types of charts that track execution and planning efficiency.
- Task Status Breakdown – A Straightforward chart that shows task status breakdown
- Plan Percent Complete (PPC), which shows completion of committed tasks against total commitments to track execution and progress. Timeframe can be monthly or weekly PPC (70-80 percent is the industry expected level, most realistic). PPC mainly measures the reliability of the planning process, not the actual progress
- Root Cause Analysis chart for delayed and incomplete tasks. Shows root causes for replanning in a pie chart. See by company.
How does this benefit me?
Improve collaboration
Subs (Subcontractors): Crucial for detailed task execution and collaboration. Easy to get the information from Subs, and compile all the information together in an actionable place
Accountability/ownership
Using the Commitments flow ensures accountability, accurate information sharing, and risk management across projects.
Without it (current state), users can move and delete all the tasks on the plan without leaving any trace and cannot track what was done on time.
Understand the why for better and more efficient short-term planning
GCs (General Contractors): Essential for project success, focusing on cost control, timely delivery, and safety risk mitigation.
Easy to assess the performance of your short-term plans. Understand how the project is running on a day-to-day basis.
Identify areas that are not performing well and areas for improvement, and understand the “why” behind why things are not going to plan.
Lean construction
A main part of lean construction management and the last planner system.
How to Get Started
Embracing the new Commitments and Metrics capabilities in Autodesk Build empowers teams to plan smarter, collaborate more effectively, and drive accountability across every phase of a project. Whether you’re a general contractor or a subcontractor, adopting these features means saying goodbye to silos and hello to a more efficient, reliable way of working. Start exploring these enhancements today and see the difference they make in your project outcomes.
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