Preventing Schedule Slippage: Construction Project Controls with Primavera P6 Training Course (Online / Remote)
1Summary
Cost and time overruns are the norm rather than the exception on construction sites — a missed milestone here, an unmonitored critical activity there, and a project that looked fine on paper falls months behind. The Preventing Schedule Slippage: Construction Project Controls with Primavera P6 Training Course by Arab British Fellowship Training Academy tackles that gap directly, training professionals to build, protect and interrogate a construction schedule in Primavera P6 before problems become irreversible.
Offered under our Construction and Civil Engineering Training Courses, the programme walks through building a structured WBS and activity network, setting a defensible baseline schedule, tracking the critical path, loading resources realistically, and reading earned value data to catch drift early. Participants finish able to run delay analysis, build recovery schedules, and turn raw P6 data into reports that actually change site decisions.
2Objectives and target group
- Translate a construction contract programme into a structured Primavera P6 schedule, from EPS down to individual activities.
- Build Work Breakdown Structures, activity networks, calendars and milestones that hold up under scrutiny.
- Set and protect a baseline schedule, and measure planned versus actual performance against it.
- Identify and continuously monitor the critical path, total float and near-critical activities.
- Apply resource planning and loading for labour, equipment and materials, and resolve overallocation.
- Update progress using data dates and actuals, and forecast realistic completion dates.
- Read earned value indicators — SPI, CPI, variances — to catch cost and schedule drift early.
- Carry out practical delay analysis, distinguishing schedule impact from simple lateness.
- Build recovery and acceleration schedules once a delay has already happened.
- Produce project controls reports and dashboards that support real site and management decisions.
Target Audience
- Construction planning and scheduling engineers
- Project controls engineers and Primavera P6 professionals
- Construction and site project managers
- Civil and project engineers
- Planning managers and quantity surveyors
- Cost engineers and construction managers
- Contractors and consultants involved in project delivery
- Anyone accountable for construction planning, scheduling or project controls
3Course Content
Module 1: Why Construction Projects Fall Behind — And What Project Controls Does About It
- The real cost of poor planning and reactive scheduling
- What project controls covers: planning, scheduling, monitoring, forecasting
- Introduction to Primavera P6 and its role in construction delivery
- Project structures, EPS and the P6 database
- Setting up project and activity calendars
Module 2: Structuring the Project: WBS, Activities and Milestones
- Building a Work Breakdown Structure that mirrors how the work will actually happen
- Defining activities, activity types, codes and durations
- Milestones and deliverables
- Organising complex, multi-phase construction programmes
Module 3: Building the Network: Relationships, Logic and Constraints
- Activity relationships: Finish-to-Start, Start-to-Start, Finish-to-Finish, Start-to-Finish
- Leads, lags, constraints and deadlines
- Calculating and optimising the schedule
- Common network-logic mistakes that distort the critical path
Module 4: Setting the Baseline and Reading the Critical Path
- Establishing and approving a defensible baseline schedule
- Baseline comparison and planned-versus-actual analysis
- Understanding total float, free float, and critical/near-critical activities
- Forward and backward pass calculations
- Monitoring the critical path as the schedule changes
Module 5: Loading and Balancing Resources
- Construction resource planning for labour, equipment and materials
- Resource calendars and loading in Primavera P6
- Resource histograms and identifying overallocation
- Levelling resources without silently extending the schedule
Module 6: Tracking Reality: Progress Updates and Earned Value
- Data dates, actual starts/finishes and remaining duration
- Progress measurement techniques
- Comparing current progress against the baseline
- Planned Value, Earned Value and Actual Cost
- Schedule and Cost Performance Indices, and forecasting completion
Module 7: When the Schedule Slips: Delay Analysis and Recovery
- Classifying delays and assessing their critical-path impact
- Baseline-versus-updated schedule delay analysis
- Extension-of-time considerations
- Building recovery and acceleration schedules
- Developing corrective schedules that are actually achievable
Module 8: Reporting, Dashboards and Advanced Project Controls
- Schedule performance dashboards and variance reporting
- Resource and cost reporting
- Trend analysis and forecasting
- Management reporting using Primavera P6
- Bringing planning, scheduling and project controls into one integrated practice