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Scheduling

When the general contractor's schedule does not work for your trade

By Review.LivePublished 3 min readHow we write

The general contractor's baseline arrives on Tuesday with a note: "Please review and confirm by Friday." Your mechanical rough-in on level 3 is a single 10-day bar between framing and the ceiling grid. Your foreman looks at it once and says it is a 15-day floor.

Steel canopy framing and stacked materials stand beside an unfinished block building.
Photo: Michael Quinn / National Park Service on Wikimedia Commons · Grand Canyon, Bright Angel Trailhead Construction Overview 0408 - Flickr - Grand Canyon NPS · CC BY 2.0 · Cropped, resized, colour adjusted and sharpened. No claim to original U.S. Government works.

Before you confirm, check your own activities: each duration against your quantities and crew, what must be finished before each starts, and what follows. Then send one written reply that lists each problem with its basis and a proposal. Trade durations are often squeezed until the finish meets the contract date, and once you accept the schedule, a slip against it looks like your delay. The Lean Construction Institute's test of a reliable promise applies: the person promising has estimated how long the task will take and is not privately doubting they can deliver.

  1. Ask for your activities with their logic: predecessors, successors and dates, not only the bar chart.
  2. Check each duration against your quantities and crew, as in durations from quantities, and whether the area can hold that crew.
  3. Check what must come first: structure, framing, openings, other trades' mains, and your own approved submittals and equipment lead times.
  4. Check what follows and who shares the area: the next trade, the inspection before cover, and how many trades share those days.
  5. Reply in writing before you confirm, one line per problem: the activity, what the schedule shows, what you need and why, and a proposal: a longer duration, another sequence or the condition under which the date works.
  6. If the dates stand, confirm your assumptions in writing, such as when each area is handed over, and record when it actually was.
  7. Check your activities in every update.

Common mistakes

  • Confirming, or signing the subcontract, without reading your activities.
  • Objecting without a basis or a proposal.
  • Raising it only by phone.
  • Promising the date and planning to add people the space cannot hold.

What to say

Your reply, one problem at a time

  1. You:Activity [ID]: the schedule shows [duration or start condition].
  2. You:Our basis: [quantity] at [our rate] with [crew] is [working days].
  3. You:Needed first: [missing predecessor].
  4. You:We propose: [duration, sequence or condition].
  5. You:Please answer by [date]; until then we cannot confirm it.

Check your understanding

The general contractor answers: "Everyone else accepted. Just add people." Four workers already fill the ceiling space. What do you reply?

Show the answer
That more people there would not shorten the work and could slow it, and offer what would: an earlier start on part of the floor, a later ceiling start or two zones. Put it in writing, so the record shows you raised it before the work started.

Sources

  1. Glossary (Reliable Promise)Lean Construction Institute · accessed

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