Construction Project Scheduling: The Complete Step-by-Step Guide

This video is the definitive guide to construction project scheduling. We're going to be covering absolutely everything you need to know to develop, maintain, and implement construction schedules. We're going to go through every single concept and some detailed worked examples so you can apply the principles in practice.

Something you've probably seen in your career is that a lot of experienced construction project managers don't actually use schedules. They build the jobs in their heads. They know how long things take. They have a very good foundational understanding of the methodology. They call subcontractors, ask questions, and basically scheduling for them doesn't go any further than a whiteboard in an office. No 300-line Gant charts or critical path analysis. Just a simple whiteboard in an office and projects still managed to get delivered successfully. They're doing what I refer to as scheduling without a schedule.

Now, a lot of people almost describe this as a criticism or a failure on their behalf, but the way I see it, they actually understand the fundamental principles of scheduling and the goal of scheduling much better than a lot of other people. They understand the core principle behind scheduling, which is expressing construction methodology through time. Fundamentally, a schedule is a representation of how you're going to build something, who's doing what and when. That representation can be a 30,000-line Gant chart in Prima Vera P6, or it can be a whiteboard in an office.

Both representations help us answer fundamental questions that we need to know to deliver the project such as when to start procurement, what date our concrete subcontractor is coming to site, and whether or not we need to pay an electrical subcontractor and acceleration. These are all scheduling decisions that rely on a schedule. So, the core goal of scheduling is coordinating and completing the work on time. That is probably the most intuitive understanding most people have of scheduling. But it is not the only goal and not the only benefit to projects of effectively scheduling.

But before we jump into all the other benefits of scheduling, I just want to briefly introduce the worked example we're going to be going through. It is a commercial construction project. It has all the key stages from design, procurement to construction. And I'm doing the example in SmartSheet. But the principles are exactly the same whether you're using Microsoft Project or even Primma Vera P6. We'll use this example schedule to explain all of the core concepts and give you a practical demonstration of how to actually build a schedule. And if you want to jump ahead to different sections of the course such as the commercial or contractual side of scheduling or just how to implement and maintain a schedule, then I'll put timestamps below.

Okay. So, we know we need to schedule to some certain degree to coordinate and deliver the works. But I want to start by going into a little bit more detail as to why scheduling actually makes contractors money. And even whether you're a project management office or you're a consultant or some other sort of business, these fundamental principles apply to how scheduling helps contractors deliver projects profitably and in general the entire construction industry, better use resources and more effectively deliver work.

So number one is scheduling is probably the most important planning tool we have. As I said in the introduction, the most effective schedulers, construction managers with 20 years' experience, have this intuitive understanding that to deliver a project, you need to understand who's doing what, when they're doing it, who they interface with, and to keep some overall track of when everything's happening to properly deliver the project. Planning captures this intuition. So there's this famous quote by Dwight D. Eisenhower which says, "Plans are useless, but planning is essential." And the core idea behind this is by trying to sit through and methodically prepare a Gant chart like this, we have to answer so many important questions and we have to think through so many different decisions. So this act of trying to repair a schedule is going to basically help us to plan the project better and make fewer mistakes.

Now, planning occurs during the pre-construction phase. But when we actually move into construction and coordinating the works for things to actually happen, as the construction manager, we take on the role of coordination. We need to tell the concrete contractor what day to come to site. We need to work out what date we need the design ready to start procurement so the materials are available on site to meet the construction program. The only way that can happen is through having a schedule and knowing when things are going to happen.

Now, the next benefit of scheduling is cost management. And there are two sides to this function. And there's the direct cost, which comes as a reflection of coordination. Where, for us to actually manage the works effectively, we need to be telling the concrete contractor what day to come to site when the earthworks are complete so they're not held up. If we give them the wrong date, they'll come to the site, it won't be ready, and they'll charge us a delay. So scheduling actually helps us manage our direct cost, the physical cost of doing the construction work.

But on the other other side, if you look at a project like this, the schedule tells us the overall duration of the project. The overall duration of the project is the biggest variable for our indirect cost. How long do we need to hire a project manager? What, how long are we going to need to hire our temporary facilities and site facilities? That all comes down to indirect cost management. And the duration of the project is the biggest variable for indirect cost. If we can actually finish the project faster, we can reduce the duration of the project, we're going to save money.

Okay. The next benefit of scheduling is cash flow. The biggest source of insolvency in the construction industry isn't actually people taking on projects that they lose money on the project. It's that they incur cost before they receive payment from the client. So, while they actually might actually be doing a profitable project, they could even have a profitable business. The fact that 10% of their contract value is held up in retention, that they're paying labor weekly, but they're getting paid by the client on 60-day end-of-month payment terms, they basically end up with not enough cash to keep moving forward. Scheduling and understanding when the work is happening, when you're going to be able to claim for it, when you're going to incur different expenses is one of the best tools you can use to to improve your cash flow management.

Then we have the contractual side of scheduling. Time is one of the most important elements of a construction contract. Within any construction contract, there will be a practical completion date, and attached to that will be a large chunk of liquidated damages. If you can't manage finishing the project on time, you will incur penalties. If you haven't forecast out how long the project will actually take, you don't even know what a reasonable practical completion date is. So, in terms of the head contract, having a schedule and understanding how long the project takes is essential for negotiating contracts.

Then, when it actually comes to delivering the project, making construction claims, putting in delays, the only way you can do that is by having an initial baseline schedule and maintaining that schedule. The exact same principle applies to managing your subcontractors, telling them what date to mobilize, how long they had to do the work, potentially even putting liquidated damages on them. That all comes down to managing the schedule.

Now, those are probably more hard benefits that are actually going to make or lose you money. But the last two, I would say, are some more sort of indirect benefits. So, the first one is actually keeping your clients and stakeholders happy. If you can send a weekly report to your clients showing when you're doing the work, when things are happening, what percentage complete different tasks are, when other things are going to happen, you're just going to keep your clients informed, up to date, and happy. So even if things do go wrong and you can flag these early and explain why they're going wrong, they're just going to think you are so much more competent.

Which leads me into the last part, which is you actually build a competitive advantage by keeping your clients happy, by keeping them informed, by showing and and maintaining a schedule. They're going to think you're much more competent, and it's actually going to help you build a strong relationship with these clients and get repeat work, which is the goal of any construction business. If you can just do your projects slightly better, keep your clients slightly more happier, you're that much more likely for them to go back to you for the next project.

Okay. So we can think of these benefits really in two categories. We've got ones that, again, this is from the contractor's perspective, but the fundamental principles will apply depending on whatever role you take in the construction industry. But we've got the revenue side of things, which is the schedule helps you to fulfill your contractual obligations. It helps you to finish the project on time, avoid liquidated damages and penalties. Demonstrates contractual entitlement. So you, it will help you to claim for more time and money if things change, and it will help you boost your client reputation again, which will help you win more work and get more money.

The other side, it helps you to deliver the work sufficiently and reduce both your direct and indirect cost. Avoid delays and stand-downs. Deliver the project faster and avoid impacts and disruptions from stakeholders. So there's really the benefits can help us to increase how much we actually get paid and limit the cost of us doing the work.

Okay. So the next thing I want to talk about is the spectrum of scheduling. We tend to think of a schedule as someone sitting in an office punching data into big charts, critical path analysis, floats. But really, if we think about this definition of scheduling, which is methodology expressed through time, that scheduling is a discipline, not a tool. So this is a schedule, as much as this is a schedule. So these core principles of methodology, sequence, durations, interdependencies, they all form part of this broader discipline of scheduling, and there are different tools we can use to represent the schedule.

One of the most important skills to work on developing and and building as you build out your scheduling capabilities is understanding the right tool for the right job. A detailed Gant chart isn't the best tool for a 3-week look ahead. It will confuse people. It's hard to update and maintain when things change every day. And a whiteboard like this is a great way to keep track of work that's happening, work in progress, which is the whole discipline of lean construction. But if you're only maintaining a whiteboard like this, it's very hard to demonstrate a claim to your client for more time. How do you represent that they delayed a critical path activity and that you should, you're claiming for 4 weeks of additional preliminary costs?

And the framework I have for thinking through these different categories of schedule are schedule levels. If we think about any project, we have the master project schedule. We have below that, in levels of increasing granularity and detail, that are more tailor-made to the specific thing. So, for example, you have a master project schedule that covers design, procurement, construction, commissioning. Procurement, you would want a completely different structured schedule to how you would want a construction 3-week look ahead. So within your procurement schedule, you're going to have way more detail around the specific milestones for procurement and how you're tracking those. You might not even want, and you probably don't want, a Gant chart to do this. But for construction, maybe you want some high-level Gant chart showing the different phases of activities, and then each of the teams below that has very detailed daily plans that look a lot more like this. Now, this is a simplistic representation, but it's a useful way to think about the different levels of project schedules.

Now, again, whenever I sort of give frameworks like this, I always want you to keep at the back of your mind that, again, construction, every project is different. So always have to use these as like a base framework and consider how this applies to your project. But we've got level one, which is what I refer to as the master project schedule, which is the schedule the client would see. We would break this down into level two schedules, which is where you'd start to break it up by, say, design, procurement, construction. You might even break up construction into the key trades and the different teams responsible for them.

Level three is then when we take that specific package or area or task, like procurement, and then we have key milestones for that phase. So, for example, within procurement, we might have the awarding of the civil subcontractor by a certain day, which interfaces with the civil construction program, is driving the start date. You then go into increasing levels of details where you progressively break down tasks into more and more details. So that procurement milestone of starting of having the civil contract awarded by the 6th of March. The midterm, short-term, and daily plans are where we really decompose that into exactly what needs to take place. So what date does the contractor need to return their quote? When do we need to have vetted that quote by? When do we have to get approval to proceed with it? When do we have to finish negotiating the contract, the civil? What, when do we have to finish the bulk earthworks? What does that mean in what we have to get done this week? When does the clearing and grubbing need to be done? How many bulk cubic meters do we have to be doing per day? That is where you get into the low-level schedules where you add additional detail.

Now, the next concept to understand, and this is a big trap I see people going into when they start to build schedules, is this concept of being roughly correct or precisely wrong. It's one of my favorite sayings when it comes to scheduling and come to scheduling, and it's this idea of progressive elaboration, where you don't have much detail at the start. So you only have a high-level master project schedule, and as you get more information and more detail, you can get into the very nitty-gritty of exactly when you're doing each task. The master schedule might have a line item for civil bulk earthworks. The detailed daily plan tells you exactly when the machine is moving from here to here, how many trucks you're booking, what productivity you have to hit. That's all in the daily plan. But it is an absolute waste of time doing that at the start of the project when you only have very high levels of detail, which is this idea of progressive elaboration, that as you get closer and closer to the task, you can add increasing levels of detail. So you might only do the daily plan the day before, but it is unbelievably detailed. You might only do the 3-week look ahead a couple of weeks before the task and update this daily or weekly. You might only do the two-to-six-month program at the two-to-six-month mark. So all progressive elaboration pretty much means is further and further away, we only have low-density conceptual schedules. As tasks get closer, we get more information, we add a lot more density to the schedule. And by density, all we're doing is going from the higher-level schedules to the lower-level schedules. So, for example, as a contractor, when we submit a bid to do a project, we might just have a tender schedule, which is high-level. It shows the key milestones. Maybe that's a level one to level three schedule. Then we have our, once we start construction, we move into doing our 3-week look aheads that have this rolling window. So we're only planning, maybe we have that master schedule that we maintain, but we're only doing the really detailed schedules looking four to six weeks ahead.

Now, the final foundational concept I want to explain, because all the other definitions like explaining critical path, floats, all these other concepts, I think it only makes sense to go through them as we come up with them organically when we're developing and building our schedule. We'll organically come across these concepts, but I think another really foundational concept that applies everywhere is this idea of a baseline schedule. So the baseline schedule is a schedule frozen at a point in time. So typically, as a contractor, this will be where you negotiate and sign the contract. There will be a baseline schedule, which is effectively what you're agreeing to do and when you're agreeing to do it as part of your bid submission. Then everything that happens during the course of the project is measured against this baseline schedule. Again, this is foundational for any construction claims you're doing. If you want to prove that you've been delayed by the client, you go back to the baseline schedule. You show that this activity the client was meant to complete by this date, and they've been late in delivering on that milestone. So the baseline schedule never changes, but as we proceed through construction, we track the actual dates against that. When did this task actually start, and when did it actually finish? Which means during construction, so after we negotiate and sign the contract, well, that will actually be typically two schedules at a minimum, but typically also a third. There'll be the baseline schedule, which is frozen at contract award. There'll be a current schedule, where we update with the actual dates things are happening. Then there will be what is referred to as a recovery schedule if we are delayed and trying to reclaim progress. And as we put in claims, there may be new baseline schedules. So an approved extension of time would update the baseline schedule. If we're delayed and we're showing how we're mitigating that delay, that would be through a target or recovery schedule. So, the baseline schedule is one of the most important construction documents. And as we talk about later on in this video, when we're referencing construction claims, there will always be some comparison between the baseline schedule and the current schedule.

So, there are two fundamental stages of scheduling. There's the development, that phase that occurs during the pre-construction phase. This is where we create a realistic, achievable, and optimized construction project schedule. We then sign the contract, develop the baseline, we begin the construction works, and that is when we implement the schedule. Now, implementation, we, we can really break down into two subphases, which is putting the plan into action, actually coordinating and delivering the works, and then there's monitoring and controlling, where we're checking what's happening, we're feeding back, and we're updating the plan as things change and taking corrective actions.

So, it begins with development. So this is us turning our methodology into a schedule. We're expressing our methodology through time. We're creating a plan for how to deliver the project. When we say a plan, it can be in a lot of formats, like a 30,000-line P6 program or a whiteboard, but fundamentally, it's going to be a list of activities with start and finish dates and durations and linkages between activities.

Now, I refer to the second phase as implementation. And some people refer to it as monitoring and control. But I don't think monitoring and control is the correct term for the second phase because what often happens, and it's a trap people fall into, where they plan too much. They love spending ages at their desk entering data into a schedule, optimizing, changing things, and then when construction actually starts, people ignore the plan and just go and do their own thing. So a plan only has value if you do something with it. So schedule implementation is the phase I refer to, where we take the initial schedule and we put that plan into action.

So now I'm going to break down the schedule development process in much more detail. We'll go through each of the individual phases, and I'll go to my example schedule and show you how to build it. So schedule development is how we build a schedule that complies with the project requirements. It captures our construction methodology correctly. That means it's going to be realistic. We optimize the construction methodology for both cost and time. So we factor in things like the overall duration, reducing our indirect costs. We schedule things so we reduce risks and don't stack trades. So we consider all of these optimizations. It factors in any site constraints such as the rate we're getting materials delivered, the access to certain workfronts. All that stuff is built into it. So it's very realistic. It's easy to understand and follow and to communicate to people, and is fundamentally going to be a tool we have at our disposal to manage construction works because at the end of the day, I keep coming back to this point: if we just build a plan and don't do anything with it, we've effectively wasted our time. So we will always want to see the schedule as a tool that is going to help us deliver the construction project. And there's going to be two outputs to this process. There's going to be the schedule itself, the realistic, accurate, practical schedule we've built. Then there's also going to be a basis of schedule document that details our assumptions and how we have created the schedule. So the basis of schedule will document how we've come up with our inclement weather allowance, how we've sequenced the trades and what assumptions we've made, how we've come up with the durations of activities, basically all the input data behind it. So the basis of schedule is always, always needs to be read in parallel with the schedule because it documents what went into the schedule and why certain decisions were made.

All right. So step number one, before we can go build any sort of schedule, because a schedule is methodology expressed through time, we number one need to understand how we're going to deliver the project. Now, methodology is a very broad, encompassing term, and it can mean a ton of different things, and there's a ton of different components to it. So importantly, understanding whether you're subcontracting or self-performing the works, where you're procuring materials, all these elements feed into the methodology. But broadly, it's about understanding how you're going to deliver the project, what are the stages, and what is the sequence of works. So when I refer to this schedule, what I'm talking about with a methodology is it's a commercial construction project. We understand that we have some design and approval phase that initiates the project. Then we understand the core sequences of the build. So we've got our demolition and site preparation. Then we're doing our earthworks and concrete. We're doing our structure and envelope. Then we're doing the MEP installation, the finishes and fit-out. And then we have some commissioning and handover phase at the end. So I guess the durations, the, the exact durations don't matter, but just having a high-level understanding of how the project is going to be delivered. Obviously, this is completely dependent on the project scope. If you're doing a battery project, if you're doing a solar farm, again, the breakdown is going to be completely different. This is for a commercial construction project, but you just really, at a high level, need to understand how is the project going to be built.

Once you understand this, the next step is to develop a work breakdown structure. So a work breakdown structure takes your entire project scope and it breaks it down into manageable chunks of work. This could be by phases, could be by areas of work, it could be by trades or services, whatever makes sense for your project. So again, for a commercial construction project, the design phase starts. Then we have demolition and site prep, structure and envelope, MEP installation, finishes and fit-out, and commissioning and handover. So that is that is the high-level breakdown of the project. Again, that makes sense because that is the sequences of the build, and then under each of these sets of activities, we have broken it down into a more detailed set of tasks. So the goal with the work breakdown structure is it's a hierarchical decomposition where we add increasing detail as we go through. And so we want to take the overall project, break it down into, number one, a high-level comp, a high-level structure that makes sense, and then you have increasing levels of detail below that.

Now, there's so much variability in how you do this, but you just have to do it how it makes sense for your project. For example, if your client is the one responsible for design and approvals, you might not choose to have this as a separate phase, but you might have a heading which is "Client Milestones" and have receipt of IFC design as a milestone within there. But obviously, for this project, we're responsible for the designer approval. So, it makes sense to break down the activities. Or, for example, I was working on a battery project recently, and I chose to break down the schedule as the actual battery constructions and the substation as two different sets of activities that just made sense for the project. It's really about, again, there's no hard rules with this. It's very much understanding the scope, the methodology, and then just coming up with a logical breakdown. The only core principles behind this should be that it is hierarchical. So it gets increasingly detailed. What you break it down into are manageable chunks of work. The general rule behind this, again, it's, I don't like saying the term "rule" because it's almost implies there's one correct way to do it. There's often lots of correct ways to do this. It's more about understanding how you do it. But you should say, basically, one crew, one trade, one area is the general principle behind which you want to get to your lowest level of detail. And then the final point, which is very important, is it should be comprehensive. It should cover the entire scope of works. Nothing should be left out of it, because if something's left out of your work breakdown structure, it's eventually going to be left out of your schedule.

So again, there's really two inputs to this. There's the actual scope of work, what you physically have to construct. This will be what's shown on the drawings. But there's also how you choose to build it, because how you choose to build it will vary a lot. Are you going to use in-situ concrete or are you going to do pre-cuts? Because obviously, that completely changes the schedule. The other big one for methodology is whether you choose to subcontract or self-perform the works. The reason that matters is generally self-perform tasks, you need to understand in a lot more detail. So you need to know when we're procuring materials, when those materials need to be on site, when we're mobilizing, when we're getting plans, all that stuff is much more important with self-perform works. Subcontractors, we generally just let the subcontractor worry about that stuff. So self-perform works will tend to break down much more than subcontracted works.

Okay. So in practice, what is this going to look like, say, on a civil infrastructure project? So say we have a road project. We break that down at WBS level one. We choose to break it down into earthworks, structures and bridges, utilities, and road works. We then break down earthworks into clearing and grubbing, bulk earthworks, drainage, and subgrade. We break utilities, for example, down into service relocation, street lighting, and traffic signals. Now, maybe because traffic signals were going to an external subcontractor, we might not actually need to break it down any more than that. Or we might choose, if we have three intersections, we might have a WBS item for each individual intersection. But then if we break down street lighting, which again, we want to do in a lot more detail, we might have pits, conduits, and foundations, lighting poles, distribution boards, and circuits and luminaires. And below that, we have another layered breakdown below that. And that is where we get to our full work breakdown structure, which follows this rule of one trade, one activity, one location. And we've also, with our full work breakdown structure dictionary, we've broken it down in sufficient detail that we can allocate an individual to a task. So in practice, it's broken down enough that say, we know we've got distribution boards done in zone A, we've got the conduits done in zone A, we've got the light done in zone A, we can start the circuits and luminaires, and then we can complete the energization. If we didn't have this broken down zone by zone, we might miss important linkages.

Okay. So once we have developed our work breakdown structure, we have a complete, complete, comprehensive list of everything we need to do to deliver the project. We can begin to link tasks together. Now, there are two types of linkages we need to understand. There's mandatory dependencies and discretionary dependencies. A mandatory dependence is a sequence you must follow. So, for example, if I'm going to install a light pole, I need the foundation completed beforehand. But there are also discretionary linkages we choose to save cost, optimize resources, and save time. For example, we may only want to bring in a crane to install light poles once we have 20 foundations available. Or we may want to do each zone sequentially to use the same crew doing the task. So in which case, there is a resource linkage between zone A electrical installation and zone B electrical installation, but the same crew is doing the same task. But that's not a mandatory dependency because we could bring in a second crew. We could bring in a second crane to stand the light. These are optional linkages.

Now, they obviously make sense to, it obviously makes sense to have these optional linkages in because we want to manage our resources. We want to optimize for cost. But one trap you can fall into when preparing a schedule is putting in too many discretionary linkages early on. For example, building a resource-optimized schedule before you have the discretionary linkages in, and it can cause a lot of confusion. So my general rule is, the first cut of doing a schedule, as much as practical, only do mandatory linkages. You can go back and you can optimize for resources and things like that. But at least initially, try to only focus on doing the mandatory linkages.

Okay. So how can two activities be connected? Well, you can have, there's a couple of different types of dependencies. You can have a finish-to-start relationship, where B starts after A is finished. This is going to be 90% of the linkages in your schedule. For example, once the concrete curing is complete, you can strip the formwork, or once design is approved, you can start construction. So, this is most linkages within your schedule. So, very simple of a finish-to-start relationship is, once the site establishment and set-out is complete, we can begin the earthwork. So, once this task is finished, we can start this next task.

The next two types of linkages are start-to-start relationships and finish-to-finish relationships. For example, say you're doing the electrical rough-in, and it can start 3 days after the mechanical rough-in. That would be a start-to-start relationship with a 3-day lag. Or, for example, you could have the cladding starting five days after the framing. You could have a start-to-start relationship with a 5-day lag. So these sorts of relationships are very common where you have multiple crews doing different trades and they're following each other. So, for example, if I go back to our schedule, the electrical rough-in starts after the roofing works. That is linked to the mechanical rough-in with a 5-day lag. So if I look at this relationship, might I click that mechanical rough-in, it's a start-to-start relationship with a 5-day lag. So you can see, 5 days after this task starts, this next task can start.

Okay, the next type is, we have start-to-start. We also have finish-to-finish. Now, finish-to-finish is common as the opposite of a start-to-start relationship. So, for example, you can only have the testing finish after the installation. So, you start a quality crew, a testing crew, they're starting after, but they can only finish after the next, after the installation is done plus a lag. Now, the final one is a start-to-finish relationship, which people have tried to explain this to me, and I've seen examples. I've never seen one used in practice. I think if you're going to use one, you're almost certainly overcomplicating something. In my, I cannot just, I think the only possible application is say, there's a bit of plant running, and you need to decommission it to start something else. That is the only example where you have a start-to-finish relationship. But again, I think you could do that same thing with just two different tasks. So I mean, probably not going to be using that.

Now, with start-to-start and finish-to-finish, you quite often have leads and lags. So, for example, the electrical starts 3 days after the mechanical. That is referred to as a lag. There's a delay between task A and task B. We can also have a lead, where a task starts before the previous task finishes. I tend really not to use leads, leads, sorry. I tend to use lags much more. I just think they make sense logically. You start the electrical a couple of days after the mechanical. You need to wait a couple of days for the concrete to cure before you can start the next task. Leads, for some reason, never really seem to come up, but lags tend to be much more common.

All right. So once we know the order all the tasks fall into. So if we think about what we've done, we've got our list of tasks, our work breakdown structure, we understand the sequence the work needs to be completed in. Again, the mandatory sequence, not the discretionary. I know in practice you do have to include some discretionary linkages, but in practice, you should try to avoid them as much as possible. The next step is to estimate the duration of each task. Now, this is going to depend a little bit on whether you are self-performing the works or whether you are subcontracting the works. For subcontracted works, you're likely going to be relying on your subcontractors to provide you this information. For self-perform works, you are going to be estimating durations using the very complicated principle that the duration of a task is the quantity of work divided by the production rate. So if we have 200 meters of cable tray to install at 20 meters per day, that takes us 10 days. Very, very complicated principle. The important point I want to make is, when you're thinking about the production rate of a task, it is always the production rate of the constraint. This is a very important thing to understand, because if you think, for example, building a steel warehouse like this, your constraint could be the rate at which the crane can install steel, or your constraint might be the rate at which steel is delivered to site, or your, your constraint might be the rate at which people can assemble and actually bolt together the steel. So it's very important to understand what the constraint of the task is, because that is going to be the production rate.

So, for example, again, I'm working on a battery project. The batteries are stored in a different location. So the constraint for the task when we install the batteries isn't how many a crane can install per day. It's how many actually get taken to the crane. And again, when you're talking about self-delivered works where you have big volumes or quantities of work, like earthworks, this is where you really need to understand the resourcing allocated to a task, because this is where you begin to play with things. You might have two excavators, you might have four excavators, you might have five trucks. So you really need to balance the resources to optimize the pace for the work. And this is where it becomes really essential to understand cost as well, because for example, say you're getting steel delivered to fabricate this warehouse. There are so many different ways you could do this. You could have three cranes. You could have one crane. You could increase the rate at which the steel is delivered to site. You could get all the steel delivered beforehand if stockpiled on site and then only bring in a crane when you need it. The problem with that is then you would need one crane set up loading the steel onto a truck. You would need another crane at the location, and so it's actually, when you think about this, you can go down a rabbit hole of any individual task. Now, I'm not an expert in steel or earthworks or anything. So again, this is where you really need to speak to people who understand the work in detail. This is where it gets confusing, and it blurs the line between mandatory and discretionary dependencies. That's why you really do have to, when this is probably more, this is probably not as relevant for an example schedule where I have, where you have, it's a commercial construction project. There's a series of just large, there's a series of different trades. We can't really play with the resourcing too much. It's probably subcontracted work. So we're relying on our subcontractors to give us durations. But when it is big volumes of self-delivered work, you have to really understand the balance of resources and what the constraint of the task is.

Okay. So what that will give you, this formula of the quantity divided by the production rate, that will give you the number of days it to complete, takes to complete the task. But importantly, the number of days that it takes to complete the task is different to the duration that will show up in your schedule. Now, the reason that this is different is because we don't work every single day. We might work six days a week. We might work five days a week. We, there is public holidays. We could work Sundays. We could even do night shifts. So that 30 days of work we actually do in 15 days because we're doing day and night shift. So it's very important to understand what is referred to as the schedule calendar. In my example schedule, if I go to my calendar, I have non-working days across Christmas and public holidays, and I have, I'm working Monday to Friday. But for example, if I change it to working Saturday, the overall schedule condenses because those 30 days of work we're doing in 5 weeks as opposed to 6 weeks because we're working the Saturday.

Now, the other important variable when doing the schedule calendar, and there's multiple different ways you can express this, some people express this in the calendar, other people show an inclement weather allowance at the end of the project. But depending on where you are, how often it rains, the type of work you're doing as well. If it's very windy, you'll have more inclement weather associated with crane lifts. In areas where it's hot, it might get too hot to be working outside. You need to understand the inclement weather allowance as well. For example, where we're working, we allow around 2 days per month of work for inclement weather. And this is where you should be taking, you should be noting these assumptions you're making. And those assumptions should go into your basis of schedule. So you're documenting how you've come up with these allowances, how you've come up with the calendar, why you're assuming you're working a 5-day week, why you're assuming you're working a 6-day week.

So basically, what we did in the previous step is we developed our network schedule. So this would be a simplistic diagram of a network schedule, where we have a start, our sequence of activities, and how they relate together. So, for example, the street lighting cable works, we obviously have to do the pits, conduits, and foundations, then in parallel, we can do the lighting installation, the distribution board installation, sorry, the pole installation, distribution board installation, and then once those are complete, we can begin wiring everything up and terminating it with the electrical installation. Now, depending how you do your tasks, whether you're assuming quantity per day or quantity per hour. For example, this is a quantity per hour estimate. We've assumed that there's 10 working hours per day. We've got 3 hours of non-productive time. So, we've got 7 productive hours. Our productivity rate per productive hour is 20 lineal meters/hour. So, we can do 140 meters of conduit per shift because it's 7 productive hours by 20 meters/hour. Our pit installation rate is 0.5 pits per hour. So we can do 3.5 pits per shift. Our foundations is 3.5 foundations per shift. Our total duration, so sorry, our total duration is going to be our quantities divided by our production rates. So conduit installation per shift is 140 meters. We've got 3,500 meters of conduit. We need 25 shifts to do the conduit. We need 10 shifts through the pits using the same principles, and we need 40 shifts to do the foundation, which gives us 75 shifts, or 75 days to do the work. We then would apply this to our calendar. If we're working 6 days per week, that would be roughly, what's that? 12 weeks. If we're working 5 days per week, that would be whatever, 75 divided by 15 weeks. So that then gives us the duration of the task. And once we enter all our durations into our network schedule, we have effectively got all of the data to build the schedule model.

So the most common schedule model that we'll see is the Gantt chart. The Gantt chart is just an easy visual representation of all of this information. So if I go to my example schedule, it's, you can very clearly see when you look at the bars in the Gantt chart how tasks link to each other and the overall sequence of the project. It's basically like, it's very clear to see when tasks start, when they finish, what the big drivers of the durations are. Now, I'll talk about the critical path in a second. You can also very easily see the critical path and the series of tasks that if delayed will delay project completion.

The disadvantages of Gantt charts is if you're doing something like a 3-week look ahead, where things are changing all the time, you're rapidly changing what date something's starting, when you're doing something, you're trying to work out when different trades can do different things. Gantt charts can be very painful to update and maintain that regularly. So that is why task boards like this, that are very popular in lean construction, have taken over so much in terms of that weekly, daily sort of planning. And what they generally are is you'll break the project down into areas or phases. For example, building, you might do it floor by floor, and you will have what works are taking place on each floor. There's lots of different ways you could do them, but the general principle is you just have some sort of columns with whether, whether you do it by floor of the building, or you have columns for like, "In Progress," "Ready," "Done," which is more of the agile way of doing it, but you're just, you're just visually representing things much, much more simply.

Now, you can do this in specialist software, or you can just do it on a whiteboard. My personal preference is for 3-week look aheads, you use an Excel sheet. For sort of mid-range programs or smaller construction projects, you can use SmartSheet or Microsoft Projects. So, SmartSheet is the software I'm doing the other schedule in. For complicated projects where you've got hundreds and hundreds of lines, where you have resource loading, you have different calendars for office tasks and on-site works, you want to integrate costs with it, you want complicated delay analysis, that is when you would begin to use Primavera P6. But really, our commercial construction project is relatively small. Most simple projects, you could use SmartSheet or Microsoft Project. But for sort of $200 million hospital projects, you should use something like Primavera P6. For big projects, you should use Primavera P6 because that's when you really get out of this sort of detailed analysis.

So when we go and put all this initial information into our schedule, what we end up with is the first draft of the project schedule. The next important concept to understand is that this first draft will be wrong. We might not show that we're finishing on time. We might not be properly meeting any interim milestones. The critical path might not actually make sense when we actually look at it and we think, well, external landscaping is on the critical path, but that doesn't even have to be done before that. So we might realize there's errors. We might basically look at ways to optimize for cost and risk. We might need to better integrate resourcing to understand practically how we would deliver it. So this is when we go to the schedule and we review it. We analyze it. We talk to it. We get other people to review it, and we basically make sure that the way we are planning to deliver the project is practical, realistic, and achieves all of the milestones that we're meant to.

So when reviewing a schedule, there's really three questions I would ask: Is, does it make sense? Is it correct? And do the overall durations and the durations of different phases make sense at a conceptual level? The reason I think the conceptual understanding of the schedule is very important is because if you look at a schedule like this, and you have this one actually isn't too bad, but for example, the battery project I was doing, there was this one activity that was just completely blown out on the critical path. And in practice,

If your whole job was delayed because of DC cable terminations, you would get you would double the resources in half the time. So that's why it's important to understand in practice, you're not going to have say some task where you can easily add resources. You wouldn't have it massively blowing out the overall duration of the schedule.

Again, the way I always like to think about this stuff is it's better to be roughly correct than precisely wrong. Some people get way too detailed too early and they end up with these overly complicated schedules that actually kind of hard to analyze after you've prepared. So that's why I think if you're ever asking should I add more detail or less detail I would always on the side of adding less detail because then it's easier to do this sort of high-level understanding and conceptual working through the schedule.

When we analyze a schedule the most important thing to understand is the critical path. So what is a critical path? It's the series of activities that if get delayed delay project completion. So you can look at this schedule. You can see if the duration of the earthworks extends it pushes out the entire project schedule. But if the duration of the cladding subcontractor extends which is pushing out this next activity which is a mechanical rough-in. I can extend this task. Well I can't. Oh, because it's got a finish-to-finish link. That wasn't a good example.

But what's another good example? Maybe this one. Plumbing subcontractor. If the duration of the plumbing subcontractor extends, it does nothing to the overall project duration. That's because this activity has float. That means you can delay it up to this point in time. So if it gets delayed up to here, well, there was a slight change then, but it gets delayed up to here. It's not on the critical path. If it gets delayed more than that, suddenly that activity is on the critical path and the electrical subcontractor isn't.

So the difference between what you can delay something before it ends up on the critical path is referred to as float. Now again, this is an area where I think people get overly precise. If in practice if these say these two activities have almost identical duration I would consider both of these activities on the critical path because for example the joining joinery subcontractor it has one day of float in practice you don't know exact when you're praying a schedule you don't exactly whether he's going to take 13, 14, 15 or 16 days it is an estimate of the duration so therefore a near critical path activity as far as it actually matters is on the critical path.

The critical path is very important to understand because these durations, this sequence, these are the variables we can tweak to change the finish date. So for example, say we can double the resources of our electrical subcontractor and we can half their duration. We pull back the critical path. We can add more resources to the mechanical subcontractor. Again, now the plumbing subcontractor is on the critical path, but you can see what I mean. Like these are the activities that if you tweak and change they are the ones that change the duration of the overall project.

So critical path where it's the logic of the critical path always has to make sense. You should be able to look at it and you be like, yep, that actually makes sense. On a building job you'd start your earthworks would be the first thing that makes sense. Then you'd be doing your steel erection. That would be what's holding up the job. Then you would be doing your roofing. Then your services.

When we talk about float, there's really two types of float. We refer to as total float, which is how much an activity can slip before it ends up on the critical path and impacts the critical path. The other term we use is free float, which is how much an activity can be delayed before it impacts the next activity. So it wouldn't be on the critical path, but it is now impacting the next activity.

Okay. So say for this schedule, we find out the action. So, where are we finishing now? We're finishing on the 16th of August, but that is too late for what we want. Say our actual project completion date was meant to be the Thursday the 9th of August or whatever that date is. What can we actually do about that? So, we built a schedule, but we're contravening the critical path. We're contravening the client's completion date. Well, there's actually two things we can do about this.

We can we can add more resources to an individual task which is referred to as crashing where we simply say, okay, now for our civil crew, we're going to our civil contractor, we're going to have two crews, which is going to reduce the duration to that many days. So we have massively pulled back the schedule because we have added resources. The other thing we can do say we didn't want to change the resourcing. The other thing we could do is if we look at this second trade which is a concrete slab, we could start some of the concrete works before we have fully finished the earthworks. So say instead of having this um h sorry this one say we're having that as a finish-to-start relationship. We could have that as a start-to-start plus a 20-day lag. Well, 20 days was actually the same duration, so that doesn't really make sense. Let's say second time lucky, 15-day day lag. So now we brought forward the concrete works. So we can we've also pulled the schedule back that way.

Now crashing and fast-tracking have different pros and cons. When we fast track, so we overlap activities, we add risk of delay. So we want to start mechanical and then we want to start electrical 5 days after. That electrical has to follow mechanical. There's a chance the electrical subcontractor catches the mechanical subcontractor and we have to pay an acceleration. We have to pay delays to the electrical subcontractor because they're standing around on site without being able to do any work. So that adds risk. Fast-tracking crashing typically adds cost. So if instead of doing the civil works with one crew, we're bringing in a second crew to do the bulk earthworks, they're going to be less efficient than previously because they're using more resources. So two crews generally won't operate as productively as one crew. So our cost per unit is going to go up. So crashing adds cost, vice tracking adds risk.

The other series of optimizations we have to do to our schedule is we need to understand the resourcing profile. This is basically the simplest way to do this is again that commercial construction isn't a good example of this because it's subcontracted. So with subcontracted programs, you generally don't have as many problems as with resourcing, but with self-perform works particular, you really need to understand the profile of resources completing the project. So there's really a couple of different terms when we speak about resources. So you'll find when you do your initial schedule, typically you'll end up with some resource profile like this where it's peaks, dips, it's not consistent flow of resources. In practice, when you deliver a project, you're not going to have 50 guys one day, 30 guys the next, 70 guys the next. You want 50 guys throughout the sequence of the project.

So to do what? To do that, we referred to as resource smoothing where we take so we have a peaky flow of resources, we have to smooth those resources out. That is referred to as resource smoothing where we redistribute resources without changing the end date. Resource leveling is where we rearrange activities within their float to remove peaks so we don't exceed the site capacity. Now I don't know maybe I shouldn't maybe those definitions weren't really clear. I was just reading them and thinking, ah, I don't think they really make sense. But really basically what you want to do is you want to either you want to make sure that you're not exceeding your total resources where you have dips in resources. You want to add more people. Basically, you just want to smooth it out. So without changing the finish date, without contravening any critical path activities, you just have a consistent flow of resources. I was saying that in way too of a complicated of way.

All right, the final step is, and this sort of happens a bit in parallel with the optimization thing, is you need to get people to buy in and understand the schedule. A schedule that nobody follows is absolutely useless. You really want to be able to you want to show everyone relevant to the schedule. You want to go through the schedule with your subcontractors, your supervisors if you're self-performing work, your client, key stakeholders, different teams and basically make sure that the schedule you build is as bulletproof, practical and realistic as possible. That's why again you want it you always want to follow this principle of being roughly correct rather than precisely wrong.

Okay. So that was a very process-driven approach to scheduling. We will spoke through building a work break number one understanding the methodology then building a work breakdown structure putting all the tasks in the correct sequence then developing your network schedule. So again, sorry, putting all the tasks in the correct sequence, then estimating the durations and how to do this for subcontract and self-perform work, how to analyze and optimize the schedule so you're not contravening the critical path. And then finally going through this with stakeholders, very high-level, very conceptual, again more or less intuitive when you really start to think about it.

What I want to talk about briefly now is how do you actually go through and schedule different types of construction activities? There's a lot of nuance to each different things. Yes, the principles are the same, but you need to understand how long it takes, what order they need to be completed in, very simple. Now, I just want to talk about specifically about things like design, procurement, earthworks, services, different types of activities and in practice how you actually schedule those sorts of tasks.

Okay, so number one is design. Design is always broken down into design gates. So you have a package like earthworks. Under that you will have different design gates and then within each gate you'll generally have three activities. You'll have the actual design development. So this would be the 30% design development is this effort of 20 days. Then there's a period of time where once you submit the 30% design stakeholders can review and make comments on it. Then the team will need to address and close out those comments through a review cycle. That happens for every design gate for every package. So then when you're developing a design schedule generally you would follow this approach. You would break it down into what are the packages, what is the effort to develop design, what is the stage of how long does stakeholders have to make comments and then how long do you need to close out those comments. That is when you would hit that milestone for say 30% design complete, 70% design complete.

Generally the other important thing to understand with the design schedule is typically you would begin procurement off the revision before issue for construction because what tends to happen is if you wait for issue for construction design before you begin procurement you can cause delays to your project and it's always it's often not necessary because the last revision of the design is often very close to what you'll get for IFC. So it's often good enough to do procurement. Again, not always, but really it's important to understand the milestone before IFC because that is what's going to be driving your procurement.

So, procurement in the same principle that we would break design down into a series of gates, procurement, we break down into a series of stages. And the way we do this is again breaking it down into stages of when we issue the package to our subcontractors, how long our subcontractors have to quote for a package of works, how long we have to evaluate their packages, how long we have to then negotiate the contract with a preferred awarding the contract, then a period of time for them to mobilize the site or fabricate those materials. The biggest mistake I see when people are scheduling procurement is they ignore how long the period from issuing the package to signing a contract is. It is always going to be way longer than you think. So it's important to actually track those phases. What happens is often what ends up in the schedule is almost it starts at the fabrication date. So it starts at lead time for structural steel or lead time for inverters on a solar farm, lead time for the main switchboard. What you really have to consider is how long you need to go from the 70% design to actually negotiating, closing out a contract, signing a contract, and then giving them a purchase order and a notice to proceed. Importantly, it's always essential to understand the lead times for equipment because depending if you're doing any sort of electrical or services-based project, you can get six-month lead time for gears. We I've seen 24-month lead times for transformers. So again, the top of your schedule, you should always have some duration for procurement. Again, this is a bad example because there's really it's a building project. You wouldn't really have that same long lead time procurement. But if you're doing any industrial or commercial project, understanding lead times is absolutely essential.

All right, so we've done the design, we've ordered all our stuff, the stuff is on site when we need it. Let's talk about the actual construction works. So number one is civil and bulk earthworks. Generally the guiding principle behind this will be the volume of work and the productivity you can hit. This is where it's an understanding of the balance of resources. If you have bulk civil works really it's just going to be this. You've got 1,000 m³ to do. You've got 20,000 m³ to do. How many are you doing per day and what is the productivity rate? Before that you'll have some sort of demolition and site strip which would be sort of clearing and grubbing and the total m². Then you'll have your bulk excavation. You'll have your subgrade inspections and proof rolls. You'll then do your fill and compaction where most of the time in an earthworks program will be. And then you might have some underground conduits, drainage, and services that go in once you've done your fill. Earthworks is probably the most weather-dependent trade. And unless you're on a project that has really long lead times for equipment, so for example, this is often on a solar farm where you're actually inverting uh so you're ordering inverters and panels that have a six-month lead time. You earthworks will almost always be on the critical parts of the project. The reason they're not on solar farms is because it's the actual duration it takes to get that equipment to site. So while that equipment is being ordered, you'll do your earthworks. So you won't actually be held up by that. But most projects, earthworks will be on the critical path of the project.

Once we are up to finished ground level, we then have our foundations and structural steel concrete. The guiding time is going to probably be the number of pours and the cycle of those pours. So for each pour, you're going to have to set out the slab and the positions of it. You're going to have to do your formwork, place your reinforcement, do your pre-pour inspection, pour the concrete, allow us some sort of curing period, and then stripping the formwork. So that curing period can be quite important. Particularly, you can get certain concrete mixes that cure faster. But again, if you're building, it's more the pour cycle time and the curing duration. So if you have to do a foundation and then you have to do walls, you obviously have to pour the foundation, then pour the walls. So that's that is the cycle which will drive the duration of that task. Then if you have so so if you have a concrete structure, it's the pour and the cycle time. If it's a structural steel structure, it'll be the rates at which you can erect steel. Assuming you don't have to wait for the actual steel to be delivered that you have no long lead times.

Probably should have done architectural and building works next. But really next once you've done your structure, it'll be a combination of the services and the fit-out work. Again, services probably the key one is understanding the actual lead time of the material to site. Then you'll do some sort of roughening where you're installing conduit and cable tray. Maybe that's behind the walls. Then the builders come in and they put up the walls. They do the cabling and then they fit off the end devices. So it's understanding this interaction between the architectural work and the services work. But services is probably a key one is understanding the lead time of getting the equipment to site. Then the sequence between the building works and the services works and coordinating the two coordinating both and then the different services trades as well. Again, that is a nightmare and a whole topic of in and of itself on large commercial buildings and that is really the bulk construction works. But again, it's not over.

We also have our commissioning and handover, the completions of the project. This is where we go from sort of more coordinating and tracking a lot of different people or we have a critical path. Handover is really coming up with a massive list of everything you need to do to close out the project. Creating a defect and punch list and then systematically working through that. So stage one of this is going to be your punch list and defect inspections where you do an inspection of each trade. You identify a list of things they have to do. You send that list to the relevant trade or subcontractor. They work through it. They close out the defects. You do a walk with your client. They identify their defects. You close them out. After you've done your defects, you can move into testing and commissioning. Commissioning, which is really system by system energization and testing. You energize the electrical system. You do your mechanical startup. You tune your building systems. You do testing of all your pipe work. You commission the lifts, all the different services within the building. Again, this is something where you really need to coordinate the energization. So, services available. And then the final is any sort of final inspections and handover your certificate of occupancy.

Now the final thing I want to talk about is subcontractor schedules. So this would be where you subcontract out of package works, could be earthworks, could be electrical, could be whatever. But this is really where we start to get into the commercial side of scheduling, which I'm going to talk about later. But within every subcontract trade, you really want to understand the mobilization time of the trade, what how long they need to mobilize the site, their actual sequence of work and how it interacts with other trades and what they need to do to hand over and complete their works. It's very important to understand this and then to coordinate trades. So with self-perform works, it tends to be a bit easier because you have supervisors who know the work, who coordinate it within themselves. But with subcontractors, you tend to be more responsible and more accountable for coordinating different subcontractors together. So, it's very important when you're getting subcontractors to site that you're breaking down their schedule enough that you understand the interaction between all the different trades so they're not running into problems and holding each other up.

Okay. So, we've built the schedule. We spent tons of time in Smart Sheet Project Premier Vera P6. We've sat there analyzing the drawings, doing quantity takeoffs. We've built our entire detailed 5,000 line construction schedule. Then what do we do with it? Well, we start construction. Our phone starts going off every 30 seconds. We get absolutely entrenched in the chaos of the project and we completely forget about the original schedule we created. You'd be pretty surprised how often this happens on construction projects. I like to plan. Most construction project managers I know love to sit at their desk for ages analyzing drawings, preparing detailed schedules, thinking through methodologies, but when all the chaos starts, the plan just goes out the window.

So this is why I think the forgotten phase or phase or domain of scheduling is implementation. And the purpose of schedule implementation is that fundamentally a plan means nothing if you don't follow that. All that time we spent planning, developing the schedule, analyzing the critical path, if we don't do anything with it, if we don't use it to meaningfully improve the performance of the project, fundamentally all we have done is procrastinated.

In practice, the way we implement a schedule is we take our master project schedule and we transform it into a to-do list. So the master schedule tells us everything that has to happen to meet our project outcomes. It captures the best methodology if we've done it correctly. Tells us when we need to finish each task. The forgotten piece is then taking this schedule and transforming it into a to-do list. A list of things, a list of tasks we need to do. I've already sort of spoken about this in terms of this concept of schedule level and taking the overall project and decomposing it into a list of tasks. Really the fundamental purpose of this is we're taking our high-level program and we're identifying everything we need to ensure happens. So for example our master schedule says basement excavation with a duration of 3 weeks. Our detailed schedule specifies that we need to float the machine to site. We need to get the surveyor to come and set this out. We need to get our supervisor to set up barricading. We need to do all of our service proving and non-destructive digging to identify services. We need to then excavate to 1.5m and then we need to install shoring.

If we think about this, this is a list of very specific tasks that as a construction manager, we are the ones responsible for making happen. Floating the machine to site. Do we have to organize for our safety safety advisor to do an environmental inspection of it? Do we need to get them to give over certain documentation? Do we need to enter it into our plant register? The survey set up. We have to call the surveyor. We have to tell them to come to site before the excavation begins. The barricaders. Do we need to hire barricading? Do we need to organize additional ones? Service location, we need to book a non-destructive digging truck to go and actually do the service roofing. So, I think you sort of get the point I'm trying to make. But the master schedule just tells us what has to happen. Our detailed 3-week look-ahead is our to-do list that we as the construction managers, the project engineers, the supervisor. This is the list of tasks we methodically work through to identify exactly what we need to do to ensure this overall task gets done within the allotted time window.

So the process we follow to actually make sure this happens is to number one, well step one is to simply understand the schedule. Our job is to look at the overall master master schedule to read it critically to understand exactly what has to happen at each point in time. Now we may have been the ones who developed the schedule in which case this step is redundant because we built it. We know what went into it. But quite often a separate bid team or a tender team will have prepared this schedule and it's our job to go and thoroughly decompose it and to understand the specifics of how it was developed. The point I want to make here is that all schedules are wrong. A schedule is a prediction of what will happen. It has assumptions built into it. Assume productivity rates, assumed linkages, all these detailed assumptions. There'll be errors and inconsistencies. Our job is when we to when we read the schedule to read it critically to understand do the dependencies make sense? Are the durations realistic? Because at the end of the day, as much as the schedule is our baseline, our guide of what we have to do, our core objective is to actually achieve the project outcome. So cost, time, all these objectives. So it's really about understanding the schedule has some errors and inconsistencies in it. Our job is to understand it and again we're following the objectives of the schedule, not necessarily blindly trusting that everything in here is correct.

Once we understand the overall master schedule, our next step is to decompose this into a short-range program. Now, this is a very fancy 3-week look-ahead. Yours don't actually need to be this pretty and fancy, but it's basically you take the master schedule, which might have this entire activity as one line item. So structure and envelope works and you break it down into the discrete subtasks and you map out exactly what day each of these things has to happen and what needs to happen to facilitate it. So this is where you break it down into different areas of a building. You break it down into specific tasks you have to do like as in a site inspection where you review the coordination. All these different niches. It's really again you take a time slice of the master project schedule whether that's three weeks, six weeks, nine weeks, again very project specific and then you decompose that into a very specific list of tasks that you can track and manage and it's your job again to make sure these actually happen. So I gave the example of a concrete slab before or a basement excavation before but again general principle is you're breaking it down to the individual discrete tasks. Doesn't have to be any f anything fancy. I really like Excel because I like mapping out my tasks and noting down next to them what I specifically have to do or I have to make happen to ensure that task goes ahead. Again, very simple. The surveyor has to set out before we do the excavation. I need to call the surveyor and organize for him to come to site. There's inferred requirements from this as well. Like he has to have the correct drawings if there's any RFIs. So really, I guess I'm laboring this point, but it's really taking what is a master schedule in the form of a Gantt chart that's high-level, and we're turning it into a very specific to-do list of every single individual task we need to make happen.

Now, the easiest way to think through how you actually do this decomposition is using a term called pool planning. Pool planning is where instead of asking what comes next when we're talking about a schedule, we ask the question, what do I need to do to ensure that this happens? So, we work backwards from some desired outcome. We're constantly asking a question, what has to happen for this? What what needs to be in place for this to happen? So, if I use a very specific example, we have a concrete pour. We need to do steel fixing, formwork, and concrete. We need to order the steel reinforcement which has a 3-week lead time which means before that we need to get quotes to go through the negotiations and raise a purchase order which means before that we need issue for construction drawings. So we're working backwards from the finished date and we're asking ourselves what needs to be in place.

The reason this is a very important concept to understand is because things take time. That's an obvious comment. It's like a relatively intuitive assumption. The thing I would stress that people often don't think through is how long things take. So when I said to take the schedule, take a time slice and decompose into a 3, six, a week, 9-week look-ahead, that is an oversimplification of what you have to do. It is a framework. The 3-week look-ahead to short-range program is a very useful construction tool, but it is more for coordinating actual works on site and day-by-day plans. Pool planning is where we sort of step back a little bit and we look at dates in the future and we ask ourselves what needs to be in place to have that happen. So for example, if we're ordering steel reinforcement, it has a 3-week lead time. So concrete pour is scheduled for the 28th of June. Our steel reinforcement needs to we need to issue the purchase order and give them the 3 weeks to manufacture the steel reinforcement by the 7th of June. If it's going to take us 4 weeks to get quotes, do the negotiations, get a purchase order approved, we need that done by the 7th of May. If we need to allow for some time to prepare the design drawings, review the shop drawings, that means we actually need that ready by the 7th of April. So, while I said to think about things in terms of three look-ahead, you have to be a bit more mature and sophisticated in how you're doing this. And you really have to think about what is the milestone we're achieving. When do we have to start getting ready? So, really, this example of a concrete pour, we really need to be planning for that specific pour 12 weeks in advance. I refer to this as lead time management. And these are these are durations that typically would not be in the master project schedule. Some better schedules will show these linkages, but a lot of the time the master schedule won't show this level of detail. So this level of detail, you really need to the point I just keep trying to stress is you have to be looking far enough advance that you're not missing lead times for things. You're not missing key activities and duration. In my experience, the things that catch people out a lot is it's not so much the on-site coordination, which can be very day-by-day, but it's things like material lead times, approvals for permits, design reviews, third-party authorities, utility connections, booking in resources with subcontractors, and it's the project manager's job to really coordinate all these lead times and to understand how far in advance you have to be planning for that specific thing.

Now, the final thing is when you're actually coordinating works on site, the 3-week look-ahead, the Excel template is a great way to capture a to-do list, but to think through the specific logistics of how you organize that construction site and implement the plan. That comes down to trade coordination, which I like schedules like this where you have a clear map of who is working where, and you use it to coordinate and manage multiple trades working next to each other. And this is a great way of communicating the plan and getting buy-in from the trades actually doing the work as well. So staging plans are a fantastic way to present the 3-week look-ahead or the short-range program to people actually doing the work and to get their buy-in because at the end of the day a lot of the time and effort you spend as a project engineer or project manager is actually going to be organizing people to do the work. You're obviously not the one doing the work. A big part of the 3-week look-ahead, managing lead times, managing these things is actually just telling people where they need to be and when. And I find staging plan is a fantastic way to plan that out and to work out and give people as much notice as possible.

Okay, so developing the plan is working out what you're going to do when implementing the plan is taking that plan and putting it into action. Making sure we're actually meeting the steps in our program. Monitoring and control is the feedback loop that how we link all of these things together. And it's really looking at things like how do we know we're actually following the plan correctly? What happens if we fall behind? And how do we keep that baseline schedule up to date so it still remains a useful and practical tool.

No project will exactly follow the plan. That's because the plan is an educated guess. The schedule is wrong the second that you write it. That's good. That's going to be because of change, unknown unknowns, and the fact that progress is when the reality doesn't match the plan. And if the schedule isn't maintained, we're going to lose a lot of the original benefits that we identified as scheduling. For example, keeping our stakeholders informed, maintaining a contractual baseline so we can make claims, and generally just coordinating works and working out what date people need to come to the site, what date we need to order material. So the only way we actually obtain those benefits is by keeping the schedule a live document that we keep up to date. Fundamentally, if we don't keep the plan up to date, we're going to have wrong information and we're going to be we're going to make bad decisions.

So tracking progress. Why do we need to do it? Well, monitoring becomes a lead indicator. We can identify that something is going wrong before it happens. For example, if piling is 10% complete in week four of a 4-week baseline program, so it should be 25%, we still have 3 weeks to do something about it before we have delayed that activity. If that's a critical path activity, we've potentially averted a delay to our overall schedule. It's obviously going to help with our stakeholder reporting, which again is often a contractual requirement where we do need to maintain a baseline. If we cannot prove that we're maintaining a baseline or showing where things are, we could potentially lose our ability to claim for cost and time, then it's also obviously going to help a lot with our decision-making. Say for example, our conduit installation is only 10% complete and it should be 90% complete, but our cable install starts next week and the cable procurement's been delayed. The decision we have to make is should we pay an acceleration to our cable supplier to get it fabricated to get it accelerated? Is it worth spending money to do that? Well, obviously not because we're not going to be ready to install it. Again, this we only know this if we are maintaining some sort of schedule and program.

All right, next, I want to talk about the actual mechanics of how you track progress. The goal of progress tracking very simply is to accurately determine the percentage complete of each task. During the preconstruction phase, we have already identified our work breakdown structure. We have a list of tasks. This set of tasks we need to accurately and objectively measure what percentage complete they are and then from that we can forecast out the completion of that task. And there is two methods to do there is sorry there's two methods to do this depending on the type of task we're tracking. There are production-driven quantity-based units and then there are milestone-driven tasks. So an example of a production-based task would be trenching. We have a 1,000 meters of trenching. We can objectively measure how many linear meters of trenching we're doing per day. Every 10 meters we do that is another percent complete. A credit-based or milestone-driven task is where there is not a consistent baseline quantity against which to measure the task. For example, we're tracking procurement. It does not make sense to measure procurement as a single unit of measure. In practice, what are you tracking? The number of pages of a scope of works written, the number of drawings issued to a supplier. There's no really sensible unit of measure. Which case we need to set up what is referred to as a rule of credit system where we allocate percentages against milestones in the task.

Okay. So I'll talk through each of these different methodologies in a bit more detail and explain how to actually do the progress tracking. Starting with production-driven tasks. Again production-driven task this is when there is a measurable baseline quantity that is an objective measure of how percentage complete the task is. The simple way to do this is number one, we identify the activity and its key unit of measure. Now, sometimes this is more confusing than it seems. For example, if you're tracking concrete by meters cubed placed, I don't think that is a sensible baseline thing because concrete generally tends to be done in staged pours. So, you're trying to get an accurate percentage complete of your concrete works. Than if you're tracking meters cubed per task. Well, you might have some massive base slab with 70% of the concrete in it, then a series of walls that actually take longer than the original base slab. So, you have to be very careful with how you do this. And there are deceptively simple units of measures that aren't useful. So, in that example, the concrete, you might might be better to break it down into separate tasks. And then, if we think about that example of using meters cubed of concrete, well, you're going to pour all the concrete in a day. It's the formwork and steel fixing and the curing that actually takes up all the time in the activity. You have to be quite careful with how you think through this cuz again it's not always obvious and it's often not very simple. Then basically you determine once you've set up your to once you've determined what quantity you're going to track you get the total quantity from the design through a quantity takeoff. Again, you should have done this when you prepared your baseline schedule. Then you simply calculate the planned quantity over time. So what is your target which is a function of your total quantity divided by your duration. So you get your quantity per day.

Now this example I'm going to talk about pits, conduits and foundations and I'm going to this is almost going to be a combination of a linear measurement plus some sort of rule or rule of credit system. Now because we want to track pits and conduits as a single activity to simplify this because obviously measuring linear meters of pit installed doesn't make any sense. We're going to assume that because in an hour they can install a pit and because in an hour they can do 20m of conduit. For the purpose of this objective measurement, we're going to say one pit is equal to 20m of conduit. So if we look, we then take our total design quantities. So we know that there's 7,300 3,500m of conduit to install. There's 35 pits which is the equivalent of doing another kilometer of trenching. And then we've also given our foundations and broken them down like this. Again, the other way you could do this is you could have this as three separate tasks in your schedule. But because we have the one activity and we want a single unit of measure to calculate percentage of complete, we're going to look at them all as a baseline of linear meters and just convert the quantity of foundations and the quantity of pits into a linear meter measurement. For the other activities in our schedule, supply and install lighting poles. That's simple. We're going to track the number of poles installed. For supply and installation distribution boards. Again, very simple. We're going to track the number of distribution boards. And for the number of light fittings and circuits we have to install, we're just going to track that per circuit. So, we have our baseline quantity against each task. We know our original quantity, the duration we have in our schedule. So, we then have our daily target we need to track against. So, 7,350m of the pit trenching conduits. Remember that's not actually 7,350m. That's a combination of pits, conduits, and foundations that we've rolled up into a single figure. Gives us an equivalent target of 100m per day. We need to install 2.25 poles per day. We need to install four circuits per day. So we have baseline quantities. Then simply all we do very very plans quantity. We've got our plan total which is a cumulative target. We have our actuals. We track each day. We track our cumulative this is hard to pronounce cumulative and then we have our total remaining quantity. So we've got planned, we've got actual, we've got cumulative and again we can make we can make this super super complicated and we can get variance which is cumulative minus planned. Again unbelievably complicated math. The key thing here is you just really have to think through what is the unit of measure and how can what is a logical way to do things like this because what happens is people roll up quantities. It gets confusing and you end up tracking a quantity that doesn't really make sense. Again, really have to think through this carefully and be as objective as possible.

Okay. So those were tasks where we can identify a single unit of measure. When we do not have a task that we can represent like that we need to use milestone-driven or a rule of credit system. So this is when the activity we want to track is actually a grouping of sub-activities without a single consistent metric. The classic example I like to use is procurement. There's nothing there's no single quantity you can use to track procurement. You could track procurement for the entire project as a whole measuring the number of packages awarded. But really you want to be a bit more detailed than that. So the way to the way to set up a rule of credit system is you want to set up a list of milestones within the activities and assign a reasonable percentage complete for each of these sub-activities. So for example procurement you can break it down to the tender package being ready you give that a 10%, the tender issued to the market 20%, the quotes received from subcontractors we say that is 50% of that human activity complete, the contract awarded 75% complete and mobilization 100% complete. This is an example it might be completely different if I was ordering long lead time items like for example fabricating an inverters or a transformer which can have a lead time of 72 weeks. This would be the wrong percentage allocation because the time between contract award and mobilization is where 90% of the duration is. So again, these percentage weightings need to make sense in terms of the duration of the task because at the end of the day, we're going to mark off that package as 10% complete when that activity is 10% complete. So really, it needs to reflect that percentage complete across time as well. Now obviously this is much less objective than a than a quantity-driven system. So it's not as good. So it's always better to actually have an objective source of truth. But this is this is good for these sorts of activities which are grouping of sub-activities. So a lot of commercial construction activities I would say are more like this where you've got a series of trades doing small specific tasks. That is that that's going to be more common in commercial construction. A lot of infrastructure projects where you've got long lineal construction projects like building a road, doing long distances of trenching and pipe work, building a solar farm. It's all quantity-based.

Tracking progress simply gives us the underlying data. There's then a series of metrics we want to calculate with this. The obvious one is the percentage complete, which is just the work complete divided by the total quantity, which is again the key underlying number we want to know for each task. Next one we want to track is the production rate divided by sorry the quantity complete divided by the elapsed time. This gives us our production rate. The reason it's important to identify the production rate for a task is because then we can identify whether the scope if a task for example is delayed we can begin to look at well has the scope grown? Are we doing more work than we originally planned or is the rate that we're doing the task slower than we originally thought? The next metric we want to track is our schedule variance. This is the difference between our earned value, what percent complete we actually are, minus our planned value, which is what percentage complete we should be. We can then also work out our schedule performance index, which is instead of minusing our earn instead of minusing plan value from earn value, we take the ratio earn value to plan value and that gives you a ratio of progress. If we're on at an SPI of one, it means our earn value is the exact same as our plan value. If it's below one, we're behind. Then we can also determine our estimated completion date. Now, you can do this as a simple number crunching exercise or the better way to do it is to put some more thought into what the underlying data is telling us and making some predictions about the future. So, if you're doing it on a simple calculation basis, you take the current elapsed time. So where we how far we are gone now plus the remaining quantity divided by the actual production rate. So if it's taken us one week to do 50m of trenching and our current production rate is 50m per week and we've got 150m less to do then we need 3 weeks left to do the trenching.

Okay. So if I show you a very simple worked example to make these numbers make a little bit more sense. So we're working on a solar farm and we have 100 inverters to install. Our plan is to install four per day, which gives us an estimated duration of 25 days. At day 10, we've installed 25 inverters. So, our percentage complete is 25%. We should be at 40% complete. Our production rate is 25, which is 2.5 inverters per day. Our plan was to be at four per day. Our schedule variance is the difference between our earned value,

What we've actually done, minus our planned value, what we should have done. So, we're 15 inverters behind schedule. Our schedule performance index is 625, which tells us we're performing at a rate of 62.5% of our plant. And our estimated completion is 10, the number of inverters we've already installed. Oh, sorry. The number of days we've already taken with the ratio of the number inverters we have left, which is 75 divided by our production rate, which is 2.5, which tells us we need it's overall it's going to take 40 days when it should have taken 15.

So, because we're tracking progress, we can calculate all these figures and we have an estimated completion date for that task. And because we can forecast that out, we can start to assess what will happen if that's a critical path activity. What we do about, which I'm going to talk about in the next section. But really there's going to be three schedules now. We're going to have our baseline schedule. This is the schedule which was frozen at contract award. Then we are going to have our current schedule, where updating with actual dates, and then potentially we have a target or recovery schedule, which is our plan to get back on track.

Okay. So we have tracked progress. We know we're behind. We know there's issues. The next question is what do we actually do about it, if anything at all? And this section I'm going to talk about delay identification and treatment. So treatments really come down to three, a three-step process. We understand the cause. Principally, we want to understand what type of activity specifically is being delayed. We then want to identify what the actual cause is and then explore options to correct the delay. Again, this, if we think about what a treatment is, this is our feedback loop to the original plant. So, this is when we're actually starting to correct progress. We're delayed with the inverter installation. What are we going to do about it? Are we going to bring in an extra crane? Are we going to work longer hours? Are we going to work Sundays? All these different options we have at our disposal. We have to decide what is actually causing the delay and what should we do about it.

Okay. So, step number one is to ask, what is delayed? Principally, we want to understand, is it a critical path activity or near critical path activity, and or is it a non-critical path activity? So obviously, a critical path activity means if that activity is delayed, it will delay project completion. And I've spoken about this in, I've spoken about this before, but in practice, a near critical path activity is the exact same as a critical path activity because again, the schedule is an estimate or a prediction of what we think is going to happen. If something has one day of float, in my opinion, that activity is on the critical path. That one day of float is simply a rounding error. If we have a non-critical path activity, that means that activity can absorb the delay before it causes any impact. So, all we want to do is monitor that, but we wouldn't go out taking on additional risk or spending money to do that faster.

The next step to understand is for each type of activity, is what has actually caused the delay? Is it resource constraints? Is it planning and scheduling issues? Is it technical challenges? Is it external factors like inclement weather, supply chain authorities delays? Is it stakeholder approvals? There's all these possible impacts or causes of delay. The key is we need to understand specifically for our activity what is causing that delay. The reason you want to understand what the cause is, is because it might not actually be our fault. For example, if inclement weather is delaying our earthworks and inclement weather is not our responsibility as the contract, then we have grounds to put in a contractual claim for that delay. But if it is our fault, then we need to do something to address the cause.

So what are our options for all activities, critical or non-critical? We should always look at optimizing. So optimizing is improving systems, methodology, coordination, resources, activities, removing blockers, planning and delivering our work more effectively. Optimization typically does not incur additional costs and it often saves us money. So we should always be asking the question, how can we do this better? Can we review the logic? Are there better ways to do things? That is something we should always be doing. And for non-critical path activities, we're simply being drawn attention to where we have a problem, where we've deviated from the plan. And that is a specific task we should look at, optimize it. But for critical path activities, and if our overall project does not have float, we need to look at spending money or using additional resources or taking on additional risk to deliver it faster.

Fundamentally, two ways we can do this and the terms are fast tracking, where we overlap tasks, which increases risk but might not necessarily cost us money. So fast tracking is, say for example, we have our building works followed by our electrical works, and we're planning on fully finishing the building works before we start the electrical works. Fast tracking would introduce an overlap between these two, our two tasks, which increases risk because there's a chance that task two is delayed by task one. So fast tracking increases risk. The other option is to crash the task. So this is where we apply resources, which means we're probably going to be less productive and less efficient, or we work weekends, extra overtime to catch up, which again increases our per unit cost. So fast tracking will always increase the cost of the task. Sorry. Fast tracking increases the risk of the task being delayed and potentially incurring cost. Crashing increases cost whether you like it or not. So it's probably, it's always better to look at fast tracking before you look at crashing.

Now typically, what you would do is when you have a delay or at least to a critical path activity and you're showing you're going to blow over your critical path, you would develop what is referred to as a recovery schedule that implements these treatments. And that is a very effective stakeholder management tool where you can show your clients, we're behind on this activity. It's on the critical path. This is exactly what we're going to do to fix it. Here is our mitigations. And that again will make your stakeholders happy. And it also just helps you make better decisions because you can really understand and analyze the impacts and options you have available.

So for example, if our earthworks are two behind schedule, the first question we ask is, is earthworks on the critical path? In this case, what has caused it? Weather and slower production rates. So, our options are to add a second excavator, which is again, is going to increase our cost because we're crashing the. I guarantee two excavators aren't going to be working as effectively as one excavator going on a longer period of time. We're also going to start working Saturdays to get an extra day per week. Again, adding overtime. And we're also going to overlap earthworks and drainage, which is going to add coordination route. So, we're spending money to accelerate the critical path task.

Okay, so we've spoken about developing, implementing, monitoring, and controlling a schedule and what happens when things go wrong. When I started talking about tradem, well, maybe it's not even our scope, the cause of the delay. This is where we start to get into the commercial side of scheduling. The number one principle we have to understand that on construction projects, time is money. And there is two reasons this is the case. Number one is simply that every week a project runs, it costs money. If we think about we're hiring office staff, we have a project manager who's paid per week. We're hiring crib facilities, sheds. We're incurring all these costs. They're a function of the duration of the project. So if our project takes six months, it will cost less than if it will cost less than overheads than if our project costs nine months. The second reason time is money is because somebody actually is building something that they want to use. If you're building a solar farm, they want to build the solar farm so it can start generating electricity. If you're building an apartment complex, someone is building that apartment complex because they want to rent out the facilities. Therefore, the faster you finish the project, the earlier people can start generating revenue from what you are building. So again, that is why time is money and that is why construction contracts always have liquidated damages in them. Meaning if you are late in finishing the project, you incur a financial penalty. So that is why time is always very clearly defined in construction contracts and time is defined with both the baseline schedule. So this is when you negotiate and sign the contract to deliver the project. You have a baseline schedule and the other part of this is you have a practical completion date. This might be practical completion for the overall project. It might be practical completion for separable portions.

Now, I've done another video where I go into way more detail about construction claims and the different types of acceleration delay claims and all these things. So, if you want way more detail than I'm going to go through here, I'll put a link in the video description to that video. But here, I'm just going to very simply cover the concept of claims. So, the baseline schedule is what was agreed at contract award. It defines what you plan to do, when you plan to do it, in what sequence you plan to do it, and what assumptions you've made to do that in your baseline schedule. If you do not have a baseline schedule, go sort of goes without saying, but it is almost impossible to make claims.

Now, this is something that factors into how you actually develop a schedule. But when you develop your baseline schedule, you also want to set it up so you can make claims. This means your baseline schedule should include all of the client deliverables you're relying on to do the work. And they should be on the critical path. So this is things like contract award, design approvals, site access, information you're relying on, reviews they're meant to do, permits they're meant to give you. They should all be clearly shown in your schedule and on the critical path. If they are not in your schedule, it is harder to prove that that is specifically what has delayed you. And then importantly, you want to get client acceptance of this baseline. Again, the counter of this ghost as well is when you're managing your subcontractor schedules, you want to be hyper aware of what milestones they are putting in their schedules and what they're expecting of you.

Okay. So then what happens when something changes? Well, that's where you have an upstream claim against the client. The most common type of claim is an extension of time claim. So this is where the scope has changed. For example, it rains when you're doing civil works, you are delayed a certain number of days and you claim what is referred to as an extension of time claim. So the general process you will have to do to do this is you will have some notice requirement in the contract. So most contracts will require notices within five to ten days where you simply notify your clients like, hey, we have been exposed to inclement weather. This is a change event as specified in the contract. We are assessing what the impact is. So you just tell them that something has happened and that you're assessing the impact. Some contracts have notice periods of 48 hours. You have to be very careful what the specific notice is. Then once you identify the delay, you submit the notice. The second step is you followed up with a detailed claim of exactly what has happened, why you've been delayed, how much you've been delayed, what's the impact on the critical path, how many extra days is required to complete the project. So that is your extension time claim. And then there will typically be a cost associated with this as well. So every claim will have cost and time associated with it.

Now there's lots of actual delay analysis methods. You can do the as planned versus as built, which is the simplest, where you just compare the baseline against what actually happened. Where do they diverge? The next one is to take the impact as planned, where you insert the delay event into the baseline schedule. But obviously, that's not as good because you're comparing against the baseline when thing, lots of things have probably changed. You can use the best one is contemporaneous records, where you insert it into the current version of the schedule and show the delay against the current plan, or you can also have current delays where you both have delayed each other. The purpose of claiming both cost and time is so you've incurred additional indirect cost because the project is delayed. Maybe you've incurred direct cost as well from the machine standing down. But you also change the practical completion date in the contract so that your liquidated damages don't kick in until after a longer period of time.

Now you have the exact same principles but managing downstream. So this is where your subcontractors maintain and program. They are delayed by something, they will send a notice to you saying that they are delayed. And in the same way that your clients will generally push back on your claims or ask for evidence, you will do the same to your subcontractor. Who ask for evidence of that they've been delayed, why they've been delayed, what's the cause of their delay. Now, the key thing to probably understand here is your subcontractors will claim things from you that you will then in turn claim from your client. This is referred to as back-to-back with your client. So, what you should always have here is you, you should always make sure that your notice periods in your subcontracts is less than your head contract. So if you, if you have to give your client five days notice of a delay, you should want three days notice from your subcontractors because as soon as your subcontractors give you notice that they are delayed, if it is a back-to-back circumstance where you can then pass that on to your client, you want to make sure you're giving them notice in time. And again, you should always be asking for the burden of proof from your subcontractor to prove it so that you can then in turn prove it to your client.

Okay, the last very simple concept I want to talk, I said very simple, but that is precisely the wrong way to describe it, is cash flow forecasting. The advantage of having a really detailed schedule is that you can allocate the cost of different activities for each activity. You can look at when am I going to get the revenue associated with that? So when am I going to be able to claim that for my clients and when am I going to incur the cost associated with it? Comparing allocating costs to different activities in your schedule. And again, this is the beauty of having an aligned work breakdown structure where for every activity, you have cost and time associated with it. It allows you to very simply do a cash flow forecast of of your schedule. And there is, and as we all know, cash is king on construction and there are so many benefits to doing this. Too much to talk about here, but the final thing is just really to touch on that having a good schedule, allocating cost to each of the individual activities is going to drastically improve your cash flow forecasting.

Okay, so I know that was a super long one and I think there's probably room for a more detailed advanced scheduling one. Again, if you're interested in the complaint claims component, I've done a much longer video on that talking through all the different types of claims and how to structure them, how to manage them. So, if you want to, if you want to learn more about construction claims specifically, which is what I would say is more an advanced use case of scheduling, then watch this video.