A schedule with no room is not a schedule

Four crews of three people. Job sites that need scheduling. And a schedule that lived entirely in the owner's head.

That is not neglect, it is simply how it grew. He knew which crew was good at what, which customer could wait, which job you had better not start on a Friday. That knowledge sat nowhere else.

It works, until he is sick for a week. Or until the business grows and there are too many of them.

What an outsider misses

When we moved to a planning board where job sites get dragged around per day, the first question was of course how full you fill it.

And that is the point everyone from outside the sector gets wrong. A full schedule is not a good schedule. There are always factors that wreck the whole thing, and the weather is only one of them.

Anyone who books their week at a hundred percent has nothing left to move around at the first setback. Then customers start getting phone calls, and that is the most expensive thing there is.

But leaving room is not only for setbacks. It is just as much for luck. If a job site finishes sooner than expected, you want something ready to slot in. A small site, something nearby, something you have been pushing forward for a while. Without that reserve a crew stands still for half a day while there is plenty of work.

So a schedule needs two kinds of room. Room to shift when things go wrong, and work standing ready when things go well.

How you do that in practice

Do not book your week fuller than a fixed percentage. Which percentage is right for you is something you learn by keeping track of how often you had to shift and why.

Keep a separate list of small work: half day or full day job sites, ideally spread geographically, with no fixed date. That is your buffer on the upside. Without a list like that you cannot absorb a windfall, because you will find nothing in the moment.

And let the system shift along. If a job site overruns, the rest simply moves with it in our setup. That sounds obvious and it is exactly what does not happen on a board on the wall: there the rest stays where it was and somebody has to rethink it by hand, usually too late.

What we did not expect

The most interesting thing came out as a side effect.

As soon as the schedule per job site was on a screen, it became visible that material had to be ordered per job site. Not in general, specifically for that site, so the crew could keep working and did not have to drive to the wholesaler halfway through the day.

That used to happen on instinct and it regularly went wrong. A crew that loses an hour twice a week to a run to the shop costs you more than a day a month. Per crew.

From the moment scheduling and material hang together, that becomes a preparation question instead of an emergency. And it is exactly the same mechanism as with stock: a system only becomes useful when it stops saying what is there and starts saying what needs to happen.

Why this is more than a tool

The real gain from getting a schedule out of someone's head is not the schedule itself. It is that something comes into existence that you can look at.

After a few months you can see which job sites structurally overrun, which crew gets which kind of work done fastest, and how often your week gets thrown over. Those are questions you could not ask before, not because nobody had them but because there was nothing to ask them of.

The claim

A schedule filled to a hundred percent is not a schedule but a wish list. Leave room for what goes wrong, and keep work ready for what goes well. Without both you are either on the phone or standing still.