Transcript
Hey, friends.
So when you think about construction scheduling as a whole, how well are we doing it? Are we any good at construction scheduling?
It’s a really tough question to ask, but Michael Pink and his team over there at Smart PM took a stab at trying to answer it. So they recently released the state of construction scheduling report twenty twenty five.
And some of the insights are pretty great.
It’s hard for us as schedulers to get our hands on kinda industry data. There’s not that much reporting across the board that’s being done, but now we’re starting to see a little bit more of that. So when I see reports like this come out, I grab them.
Yeah. Maybe I’m mentioned in there as well, and Plan Academy gets a mention and has a page or two. But let me talk about one or two things that I really liked about this report or some of the content that I saw. So this report is based on thirty five hundred survey responses as well as over seventy thousand baseline projects that were analyzed by the Smart PM tool. So it’s a big amount of data. It’s the analysis of the projects as well as the survey responses.
Now remember me. I’m a training guy. I’m thinking about the people side of this. So there is tons of content in here about how schedules are poor, about areas for improvement. These are things that we try to put into our courses to teach how to do good scheduling. But there’s a couple key things in this report that are really, caught my attention. So let me head over here to page sixteen.
This question is, what are the biggest challenges in scheduling today?
This is what they were asked in the survey. And I thought this graph really told a great story.
Number one, managers, they can’t find qualified staff or there’s a lack of qualified staff. Maybe they have staff, but those staff are not knowledgeable, or maybe they’re just struggling to find the right qualified staff out there in the world.
This resonates with me. I’m asked often, do you have any schedulers who have got, you know, three to five years of experience that can do this kind of work? And here’s the truth. Schedulers are in high demand. It’s hard to find really good schedulers.
I’m wondering too if companies are struggling to train from the ground up.
I don’t know why that’s happening. I don’t know why we can’t mentor people into these scheduling roles. But, you know, the the point is there’s a need for schedules, which is good in our industry.
It means that there’s more focus on schedules. We’re seeing more importance around schedules. Companies are realizing how important that is, and they are trying to get people into the roles to help do good scheduling. So I know there’s a problem, but to me, it’s a good problem that we’re having. It means scheduling is gonna be around for a while.
There’s definitely some data in this report about AI, and you can check that out about how we’re using AI and whatnot. But for the moment, we really have this great opportunity where scheduling is becoming more at the forefront.
Yay for us. So this one hit home with me as well. Less than four percent of construction companies have a dedicated project controls team.
Wow. That’s staggering.
I’m I mean, I’m it doesn’t mean that they’re we’re not doing scheduling.
You know, we could be doing scheduling, but there’s no there’s lack of structure.
This to me kind of resonates with how you know how when we’re planning projects, our estimates are always way too optimistic?
I think that happens inside organizations as well, not in planning projects, but in planning what it’s gonna take from a scheduling perspective to deliver a great project. I know I can speak to that from my own experience.
So I think companies need to invest more in scheduling, invest in building up their teams, invest in mentorship.
Those are some of the things I would really love to see.
In fact, I really love this graph too on page thirty seven where it talks about based on project size, how much man hours or how many man hours are required for proper schedule oversight in terms of reviewing schedules, looking at delay analysis, predictive assessments.
You know, I would put in there we could also add in here, reporting or scheduled development, some other things. But this is not a complete picture, but it does give you a little bit of a view. So go and check out the state of construction scheduling report.
Have a look. Leave me a comment, some of the things that you find inside. I would love to know your thoughts. Alright. Happy planning. Michael out.
