A one-page project execution plan for smaller contractors
Your company has just won its largest job so far: a two-storey fire hall, four times the size of anything the crew has built. The owner's project manager asks for your execution plan before the pre-construction meeting. You have never written one, and the examples you find run to forty pages.
Large contractors write long execution plans because many people must agree on them. A small contractor has the opposite problem: the plan lives in the head of whoever runs the company, and when that person is on another site, nobody else knows it. One page forces the decisions that matter — how, who, in what order, and how progress is reported — without becoming a document nobody reads.
What goes on the page
- Scope in three lines: what you are building, what you are not, and the contract dates that bind you.
- How it will be built: the few methods that drive cost and time, such as prefabricated or site-built walls, or which trades work side by side.
- Who decides what: the project manager, the superintendent, the foremen and the key subcontractors, each with the decisions they own — a responsibility matrix can hold the detail.
- Sequence: five to ten phases with target dates, from mobilization to handover, and the handoffs between them.
- Risks: the three things most likely to hurt this job, each with what you will do about it and who watches it.
- Reporting: what the owner receives, how often and from whom, and what the site sends the office each day.
- Review it monthly, and change the line whenever a decision on the page changes.
Common mistakes
- Copying a large contractor's template and filling in sections that do not apply.
- Writing the plan for the owner and never showing it to the superintendent.
- Listing risks without an action or a person watching each one.
- Filing the plan after the kickoff and never opening it again.
Checklist
Your one page has
- Scope, exclusions and contract dates
- The methods that drive cost and time
- Named people and what each decides
- Five to ten phases with target dates
- Three risks, each with an action and an owner
- What is reported, to whom and how often
- The date of the next review
Check your understanding
Why limit the plan to one page when the job itself is complicated?
