Volumes of work

I do not know that PMs do not use 'volume' or 'quantity' as one of their considerations in scheduling and cost management. How many resources? How many square meters per unit of resources? How many total units? Etc. However, I do worry about the sole consideration of quantity as a basis for measurement as this does not necessarily represent value or effectiveness. Somehow we have to be able to plan based on 'value' rather than quantity of the work or effort. 100 hours of engineering is not necessarily ten times better than 10 hours of engineering, 20 drawings are not necessarily better than 12 drawings, 1000 labour-hours are not necessarily better than 750 labour-hours - it depends on what you achieved.

Hi Peter!
Value and Quality may be considered as success criteria but for planning purposes we need to estimate future works cost and duration that directly depend on the volumes of work to be done.
How many resources depends on planned volumes, how many square meters per unit of resources depend on resource productivity (another parameter absent in most packages), required material quantities depend on the volumes.
Calculating project schedule basing on values is new to me. Please explain what do you mean.

I can talk for lot of industries but I will put on the table one industry that is a classic on the matter because the intagibility of the product: software. There is a lot of work done from 1956 up to date about how to calculate what you stated in other industries. All that work has been proved along the years and is widely used including other industries has taken it to make estimations (and I use it in other industries). You can take a look to some work like Barry Bohem´s "Software Engineering Economics " or Putnam, Lawrence H.; Ware Myers "Measures for excellence : reliable software On time, within budget.". I hope I answered your question which is very interesting.

I am not saying that one should schedule based on value only. What I am saying is that during the planning exercise that one recognizes that volume isn't the only consideration. One has to be conscience of effectiveness - is there a better way? If our records show that a 10,000 sq m building takes four month to deliver, do we accept that as gospel or do we look at options/alternatives/innovative approaches? Volume/quantity is important but not the only factor. Maybe the 10,000 sq m specified should be open to review. Can we deliver a more effective footprint? The objective is not to deliver the building but meet the functional requirements which happens to include a building.

This seems like a question of details.

Lets say you, the project manager, have plans for a building that requires 10,000 bricks. You have a fair idea when the foundation and framing will be done, and you call the masonry union to schedule the workers needed to lay the bricks. Their foreman is likely going to check your estimates, ensuring that you really need 10,000 bricks and adding a percentage for waste. That foreman is going to count the bricks- not each individual brick, but he'll know how many are in a stack and how many are in a wall. The foreman will be able to tell you how many bricks have been placed and how many remain. He'll probably also track the number of masons and laborers available, and he'll know which people are fast and which are slow. The foreman will also keep an eye on the weather. All this will be considered to tell you, the project manager, when to expect the masonry to be complete, plus the time it takes to remove equipment.

Do you, the project manager, really care how many bricks are on site? Probably not. You're probably tracking % completion, but you're not counting bricks. That's not your expertise, and unless you're the foreman, you probably don't know how to turn that number into an estimate. It's a level of detail that's meaningless at your level. What you really care about time, expense, and quality. When will the bricks be finished on the North wall so we can start installing windows? Are we within budget? Do we have reserves? Are we cutting corners that the new building owners will reject?

So tracking those "volumes" is being done, but probably not at your level and probably not in your project plan. And above you is the customer, who doesn't care about your project problems. She simply wants to know when she can occupy the building.

Hi Sergio,
in the first lines of my first post I wrote that my question is addressed to participants of construction and manufacturing projects.
I know that it is hard to measure and quantify many software development activities but not all. Any development includes testing, documentation development and other activities that can be measured. I remember attempts to apply function points as the way to measure volumes of software development activities.
Software development project consists of some activities that is hard to measure (creating complex algorithms as an example) and a lot of routine activities. Assigning resources and estimating activity duration you take into account assigned resource productivity. The volume of these typical activities may be measured different ways. I already mentioned function points, another more simple way just to set standard man-hours. Basing on their skills resources may have different productivity (like 0.9 or 1.2) and expected duration will become known after resource assignment.
It is an interesting topic but I tried to make my post and discussion simple and so addressed my question to construction and manufacturing managers who manage projects with easily measurable volumes.