Simplify Construction Blockade Reporting

Introduction

Hi, it's Will from Gather. In today's video, we're going to talk about blockade reporting.

A lot of people have been talking about blockades recently. We often overcomplicate it in my opinion. We worry about the intensity of doing the works in such a congested blockade environment. Hopefully today we can break it down and make it much, much easier to understand.

I've got a few slides, and then we're going to split this video into three parts: plan, record, and report. Let's get into it.

What is a blockade?

First, what is a blockade? What do we think it is? Most people associate this with rail projects, but it's common in other infrastructure projects, such as highways and utilities.

Most people probably think about this as a big seven day occupation of the railway over Christmas or Easter. But for me, it could be simpler than this. We can define it as what follows: a blockade is continuous occupation of an asset of more than one shift. We don't hand the asset back in between shifts, basically.

In railway terms, that can be just a long possession where we work multiple shifts over a weekend without handing that asset back.

Common challenges in a blockade

What is the common challenge? What are the things that we worry about? It must be planning shifts in detail, because we've got a limited time window. We want to make the most out of that window. We want to get maximum productivity and real time updates from site.

What's going on? Everyone wants to know. That's linked with the third challenge, which is keeping stakeholders informed in blockades.

A lot of people are interested. There's a lot of investment in making the blockade happen. It takes a lot of planning in advance. It takes almost a year in advance for some projects to get that access to the infrastructure.

Another challenge is the replanning during the shift, tracking, and hand back risk. Can we hand back on time? What is the risk to right time hand back? They are all very common challenges.

To answer those challenges, we're going to split this into three simple parts: planning, recording and reporting. That's as simple as it needs to be.

Planning in detail

Let's start with shift planner. I've already started here. I've got my five shifts here in the shift planner. You can see one starting at nine o'clock on the 23rd, which is a Friday night, then a follow up shift with a bit of an overlap here on the 24th. Again, we've got that hour overlap on each shift. We're seeing 10 shifts. Access point, same as the project's, Station Ainsdale.

We've got three different supervisors, some of them are doing two shifts out of the five. I want that rotation. You can see they all have possessions.

Let's get into it. We can see the shifts I've tagged them with a different team. Team one, team two, and team three. This is usually how you do that with our tagging function. I put in the labour already. We've got a team of six on each shift, bit of plant, materials and worklogs. Save the plant and materials. We will start digging into activities now.

I planned three different activities on each shift, split by location. I've got the different activities here: route works and installation of foundations. Then we input the planned start time and end time for each of those activities. You probably already have an hour by hour programme. You can input all that data in here. Really straightforward.

We've now done that for each shift, different time, different activities at different locations. The thing that most people get worried about is the access information. How do I fill a shift record when I'm still on track?

Recording access in a blockade

Let's open up all the different shifts we've planned. We'll go to access. Just edit what we've got in there. All the references are the same. I've already put in the references for the work sites, but let's just scroll across and have a look.

You can see here we've got the possession time of work site. We've got all the different shifts here. The first shift we need to capture that. We're taking possession of railway at 11 o'clock. We're starting at quarter past 12. Get to the worksite, get the C4 or the isolation.

Then we want to track our machines. We're only going to start work at 10 past midnight. We're then going to say we're going to do work until quarter to six. That's how it works out in this shift.

We're going to look at the rest of the shifts. You can see here, I've not put any possession time information in. I'm not putting any tracking. We're just taking over this handover period.

That second shift is six till four o'clock. We can see here we've got those handover periods, same with shift three and shift four. And only in shift five do we actually need to put in the off track C4 and all that process in reverse. You see that's quite easy to do.

Every shift matters

It's really easy for us to capture those individual shift records. The question I often get is: why do we need to do records? You will get better quality detail with all the different teams, different team members. All those five records are all very important in their own right.

Let's save the plan. We've got five shifts, labour, plant, materials, worklog and a tag of a team. We've planned those shifts in detail now. That will create five shifts for our team and shift reference. Join me in step two, where we look at how to record each of these.

Okay, we've got our planned shifts here. We've got the different teams tagged. Let's go back into our overall menu. We can see how that's changed. We'll look at the key insights now.

Real time insights

I'll open the key insight dashboard on a new tab. Go straight into the Gantt chart. We can zoom in and out. We can have a look around what this means. Here are all our activities. We can bring in the access information if you want to. These are all the bits we've got planned to do in the shift planner and the gaps in between shifts.

Personally, I like to look at this in more of a tabular view. Let's go to our project overview. Here are all the planned start times and activities. We'll drop in all these metrics as we fill in those records. This is all live.

I know people watching this will do hourly reports for stakeholders during these key blockades. Gather's key insight dashboard is there for whenever you need it, either in that tabular format or in the Gantt chart.

Do more with data

This data is really straightforward. You can use it in Power BI, which everyone seems to love. You could put it back into P6. You can do Google timeline. You might even want to use some excellent tools like Aphex. But ultimately, each of these activities needs to be on a shift record of some form.

Let's go back to our project screen. I'm going to go into shift records. I've already started filling this in. Most people do this on their mobile device, tablet, phone, whilst they're out on site. Freezing. But I'll do it on my laptop today.

Recording with precision

I want to go into this record that I've already started filling in. The two bits of information we really need to focus on for the purpose of this video are access and worklog.

Let's start with access information. For possessions, there are quite a few steps you can see here. We've pre populated all this information. Now we need to fill in the actuals.

The good thing about Gather is that you can put in the actual time you work on the day. You can change that if you want to. It's all anchored from that shift start time. You put it in manually. I'm going to match this for the purpose of this exercise.

Let's assume we do everything according to plan. We get to the work site on time. It takes another 15 minutes to get the isolation and tracking machines. That's on time as well. Well done. We're starting to progress.

What happens if it's different? What happens if it actually starts a bit later to get to the site? We have to explain why. Maybe the travel time was longer than expected. We're actually starting the work a lot later, 20 minutes later. It might be insignificant. It might be significant. We don't know. But understanding those differences is really important.

Then we'll go record the works. We come back to what I've started to fill in already. We've got three activities planned today. We have to fill in all the key times. Nice and red here. Why? I've already put in the quantities. What's missing?

I actually have to put in the actual start time. Why is that important? Those bars we talked about before, they need to be actualised. We'll just put in this shift the same. Now it's gone green. We'll do the very same for this one.

Just for ease, let's assume this all goes to plan. Two greens. Great stuff. First activity in CE 123, it's all in trough. The plan? 200 metres. What was it actually? What time? What was the reason for variance?

Consistent, robust data

We can record the start times. Let's say we started a little bit later. I'd say 1:50. Then we can actually put the end times in. What we encourage people to do is put events in. This takes the date and time. Now, as you can see, I'm filling that in a bit later on. We can add in all this information. Let's say at 1:30 and we can add in one. This can be whatever you want. We can add in the pictures. We can add in all the comments. It's all there. Then you put your name against it.

Ultimately, we need to say what time we finish. If we actually start a bit later, we're going to finish a bit later. I will make it a little bit later. I will actually say we're not going to complete everything.

Why are we not completing everything? Well, it's taking much longer to do due to ground conditions or whatever it needs to be. The key information is recording the quantities against the plan.

Record the start times. We can add in as many events as possible. That will all be in there on the shift record. Then we're going to go back. We're going to complete the works complete time. We're going to finish on time. There will be no reason for variance. It's as simple as that.

Let's go back and have a look at all of our records. We will also look at how that affects the programme.

Document variances

Before we go any further, let's have a look at what the second shift would look like. It's a little bit different to the first. I've already done the worklog element. Let's look at the access information. We've only got the works commenced and works complete. So we don't have to put in all this information. They're non compulsory.

I know you've previously been confused about how to fill a full shift record. What time do we start? What time do we finish? If it is different, we have to explain why. Even if it's one minute different, we have to still put that in, which I'll just do now.

We do actually have to add a delay category as well, whatever it needs to be in here. Maybe it's different paperwork to fill in. The reason can be as simple as that.

Don't worry about filling the whole shift record for works commenced and works complete. That is the only bit we need to do. Not all this in terms of possession, worksite and the hand back stuff.

Reporting planned versus actual

Okay, now we've done two shifts. Let's go back to our key insights again. I'll open these in new tabs. You can see here we've got the programme actualised with the yellow bars. We can see here the activity has taken a little bit longer and started a little bit later. So yes, it's not looking too good. But we've got plenty of the blockade left to go, about five shifts left.

We can look at this in a more tabular format. You've got all the planned activities, how we've actually completed, fully completed, and any lost time. We've lost 0.3 of an hour so far. Let's go straight to the report to see the details.

For each of those shifts, Fred's shift has a full report. So will Derek's. During the blockade, these reports are always available. They're always up to date. We can see progress as it happens.

That's halfway through the blockade. Let's go and finish the remaining records. I've submitted all those now. They're all done by the supervisor of each shift. We can go back into the key insights. We can look at the individual shift reports. All completed and good to go.

Your summary reports are also ready. You can run the labour report or a progress report if you want to get into detail. It's great for going back into tools like P6 or maybe your short term planning solution, things like Aphex I mentioned before. You can use all those reports to get that information back in.

Let's go back into the key insights again. I'll open it on a new tab. All these shifts are actualised now. I can dig into detail for each one. We've got the durations of each activity in minutes. We can see exactly where we're up to in the project overview in a more tabular format. Everything is up to date.

Now, all these times have actualised. We've got a total lost time. It's not too bad in terms of lost time there. All the activities have been complete. We can see what's happened. We can look at some other metrics.

Shift scores

Shift score is always one of interest. Two shifts that are efficient. Two had production issues. One had frustrated access. Imagine if there's a 30 or 50 shift blockade. You can see all that information in there.

Back to access again, we pull out that data and we can look at our access timeline. We've lost time here, mainly down to plant and equipment. Shift duration was as planned. Working time was a little bit less. That's the lost working time overall.

Ultimately, the project has all the information it needs to update your stakeholders whenever you need it. Gather gives you that real time information from site.

Conclusion

Blockade reporting is often made very complicated. But you can make it really simple by just collecting consistent, structured records from each team every single day.

Let us know how this works for you. Any comments or any feedback, let us know. Give Gather a try. Thank you.

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