What is Front End Planning?

Front end planning is an essential project process whereby a project team develops sufficient strategic information with which owners can address risk and make decisions to commit resources in order to maximize the potential for a successful project. In the short, eight-minute video below, Dr. Gibson lays out the tenets of that process in the context of the project lifecycle.

Why Front End Planning?

Front end planning has many benefits to the life cycle of any project. Research has shown that it improves overall cost and schedule predictability reduces change orders, improves operational performance and helps the client meet business drivers. Dr. Gibson summarizes almost 30 years of empirically-based research outlining these benefits in the short four-minute video below.

Nine Front End Planning Rules of the Game

Over the course of 30 years of research, nine keys “rules of the game” have been identified through extensive case study research. Adopt these rules and your project will turn out much better. Ignore these rules and your project will most likely pay the price. In the short six-minute video below, Dr. Gibson outlines these important concepts.

Decision Support Tools

Use-inspired research should lead to techniques, processes, decision support tools and other aids that help address a problem. Over the past 30 years, a number of these tools have been developed by researchers at ASU. In the 13-minute video below Dr Gibson will give an overview of some of these tools with a deep dive into the Project Definition Rating Index—Industrial Projects, Maturity and Accuracy Total Rating System.

Front End Planning in the Future

Gibson ends his presentation, talking about technology and practices of today and the future that can help teams do a better job of front end planning. He also summarizes the choice, choices and consequences of our actions in this five-minute video.

Where These Videos Came From:

Dr. Gibson delivered a lecture on April 24, 2019, in the Bartlett School of Construction and Project Management at University College London, United Kingdom in which he discussed early project planning and its potential to either positively impact the trajectory of a project’s life or lead to less than optimal results. These short videos are portions of that lecture.