Practical, experience-based project management lessons for project engineers, developing project managers, and field professionals.
Friday Field Notes #13: The Schedule Is a Communication Tool
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Good morning team, This week’s topic: project schedules. 1. From the Field A project schedule is obviously a planning tool, but I’ve found that its real value comes from how well it helps people understand what is supposed to happen next. A schedule can be technically correct and still be difficult to use. If the field team cannot tell what areas should be available, when subcontractors are needed, or what activities are driving the next few weeks of work, the schedule is not doing much to help execution. The best schedule conversations usually connect dates to decisions. What has to happen first? What information or equipment is needed? What could prevent the activity from starting? Once the team starts using the schedule to answer those questions, it becomes much more than something updated for a monthly report. 2. Leadership Perspective Good leaders give people enough information to plan ahead. A schedule helps do that when the team understands the logic behind the dates instead of simply being handed a list of activities. 3. Field Observation I’ve noticed that schedule problems often become visible in normal project conversations before anyone calls them a schedule problem. Material is not arriving when expected, access is still unresolved, a predecessor activity is taking longer, or the crew cannot move into the next area as planned. Those are schedule conversations. Learning to recognize them early is an important part of developing as a PE. 4. Spreadsheet Tip This week’s formula: TEXT If Cell B2 contains a date, this formula displays the day of the week: =TEXT(B2,"dddd") For an abbreviated version: =TEXT(B2,"ddd") This is useful in look-ahead schedules, delivery logs, inspection trackers, and other project spreadsheets where seeing the weekday helps with planning. 5. Question for the Week Does your current project schedule clearly show the field team what needs to happen next? Have a great weekend, Dan |
Friday Field Notes
Practical, experience-based project management lessons for project engineers, developing project managers, and field professionals.
Good morning team, This week’s topic: look-ahead schedules. 1. From the Field A look-ahead should represent what the project team actually believes is going to happen over the next few weeks. That sounds obvious, but I’ve seen look-aheads continue showing activities that everyone onsite already knows are not going to start on the dates listed. At that point, the document stops being a planning tool and becomes an exercise in updating dates. A useful look-ahead should reflect current field...
If you’re new here, Friday Field Notes is a short weekly newsletter built around practical project management lessons from the field. I originally started writing these notes for Project Engineers I was helping develop. The goal was simple: give them something useful they could read in a few minutes and apply to a real project. A lot of project management is learned through formal training, procedures, software, and project controls. But some of the most important lessons come from...
FRIDAY FIELD NOTES #12 Submittals Protect the Work Good morning team, This week’s topic: submittals. 1. From the Field Submittals are sometimes treated as an administrative requirement that must be cleared before the work can begin. In practice, they serve a much more important purpose. A submittal gives the project team an opportunity to confirm that a proposed material, procedure, supplier, plan, or piece of equipment meets the contract requirements before it is incorporated into the work....