Many watched in awe as a team in China built a 15-story, prefabricated hotel in six days. According to a time-lapse video of the Ark Hotel in Changsha, the project was completed without the use of stationary construction cranes and without a single injury among workers on site. Prefabricated components were loaded on to trucks, brought to the site and assembled by a well-synchronized crew—demonstrating a high level of speed, efficiency and predictability during construction.

What the video doesn’t show, however, is the amount of time, resources and effort that went into the scheduling and planning of this project. How many months, or even years, did it take to design the building so it could be built in days? How long did they spend planning, and then scheduling, the well-orchestrated delivery of materials to the site? How was the process managed? How were decisions made? Who was involved? That’s the story that piques our interest.

As a builder who continuously seeks opportunities to provide the greatest possible value to customers, we have been looking closely at our own planning and scheduling practices.

What we have found is that while there is still a role for the traditional critical path method (CPM) as a high-level, strategic roadmap, there is a better way for detailed project planning to create a smooth, more reliable workflow, which in turn, maximizes productivity and minimizes waste.

For example, detailed CPM specifications, often required on large-scale projects, include thousands of interdependent activities based on a series of approximations or assumptions made by the project team. If we had developed a detailed CPM for our $320 million, 36-month hospital project in Castro Valley, CA, it would have included somewhere between four to five thousand activities that may or may not be relevant as the project progresses and conditions change.

Rather than creating a detailed CPM for the Castro Valley project, the contract schedule submitted to the owner included a total of 23 milestones carefully selected and planned in just the right amount of detail using CPM so that the project team and owner could be confident in the durations. The superintendents and construction manager then continued to expand the detail supporting each milestone as the project unfolded through ongoing conversations with subcontractor supervision. Once there was alignment that the strategic plan was ready, the project management team turned its attention to the next milestones and let our area superintendents, project engineers and trade foremen create a highly detailed work plan for production over the following three weeks. The result is an extremely efficient delivery of this hospital project, which, 17 months after breaking ground, is at least two months ahead of what everyone agrees was an already aggressive schedule.

What we have found, just as the builders of this hotel in China, is that investing in planning, including building virtually using building information modeling (BIM), pays off. We have also learned that we can deliver projects much faster if we get the right people planning at the right level of detail at the right time—all it requires is a change in the way we plan.