Important Question And Answer: civil - Civil - Construction Planning

1.  What is planning?

Planning aims at formulation of a time based plan of action for coordinating various activities and resources to achieve specified objectives. Planning is the process of developing the project plan. The plan outlines how the project is to be directed to achieve the assigned goals. It specifies a predetermined and committed future course of action, based on discussions and decisions made on the current knowledge and estimation of future trends.

2. What is construction planning?

The construction planning process is stimulated through a study of project documents. These documents include but are not limited to the available technical and commercial studies and investigations, designs and drawings, estimation of quantities, construction method statements, project planning data, contract documents, site conditions, market survey, local resources, project environment, and the client's organization. The planning process takes in to account, the strengths, and weakness of the organizations.

3. What are the objectives of planning?

Proper design of each element of the project

Proper selection of equipment and machinery in big projects, the use of large capacity plants are found economical

Procurement of materials well in advance

Proper arrangement of repair of equipment and machinery Employment of trained and experienced staff on the project To provide incentive for good workers

To arrange constant flow of funds for the completion of project

To provide proper safety measures and ventilation, proper arrangement of light and water.

4. What are the types of project plans?

Planning the entire project from its inception to completion requires a vast coverage, varied skills and different types of plans. The nature of plans encountered in a typical construction project are indicated below

Types of project plans

Development stage                    nature of plan

Inception stage                         project feasibility plan

Engineering stage                       project preliminary plan

Implementation stage                 project construction plan

5. Define work tasks?

Work tasks represent the necessary frame work to permit scheduling of construction activities, along with estimating the resources required by the individual work tasks and a necessary precedence or required sequence among the tasks. The terms work tasks or activities are often used interchangeably in construction plans to refer to specific defined items of work.

6. What are the steps involved in planning?

a.     Defining the scope of work to be performed

b. Preparing the logic or network diagram to establish a relationship among activities and integrating these diagrams to develop the network model

c.  Analyzing the project network or models to determine project duration, and identifying critical and non-critical activities

d.  Exploring trade-off between time to cost to arrive at optimal time and costs for completing the project.

e.  Establishing standards for planning and controlling men, materials, equipment, costs and income of each work package

f.  Forecasting input resources, production costs and the value of the work done

g. Forecasting the project budget allocations for achieving targets assigned to each organizational unit

h. Designing a control system for the organization

i. Developing the resources, time and cost control methodology

7. What is the purpose of coding?

a. To identify the data connected with each work package, as work packages from the database for

managing various project functions.

b. To aid in the organization of data from the very detailed to the very broad levels

c.  To enable the processing, sorting, and extraction of information required at various levels of management and functional units.

d. To computerize the data processing system

8. How many categories available in codification?

In construction projects, the codes used can be broadly divided in to two categories i.e. project

interfacing codes or simply referred as project codes and department specialized codes.

Project interface codes:

These are the common codes used for developing an inter department database. Ex: a project code

for the foundation of a building.

Departmental specified codes:

These codes are developed by the departmental heads for their use. Ex: to indicate the location

of materials in site ware houses

9. Define the types of labeling approach?

a. alphabet codes

b. numerical codes

c. alphanumeric codes

Alphabet codes:

Alphabet letters A to Z, single or combined, can be used to represent a code. An alphabet in a

single character space can represent 26 variations as compared to numerals 0 to 9, which can depict maximum of 10 variations

Numerical codes:

It is the most important form of coding in numerical codes, each character can be represented by a numerical varying from 0 to 9

Alpha numerical codes:

It is the combination of alphabets and numerals to develop a each code.

10. Defining precedence relationship among activities?

Precedence relations between activities signify that the activities must take place in a particular sequence. Numerous natural sequences exist for construction activities due to requirements for structural integrity, regulations and other technical requirements.

11.Define the following terms?

i.activity

ii.event

Activity: A project can be broken down in to various operations and process necessary for its completion. Each of these operations and processes, which consume time and possibly resources, is called activity. The activities are represented by arrows.

Event: It is the state between the completion of a preceding activity and the beginning of the succeeding one. It has no duration an event is shown by a circle or ellipse

12.Define activity direct cost?

This is the cost that can be traced in full with the execution of a specific activity. It consists of  costs of direct labour, direct equipment and other direct costs. For example: in the activity of roof concreting, the following direct costs would be involved.

Types of costs         item of costs

Direct materials       cost of concrete and steel

Direct labour  cost of labour employed

13. Define activity indirect cost?

This is the cost that incurred while performing an activity, but cannot be traced directly to its execution. In other words, all costs other than the direct ones fall in this category. These represent the apportioned share of supervision; general and administration costs are commonly refer to as overheads.