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The Secret to Short-Interval Scheduling

Feb 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Dr. Perry Daneshgari and Heather Moore, MCA, Inc.

First and foremost, the daily schedule is what needs to be done today, tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow (click here to see Fig. 3). Some of these tasks may be future tasks that the project plan does not have scheduled until later in the job; however, if the foreman has an opportunity to flatten the manpower loading curve by pulling some tasks ahead, he definitely should have the freedom to do so.

The project manager should make sure to review the task completion shown in SIS against the project schedule, and invoice ahead of schedule for work completed early. If future tasks have been scheduled early by the foreman, the project manager can reference the three-week look ahead and schedule more tasks accordingly. He can also add any other project planned-schedule tasks to his three-day schedule.

To create the SIS from scratch, the project managers, department managers, and the owners should start in the field. Start with asking your foremen what tasks they are going to complete each day for the next three days, who is going to work on them, and the scheduled time for the activity. Once the data is collected, it needs to be ranked and plotted to identify the obstacles foremen are facing.

Daneshgari is president and CEO and Moore is an associate implementer with MCA, Inc., Flint, Mich. They can be reached at perry@mca.net.

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© 2012 Penton Business Media, Inc.

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