We don’t know what we don’t know! What Planning Engineer Should Know?

As a Planning Engineer, Manager, or even a newbie to the Planning field; there are 3 stages that everyone will pass in his/her career. It is normal to pass through the 3 stages; but what is not normal is to stuck to stage 3 where you will find yourself after a while way behind your colleagues and your competition in the market is very low. Following are the 3 Stages to take care in which stage you are currently in:

Stage 1 You Know what you Know:

At this stage you practice and improve the skills you have already. For example, in the planning field you start learning the Primavera tool and know how to perform planning tasks using your method and you repeat this several times until you are good at it. This is good but not good enough because if you don’t move to Stage 2 you will defiantly stuck in stage 3 as i will explain below.

Stage 2 You Know what you don’t Know:
By keep investigating and searching what is new in the planning field; you will recognize that there are some new planning tools and techniques that you do not know. Therefore, you may consider to improve yourself and move forward to stage 1 (know what you know) and keep learning the new planning tools and techniques or you just know it is exists and admit that you do not know these things. The problem when you decide not to know what you know it is exists is after while you will stop looking at stage 2 and you will move forward to stage 3 below.Stage 3 You don’t Know what you don’t know:
If you decide in stage 2 to pass too many skills without knowing them, you will reach a stage that you will lose your interest to know what is going on in the planning field. At this stage it is really dangerous to your existing and future career. After sometime you will become an old fashion, very slow, and your productivity will not satisfy many companies. Even more, you might not be able to find the suitable job with a fair salary because you don’t know their requirements.

Recently -As a Planning Manager- i was involved in several planning engineers interviews and i was really shocked from engineers who claimed that they are professional and they do not know essential skills in the planning field. To help you evaluating yourself; i will list down the main skills required to be a professional planning engineer.

A: Evaluation Criteria:

If you know these skills and you know how to implement in the planning field; you are excellent (stage 1).
If you know these skills but you do not know how to implement in the planning field; you are not qualified and need to work on yourself to learn as soon as possible (stage 2).
If you never hear about these skills, you are in dangerous, you are typically in (stage 3).

B: Essential Skills for Planning Engineers:
I will group the below skills in groups (A, B, C, and D) and i will tell you why at the end of this article.

Can read project data and know whom to ask to get missing information (A)
Can create cost loading excel sheet to distribute the BOQ items to activities (A)
Understand the excel tables. this is different than the normal table; this can be done by selecting any range of data in excel and click on Ctrl+T (A)
Can create a simple Macro in excel to automate the repetitive tasks (A)
Can create activities list from BOQ and project drawings (A)
Understand the productivity rates and able to create excel resource loading (A)
Able to develop WBS in a professional way. By work standard division of work, (A)
Calculate in Excel the Cost and hours for each activity. (A)
Can import the activities along with cost and resources from excel to p6 (A)
Can develop shop drawings and materials logs in excel and import to p6 (A)
Can use global change in p6 to make bulk actions in p6 (A)
Can perform resource leveling in p6 – not the standard option but manually- (A)
Can export the schedule date from p6 and create separate reports in excel showing the required quantities for each activity over time – weekly or monthly – (A)
Can create detailed dashboard in excel to show the progress based on EVM, working hours, productivity, and other KPI’s. (A)
Know the differences and able to develop both revised and recovery schedules (A)
Know the concept of claims and EOT (B)
Know how to find the claim events from project different documents such as RFI, SWI, IR, comments …etc (B)
Know how to collect and record supporting documents for any claim (B)
Know how to analysis the events before submitting as a claim and how to involve project team in this exercise (B)
Know how to build a strong narrative report from the events and prepare professional EOT report (B)
Know how to build a strong case to the claim (B)
Know how to defend your claim case in front of the client (B)
Understand the different methods of claims analysis techniques (B)
Understand the main FDIC clauses and construction contracts (B)
Understand the concept of Excel Database and how to store data (C)
Know the differences between storing data in good or messy way (C)
Why we should store data in columns not rows (C)
How to store your data in database format and create links between tables in excel to produce same data in many ways (C)
Understand the Pivot Tables and create interactive reports in Excel (C)
Convert P6 schedule data to excel reports using pivot tables (C)
Create dynamic reports in excel where you change a single value such as data date; all report data will be changed accordingly (C)
Know how to deal with Microsoft Power Bi software (D)
Know how to link Power Bi with Excel (D)
Know how to link Power Bi with any P6 schedule (D)
Know how to convert any P6 schedule to an interactive online report (D)
Create advanced Interactive / Dynamic Reports using Power BI and share it with project team via a link where any team member should not have any special programe to open and navigate though the data (D)
Show actual spent hours VS Planned spent hours using power bi per building, floor, area, activity …etc (D)
Develop materials and shop drawings logs where you can select building, area, floor …etc and all relevant engineering works will be filtered accordingly using power bi (D)
Show planned VS actual Cost, Resources per floor, Area, building, any data range…etc using power bi (D)
Develop look ahead schedule that automatically show the 4 weeks activities bases on today date and share online link with the team using power bi (D)
Create Cost Control module to show actual VS budget costs per activity, building, area, zone …etc. (D)
Able to create Enterprise report to show all the company projects performance and can filter by project, Area, project manager, or any other criteria (D)

It is never too late to learn!

I hope i gave you an idea about the potential skills you might consider learning. You are free to learn these skills from any source; however if you decided to learn from Planning Engineer website through my courses, following are the relevant courses per category as mentioned above.

Relevant Course for group A skills

Relevant Course for group B skills

Relevant Course for group C skills

Special Package for groups A, B, and C skills

Relevant Course for group D skills