a planner can never be a great planner unless they are prepared to stand up and be counted!

however, too many times one sees “schedules” that look pretty and are intensively updated (costing lots of money to achieve nothing but a pretty picture), yet do not reflect the logic of “reality” just the logic of looking nice – activities linked to others inappropriately!

so guess what – no one uses it because the logic does not reflect what actually will happen!

i like dan patterson’s thoughts ” there is plenty of chances to get the “schedule” right, but only one chance to execute it!”

if you get the schedule right (at the right level of complexity) no one needs to look at it unless things are going wrong!

then when you get to the end you hear things like “we delivered a £100m job and nobody knew it was happening!

paul,
in many ways, i think we’re on the same page – in the article i suggest that the scheduler do the analysis and get it in the hands of people who can use it – i language it as being “proactive” but it’s trying to show the value of the schedule to those who are embedded in a culture where schedules have no focus.
blunt can work if that’s your style.
so where do these cultures of making the schedule a side-thought come from?
do you think this is a product of smaller companies growing fast into bigger jobs? jobs where the environment demands real project controls but the contractor has little experience?

great suggestion for streamlining the update process. but i wonder if this is one of those situations where a full-time scheduler would have beneficial. or maybe this worth discussing – do we need more scheduler time or do we need software that takes less time to update a schedule?
i’ve been heard lots of advocacy for full-time schedulers – who can not only do the updates weekly, but help paint the picture and get the info to the team.
what you do think?

however there are a number of things i would add. this illustrates to some extent the relationship between “plan” and “schedule”. i can’t count the number of times i’ve done reviews where i can see the schedule but nobody knows the plan on which it’s based. the project manager needs to be able to communicate “this is what we going to do , and this is how we’re going to do it.” this is not communicated in a detailed schedule. it is communicated in high level schedules, milestone schedules, power-point presentations and sometimes (i’m not sure how efficiently) by 4d presentation.
once you have that, then the schedule acts as the detailed back-up showing how this plan is to be achieved.
the second thing i noticed is the inability of most schedulers to communicate visually. this isn’t helped by the appalling lack of visualization available in the main scheduling software packages. the old primavera p3 gave you a reasonable ability to do high level bar charts fed directly from the database, but all that went with the move to p3e. the latest versions (i’m only up at 8.3) may have this or it may be on the latest version of primavera web, but in my view it appears the emphasis in the software developer’s mind is on the data rather than how to communicate it simply and without fuss.
finally sometimes i have to tell schedulers the shocking news that no-body cares about how clever or detailed the schedule is. people don’t care how you’ve coded it or used intelligent activity id’s or even how it’s structured. all they want to know is “when do i have to my job by? or when will joe & co be ready for us?” the best schedules like the best writing should be almost invisible like clear glass and should highlight the information required not the method or person who developed. the scheduler’s job like a writers is to tell a story. if you tell that story well so people are interested in it, then they will use the schedule.

first, the notion that the schedule belongs to the scheduler.

second, that there is no management commitment to using the schedule.

the attitude that a project schedule is “the scheduler’s thing” is effectively a renunciation of any ownership of the schedule by the project team. no wonder they aren’t interested in using it. they have no stake in it. they derive no value from it (a self-fulfilling situation, to be sure). from their perspective, the scheduler’s insistence on keeping the schedule up to date is just another distraction from their “real” work. been there, done that, and the t-shirts are in tatters.

management is setting the tone for the project by barely going through the motions with respect to the schedule. the rest of the project team is following their lead.

because of the project environment, i think that your advice won’t do much more than cause your friend, or schedulers in similar positions, additional frustration. you are asking that people make a bottom-up change in the project culture and that they do so by doing what they’ve been doing, just more so. if that hasn’t worked so far, odds are high that it will continue to be ineffective.

instead, your friend should focus on the project and use the schedule instead of serving it. that’s a hard thing to do, given the amount of effort we put into building and maintaining schedules. it’s also a differentiator between being a scheduler or a planner. project teams need information and analysis, not data and stacks of reports.

in the dismissive environment surrounding your friend, it may take some strong and repeated doses of “i told you so” to get through to the pm or other team members. like “remember how the schedule showed us three months ago that steel fabrication would be a problem? and how you’re fighting fires now over delays in steel deliveries? well, brace yourself because everything is pointing toward a repeat performance with pipe installation. we haven’t been able to get the number of crews we need to stay on schedule and productivity sucks for the crews we do have. we need to take action now to prevent more fires.”

blunt? absolutely! but that’s the kind of message management needs to hear: that the schedule is relevant, that it is predictive, that it can keep their butt out of a sling. will they be all smiley and happy for your help? no, but that isn’t why we do this stuff. we’re in this for the good of the project, not for the good of our tools. i wish i had understood this better 25 or 30 years ago and i hope that your friend wakes up to it soon, as well.

as for the hyper-involved owner, your friend has my profoundest sympathy.

the type of contract has a lot to do with owner’s team not receiving updates.as well, a scheduler needs to be a key player on the project controls team, and scheduling (verb) is done by the pms and cms (owners and contractors), to produce an optimized project plan (noun), which must be dynamic (driven with evpm), with contract scorecards (milestones, measured by variance and penalties).

the use of roc (rules of credit) and quantity surveyors is essential in updating project plans, evpm, and variance, to ????? ??? ????…

https://www.linkedin.com/in/edmund-ted-lister/

so true.

perhaps highlight the cost of liquidated damages per day that the project will incur when the schedule slips. that always gets some attention 🙂

seddik, thanks. when schedulers feel that what they are tasked to do (build/maintain a schedule) is merely a formality, then it’s tough to feel motivated at all to be proactive.
we have to remember that how the schedule is used isn’t a reflection on us personally – it’s really about educating the team and changing the culture.
the planner is in a good position to help bring that sort of change about. just have to dig in and be heard.

thanks hadi!

yes i would start with ms power bi. the desktop tool is free to download and use. once any excel savvy user watches some of the tutorial videos he/she should be up and running in power bi fairly quickly

haidi,
great idea. which tool would you recommend users start with?

that sounds pretty frustrating bill.
you might be working in or with organizations that need to go through a culture shift to put more focus on scheduling.
sometimes, it’s like eating more fiber – you don’t know how good you feel until after you try it for a while. might be a bad example.
if you can make small in-roads on changing the culture for just 1 project and then using that as an example for others, showing the benefits, you might make some progress on shifting the culture.
i know, not an easy task, and probably not in your job description to shape corporate culture. but maybe you can start a conversation.

i have tried a majority of the suggestions you mentioned above with little success.
the only time i get good updates are from people who have actually built and maintained schedules before. the rest of them are just pms who took a semester of scheduling and are now “experts” ???