Readiness Assessment for Flash Tracking

The pursuit of Faster Fast Track or Flash Track is deemed necessary in today's industry for reasons such as emergency rebuilds, competitive market advantage, and regulatory compliance. Flash Tracking has been defined as a time-driven project, which by necessity requires a heightened degree of concurrency between engineering, procurement, and construction. This paper reports on Flash Track readiness assessment algorithms that were developed to enable an organization to assess its readiness to execute time-critical or Flash Track projects. The readiness assessment algorithms were developed by defining the relative importance of 47 essential Flash Track practices, grouped into 6 categories using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The weights of the practices and categories were determined by a 15-member industry expert panel, comprised of 15 Construction Industry Institute (CII) member companies representing owners, contractors, and engineering organizations. The algorithms were ultimately integrated into a Flash Track toolkit. In a validation exercise, representatives from 13 completed Flash Track projects used the toolkit with reference to their projects. Project representatives' retrospective self-assessment of readiness to perform the projects on a Flash Track basis were moderately to strongly correlated (r=0.76) with their readiness assessment forecasted by this research's algorithms. This research provides the first quantitative measurement suitable to assess an organization's readiness to undertake the unique challenges of a Flash Track project.