Paintball theme park provides engineers, interns team-building experience
More than 15 engineers and interns currently assigned to Graycor Industrial project sites and office estimating recently received scheduling basics training provided by the company’s Engineer Mentor Committee (EMC).
Nirav “Nick” Doshi, project controls manager for Graycor Industrial, led the classroom instruction held on Aug. 15, 2019, at Graycor’s Learning Center in Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois, where he introduced the basic features of Primavera P6 Critical Path Method (CPM) scheduling.
Micaiah Schultz, project controls engineer, assisted in the learning event which covered topics of: Importance of Planning; Overview of P6 Program; Building a Resource-loaded Schedule; Baselining a Schedule; Creating P6 Layouts; Updating a Schedule; Reporting – KPI, Commodity and Productivity Charts.
Nick began the half-day training by going over the importance of good planning and the roles of estimators and operations personnel in the planning process. Later, in the hands-on exercise, the engineers learned how to set up user preferences in P6 and create a new schedule. They also learned how to resource-load a schedule, as well as how to analyze critical paths and earned-value reports. Classroom discussions focused on the importance of capturing delays by owners, engineers, owner’s supplier, or any third party in the schedule. In addition, the engineers were instructed on the process of collecting progress information on site to update schedule and earned-value reports.
“The training is intended to familiarize our engineers with the P6 program capabilities and go over the importance of scheduling, which is a communication tool essential to succeed in achieving a project’s goals,” said Nick.
Following the day’s training portion, EMC member Matt Bero organized a team-building outing, taking the engineers and interns, as well as fellow EMC members Tony Dinnocenzo and Jeff Paschen, to Paintball Explosion in East Dundee, Illinois, where the group spent the afternoon waging competitions in the state-of-the-art theme park modeled after the popular video games ‘Call of Duty’ and ‘Modern Warfare.’
Through its mentoring training program, Graycor’s Engineer Mentor Committee educates, guides and trains new engineers hired by the company.