PM ExcellenceA recap of the August 20 call, for anyone who could not attend.
A recap of the fifth live discussion, built around one live demonstration: what happens once a project’s hours connect to its actual tasks. This summary carries the substance of the full hour.
Meeting RecordingFull August 20 discussion · 1h 33mWhere the Room Started
The session opened with one question: what tool works for you today, beyond the Grace process in the videos? The room answered with three real habits already in use.
List every sheet a project needs, and assign hours to each one. Plans and elevations go to one person. Sections and details go to another. No two people work the same sheet.
Run an internal kickoff early, with a group wider than the core team. It catches tasks that do not look traditional, like custom wall graphics on a school project, before they get missed.
Run a weekly team connect, and send the schedule to the QC reviewer before QC starts. Architecture and interiors plan together, as one team, not two.
The Gap the Room Named
Some PMs track tasks in Microsoft Teams. Others use Planner. Both tools sit apart from the project’s budget and hours. One question pushed further: once a role turns into a real person, does the plan still know what that person costs, and whether they are even free?
Its limit is clear: the heat map only earns its value once enough PMs enter real project data. Until then, checking whether someone is free is still a one to one conversation.
This question had no clean answer. A person on the plan can move to another project, or go out for personal reasons, at any time. No fix emerged beyond building in a buffer.
The standing rule, demonstrated moments later: staff a project because a piece of work is ready for someone, not because a person needs something to do.
The Demonstration
A working mock planning board was built live, for Oakhaven’s 13 week DD phase, to show what happens once a phase’s hours connect to its actual tasks. Two steps do not exist in any current Grace tool. Everything else, the room already had.
Elevations and sections became one work package: three weeks, the named roles, and a cost of $20,165. One line from the room summed up why this matters: “you can eat the elephant.” Track what is done, and what has been spent, at the halfway point.
Floor plans before interiors. Interiors before QC. The room named the result before it was labeled: critical path. Convert that order to a Gantt chart, and staffing demand for every week appears on its own. Nobody has to guess it.
The hours were redistributed on screen. The best case still left the team at 52, 52, and 43 hours across three straight weeks. That number stayed on screen on purpose: a good plan does not guarantee an easy one, it lets a PM see the problem in week one, not the week before Thanksgiving.
One line on rework landed hardest: staff running ahead of decisions, on tasks that are not really ready, is the number one cause of rework on a project. The answer for the room: break the phase into work packages, then schedule when each one finishes. Grace’s existing tools already carry the rest.
Take It With You
Everything Module 5 covered, on a single sheet: Grace’s process from a signed fee to a live plan in BST11, the seven step method with what to watch for at each step, and the four traps that break a plan before it starts.
The one sheet
The browser version opens the full sheet and scales to your window. The PDF prints at 17 × 11 inches and holds its type at that size, which is the one to pin up next to your desk.
What is on it
The Honest Answer on Tools
One pointed challenge came from the room: what was demonstrated does not exist as a tool the cohort can use today. That is true, without hedging. The project budget spreadsheet, the phase roadmaps, and BST’s scheduling and heat map already exist. The one missing step, turning a task list into a schedule, is manual PM judgment. That is not expected to change, whatever software the firm buys next.