Construction projects are notoriously hard to deliver on time. Plagued by uncertainty, even rain can impact the pace and outcome of a project, let alone more complex sources of uncertainty (e.g., supply shortages, COVID-19). The unique combination of factors that constitutes the nature of a project further reinforces the challenge. No wonder that construction projects run over budget by billions of dollars and slip several years from their delivery date, impacting the daily life of you and me.
All a project needs to shield its delivery from such rainy days is an umbrella.
Intuition advocates for shielding the critical path – a rather sensible approach given that this is the sequence of activities from beginning to end without any spare time between them. After all, any delay on the critical path is bound to hit the project end date. Despite this method being an industry standard for about half a century, major overruns and delays remain the norm.
At Nodes & Links we are obsessed with developing methods that leverage modern computing and AI to shield your project against uncertainty. With this new capability, everyone in your team will be able to mitigate delays up to 100%, getting your project back to plan.
We use a combination of Machine Learning and Network Science to forecast when your project will finish, by just looking at your project’s unique data. But that’s not all. We use advanced analytics to pinpoint activities for mitigation. Activities that upon acceleration of their execution will bring the project schedule back on track. All this insight comes with full transparency, giving you the ability to ask the AI why certain results look the way they do, along with testing your own scenarios. All this without any complex data integrations – simply upload your schedule uploads and you get the recommendations in seconds, irrespective of your project’s size.
Project team – meet your new umbrella for the project’s rainy days.
We have tested our model in the Nodes & Links sandbox and compared it with the next best thing, mitigation based on Critical Path. The results below are for a few hundreds of schedules, comprising 35 projects, each represented by a symbol.
On average, Nodes & Links can mitigate 20% more of project delay compared to the Critical Path method, with our mitigation often driving an improvement of 100%. This means that in these cases, any delay observed could be mitigated in its entirety, with the project being back entirely on plan.
At the same time, not everything can be salvaged – some projects are just beyond repair (see symbols on the bottom, far right). Timing the uncovering and deployment of these mitigations is important in order to make sure your project has not gone beyond the point of no return.
The best project teams understand and proactively manage their plan.
Nodes & Links is built for every member of your team to track, analyse and prioritise work to make great decisions.
