Levels of scheduling

Hi James

There have been a number of threads on the subject of planning levels and the various definitions.

Your system of 5 levels is the most common.

The next topic is whether you create bottom up programmes - starting at level 5 and working upwards or Top Down starting at level 1 and developing detail as and when information comes to hand for each lower level.

I am interested in your phrase "golden thread" - would you please elaborate.

Best regards

Mike Testro

Mike
No problem - the term ’golden thread’ is just making sure there is alignment between all the levels of schedule, so the milestones that appear in the Level 1 schedule cascade down through all the levels with the same ID’s and names

My idea for building up the programmes is as follows:

Our Level 1 schedule contains only milestones - no dates, these milestones are work that we need to complete to get us to our agreed site end state, from this schedule I would then allocate these milestones out to a project manager and say build me a bottom up programme to deliver those milestones.
From this detailed working schedules I would then summarise up through the schedule levels with lessenin degrees of detail in each one.

Cheers

James

Hi James

What happens when your series of bottom up plans - when imported and linked up - deliver an end date later than required?

Best regards

Mike Testro

Mike
In general we don’t have that problem, the projects are prioritised according to site goals and government targets, these tend to get the highest focus in terms of resource allocation

As an aside, whereabouts in Suffolk are you based?

James

Hi James

I live and work in Bungay.

Best regards

Mike Testro

Not that far from me then, I live in Leiston and work just outside it

Cheers

James

20 years ago with Wimpey we used to work on the basis of 3 levels with data rolling up from level 3 (works / contract prog) to 2 to 1 - the use of the various levels overlapped from site eng / QS up through site / project management to site / project / regional director.

This stayed with me and I’ve generally tried to apply. I guess level 4 came in the form of detailed rolling progs prepared by site / section eng as based upon level 3 objectives - I suppose this could equally have been fragnets or sub-progs for level 3. I’ve never made it to level 5!

For me the build up starts at level 3, but this may be aimed at meeting level 1 objectives so I’d work up and down the ’golden thread’ and will continue to do so as the level 3 is progressed.

During time spent in HK (with a contractor) I enforced this practise - albeit production and use of meaningful & good level 4 rolling programmes (hand drawn will do) was always a problem.

Now my role is more removed from the ’coal face’ and sadly I can report no evidence to date of such a structured approach being adopted by civil contractor ’planners’ here in UAE.

James,

Go on the planning engineers organization website and look for a paper by Gary France on the 5 levels of planning, this will give you an idea if the detail required at certain levels. I would say that no one set of levels fully covers each industry. The aforementioned definately covers construction, but ive not heard of defined level in IT planning.

If you work is for the NDA then the levels would be covered in the overall EPS of the decommissioning programme. From last time i saw it, Lvl 1 was national, 2 regional, 3 business group, 4 site etc.

The levels of planning are like everything else in planning. There is no standard way to do it, it just needs to make sense to the people looking at it.