On most small and mid-sized sites, the construction programme is a spreadsheet with cells coloured in by week. It is easy to produce. Anyone can read it.
It also has one fatal weakness. When a task runs three days late, nobody can say which downstream tasks slip with it. Nor can anyone say how far the handover date has moved.
So, what is MS Project? In one line, it is the tool that answers precisely that question.
This article is written for site engineers, technical staff and anyone new to project management. You do not need to have used scheduling software before.
Spreadsheet scheduling versus MS Project
Microsoft Project is Microsoft's project management software. It is used to plan work, allocate resources and track both progress and cost. In construction it is used mainly to build and control the construction programme.
The core difference from a spreadsheet is not the interface. It is that MS Project understands the relationships between tasks.
| Spreadsheet | MS Project | |
|---|---|---|
| Presentation | Cells coloured by day, drawn by hand | A Gantt chart generated from the data |
| Task relationships | None; the planner has to remember them | Declared explicitly: B starts when A finishes, or overlaps, or lags by so many days |
| When a task slips | Re-colour everything downstream by hand | Recalculates the dates of every dependent task |
| Critical path | No way to tell which tasks drive the handover | Identified automatically and shown in red |
| Resources | Loose notes | Labour, plant and materials assigned per task, with overload flagged |
| Actuals | Add an "actual" column and compare by eye | Save a baseline, enter percent complete, compare automatically |
| Suits | Very small jobs, under 30 tasks, little change | Any job with dependencies between tasks and change during construction |
A spreadsheet is not wrong. It simply stops at drawing a programme. MS Project calculates one. That calculation is what lets you find out in advance, rather than afterwards, that the job will be late.
Three ideas you have to grasp
People learning MS Project tend to start with the buttons and skip the three ideas below. The result is a programme that looks convincing but cannot be used to run a job.
WBS — the work breakdown structure. This is how the project is split into progressively smaller parts. The building splits into packages: substructure, frame, finishes, services. Each package splits into tasks: piling, excavation, foundation concrete. The lowest level must be something you can hand to one gang and sign off. In construction the WBS should follow the cost estimate structure, so that the programme can later be tied to money.
The critical path. This is the longest chain of consecutive tasks from start to finish. If any task on that chain slips a day, the whole job slips a day. Tasks off the critical path carry float. They can slip within their float without moving the handover date. Knowing the critical path tells you where to put your people and plant. MS Project works it out automatically, provided the relationships are declared correctly.
Resources. Labour, plant and materials. Assign resources to tasks and the software will show you the days on which one gang is booked onto two jobs at once. A programme with no resources is a paper programme. It quietly assumes you have unlimited people and machines.
This is the single most important idea in scheduling. The figure below shows why.
Answering what is MS Project at the level of buttons takes a few sessions. Thinking in terms of the critical path stays with you for a career.
A small job in seven steps
Take a four-storey townhouse with a concrete frame. The sequence below is also the one taught over six sessions on the Institute's MS Project programme.
Step 1 — Set up the working calendar. Enter the start date, the time unit and the working calendar. Six-day week or seven. Which days are public holidays. Get the calendar wrong and every date after it is wrong. Beginners rush this step.
Step 2 — Build the WBS. Enter the task list in hierarchy. Substructure: setting out, piling, excavation, blinding, foundations, ground beams, backfill. Frame: columns, beams and slabs floor by floor, external walls. Finishes: plaster, tiling, paint, doors. Services: conduit, wiring, fixtures. For a townhouse, somewhere between 40 and 80 tasks is about right.
Step 3 — Estimate durations. For each task, estimate the days from the quantity and the gang's output. Say a six-man rebar gang fixes two tonnes a day. This is where the programme meets the estimate. Quantities come from the measurement, outputs from the norms or from experience. Our article on quantity take-off covers where those quantities come from.
Step 4 — Declare the relationships. Which task must finish before which. Which tasks can overlap. Which need a technical wait, such as curing before formwork strikes. Declare them all and the critical path comes out right. Missing relationships is the most common error of all.
Step 5 — Assign and level resources. Assign gangs and plant to each task. Read the resource histogram to find the overloaded days. Fix them by moving non-critical tasks, adding people, or accepting a longer duration. On a townhouse the bottleneck is usually one masonry gang doing both blockwork and plaster.
Step 6 — Check the critical path and save a baseline. See whether the critical chain makes sense; it usually runs through the frame, floor by floor. If the finish date misses the contract, shorten it. Shorten it by overlapping more, or by adding resources to a task on the critical path. Adding people to a task off the critical path saves no days at all. Then save the baseline.
Step 7 — Update with actuals. Each week, enter the real start dates and percent complete for tasks in progress. The software recalculates the finish date and points to whatever is dragging the job. The report is then no longer a vague "we are behind". It becomes "four days behind because task X on the critical path slipped".
These seven steps are a loop. When something changes, go back from step 7 to steps 4 and 5. A programme built once and filed away is just a tender document.
Seven common mistakes
Typing start and finish dates by hand. This is the number one error for people coming from spreadsheets. Typed dates create hard constraints, and the software can no longer recalculate. Enter durations and relationships instead, and let it work out the dates.
Missing the technical relationships. Forgetting curing time. Forgetting that finishes wait on concealed services. Forgetting that an upper floor waits on the one below. The critical path then comes out shorter than reality, and the programme is absurdly optimistic.
Everything critical, or nothing critical. Both are signs of a faulty declaration. Usually too many hard constraints, or too few relationships.
No resources assigned. The programme looks beautiful on screen. On site, one rebar gang is expected to work three floors at once.
No baseline saved. You update, then realise there is nothing left to compare against. You report a slip against a plan that no longer exists.
Naming tasks after gangs. "Masonry gang, second floor" is not a task. "Blockwork to second floor" is. Name tasks after the product and they can be inspected and paid for.
Breaking the work down too far. A 500-task programme for a townhouse will not be updated past the second week. The level of detail has to match what site can realistically report.
MS Project or Primavera
Someone asks this in nearly every first session. The short answer: most engineers in Vietnam should learn MS Project first. Primavera is for when the work genuinely demands it.
| MS Project | Primavera P6 | |
|---|---|---|
| Suits | Single to medium projects; engineers, site managers, technical departments | Large projects, many running at once, many parties; a main contractor's planning department |
| Difficulty | Learnable in a short course, familiar Office-style interface | Markedly harder; requires understanding enterprise-level data structures |
| In Vietnam | Common with domestic contractors on ordinary building and industrial work | Often demanded on foreign-funded, oil and gas, and major infrastructure projects |
| Cost | Lower | Considerably higher |
The core ideas are the same in both. WBS, relationships, critical path, resources, baseline: identical concepts. Learning MS Project first means learning those ideas at the lowest cost. If a project later demands Primavera, most of what you add is data organisation, not thinking.
There is another direction to go. A programme can be linked to a BIM model to produce a 4D simulation. Viewers then watch the building rise over time instead of reading Gantt bars. Our articles on what Navisworks is used for and what Synchro 4D is cover the two tools that do this.
At the Institute, the lecturer who leads the MS Project course is the author of the specialist text on the software, published by the Construction Publishing House.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to learn MS Project?
Basic operation: one six-session course. Producing a programme good enough to run a job: add one project taken start to finish, with someone reviewing it. The hard part is not the software. It is estimating durations and declaring relationships correctly.
Can MS Project handle estimating and payment?
You can attach costs to tasks and follow cash flow against the programme. But it does not replace estimating software. Common practice is to keep the estimate and the programme separate, and tie them together through a shared WBS.
Do site engineers need it, or only the planning office?
Whoever enters the weekly actuals should be a site engineer, because they know how far each task has got. At minimum, a site engineer should be able to read the programme and know whether their own tasks are on the critical path.
Is an MS Project programme acceptable in a tender?
Yes, and it is the norm. Most domestic tenders are submitted with a Gantt chart printed from MS Project. Foreign-funded projects may specify Primavera files, so read the tender requirements carefully.
Is there a free alternative?
Several open-source tools and web services produce Gantt charts with a critical path. They are adequate for small jobs. But when files have to be exchanged with clients and partners, the MS Project format is still the default in Vietnam.
Does the critical path change during construction?
Yes, and that is why updates matter. A non-critical task that slips beyond its float becomes critical itself. The new critical path may run through an entirely different chain of work.