Communications in planning & scheduling
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I'd like to get the opinion from the senior planners / schedulers as to how they handle the communications regarding the schedule. For instance, how do you publish the schedule once it is updated? How do you respond when someone else other than your manager (i.e. a project coordinator or a project engineer) makes a request for a review or to do a special exercise on the schedule? How do you respond when a drafter (someone who is not in a managerial position) comes to your office and asks you to send him/her the latest schedule? How do you interact with the cost control group? Everything has to be formal, through written requests, or sometimes informal is fine and verbal requests are ok? Things like that.
Thank you very much in advance for sharing your experiences on this topic.
3 replies
Oldest first- 0Mike Testro ·
Hi Raul It all depends on the
Hi Raul
It all depends on the size and complexity of the project and how you manage your time.
Your main role is to keep the management team fully aware of the state of progress and management of events.
Any request for your time should be through the people that you report to - so if a junior member wants some data from your planning team the request should be made through the appropriate line manager to you and you decide if you have time to do it.
You can do this through formal written requests or through minutes of meetings.
I would avoid allowing people to just drift into your office and ask for some planning output.
Best regards
Mike Testro
- 0Gary Whitehead ·
Q: how do you publish the
Q: how do you publish the schedule once it is updated?
A: planning file (eg xer) gets filed on the database & archived. pdfs of standard reports (critical path, lookahead, variance, etc) get issued to project team via web-based document control system, or email.
Q: How do you respond when someone else other than your manager (i.e. a project coordinator or a project engineer) makes a request for a review or to do a special exercise on the schedule?
A: Decide if I think the review / excerice will make my schedule better and/or make it more likely that the requester will achieve his planned work. 95% of the time it will, so I will agree. Your job as a planner is not just to maintain an accurate schedule, but also to help the project team get the most use out of that schedule.
Q: How do you respond when a drafter (someone who is not in a managerial position) comes to your office and asks you to send him/her the latest schedule?
A: Apologise for not sending it to them before. Then send it to them. Then add them to the list of people I regularly send it out to after each update. The schedule is absolutely useless if it is kept secret. If a project team member does not know what your schedule says he should be achieving, you are not doing your job properly.
Q: How do you interact with the cost control group?
A: This depends on how the departments are setup, and how/if earned value & costs curves are part of your reporting function. My preference is to load & code the budget costs onto the schedule with the cost controller / QS / estimator, use that to report EV & PV, and let them worry about AC. And to give them whatever schedule reports they need in order to inform their cost forecasts.
Q: Everything has to be formal, through written requests, or sometimes informal is fine and verbal requests are ok?
A: probably over 50% of the requests for my time come through an informal way. Many of these are verbal. This causes no problem for me, as I am capable of managing and prioritising my own time.
I can see absolutely no benefit and an awful lot of wasted time and goodwill arising from forcing people to submit requests for my time in writing to my PM before I action them. I doubt my PM would be very happy having to act as my PA either.
- 0Raul Santos ·
Thanks both Gary and Mike for
Thanks both Gary and Mike for your time and sharing your experiences on this topic about communications, which is rarely seen on the forums (maybe because it is part of the "soft" skills, and not the "hard" skills). As I gain more experience I realize that communication skills are key for the success in delivering a quality schedule as you need to properly communicate with your managers, co-workers, client representatives, etc.
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