Quality of Baseline Schedules: Lessons from Higher Education Capital Facility Projects

The keys to capital facility project success are developing a sound project plan or schedule and then carrying out the project according to the plan. The construction industry, however, has major difficulties accomplishing schedule goals, and construction professionals struggle to develop reasonable baseline schedules. The objective of this paper is, by applying the industry-recognized schedule quality metrics to baseline schedules used for higher-education capital facility projects at the University of Texas at Austin, to understand the current quality of baseline schedule, identify problems, and provide recommendations for future higher-education capital facility projects. The evaluation results show that among 49 collected industry-recognized metrics, all the projects passed 27 metrics, with one project failing to pass all of the remaining 22 of the 49 metrics. The industry should pay particular attention to the following commonly occurring issues when developing a baseline schedule: (1) dividing up activities that exceed 30 working days; (2) creating or managing a schedule containing multiple lags; (3) initially using unique task names; (4) assigning at least one predecessor and successor to an activity or a milestone; and (5) developing a schedule mainly through a Finish to Start relationship.