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Hello. I'm Jeff Shiver, Managing Principal of People and Processes. I want to share some thoughts with you regarding putting together next week's schedule from a planning and scheduling perspective.
We'll start out on Monday. One of the first things a planner needs to know, or the scheduler actually needs to know, is how many hours of work I am planning for next week. In this particular case, we're selecting 400 hours.
Then, what the scheduler may actually start to do is, put in what the PMs have got to come and do next week - and dropping those over here into the pot for this next week's schedule. Then what needs to be rescheduled and what's all the corrective maintenance actions that I've got to do as part of that out of my backlog.
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He may spend the rest of day and maybe the first part of Tuesday putting this together and then filling up this bucket with the different plans he's got intended for that week. Then, he might email that to the various stakeholders, say, by noon on Tuesday.
Then on Wednesday, we're going to have our scheduling meeting. Maybe that's at 10:00 on Wednesday we have that scheduling meeting. Ideally, everyone's already looked at their emails and has seen what's in the bucket for next week. We make it as short a meeting as we possibly can - maybe 15 minutes approximately. Then we can spend the other 15 minutes that we might take of a 30-minute meeting covering what we did in the last week, the previous week, from a schedule compliance standpoint. What were the schedule breaks in having those conversations?
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Anyway, after we finish that scheduling meeting, we continue on. The planner might now focus on things like job plans for the following week, or some other activity, like doing some job research or an administrative task.
Then, on Friday, we're going to agree and then we're going to lock the schedule. Now, the planner scheduler is not involved in the schedule anymore.
After we lock the schedule for next week, we're done from their perspective. They've moved on to the following week that's further down here. Now, any breaks in the schedule become the responsibility of the first-line supervisor to execute. Remember we said in previous videos that we want the planner scheduler to be strategic in nature, meaning next week and beyond. We want the supervisor to be tactical. Once we've locked this schedule, it's now the supervisor's schedule and they have to make the choice whether to break the schedule or not to deal with any emergencies that come up.
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The supervisor may very well take and go ahead and line out jobs across the entire week or they may pull them out on a daily basis - either way is fine. At the end of the day, at the end of the week, they're still trying to get this 400 hours worth of work done.
Now, one of the things I hear all the time when we talk about schedule compliance is: "If I had scheduled 10 jobs and I did eight, I would have an 80 percent schedule compliance." Well, that's true.
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The issue is that the schedule compliance starts once the schedule's locked. This means that as a supervisor, just because you come in and you find out about a new job on Monday and you plan for it yourself and you execute it, say on Thursday, you can't count that for schedule compliance. Nope, sorry you can't do that. The schedule was already locked.
You did do some planning on it and you chose to do it on that particular Thursday and that's fine. That's the way you need to approach it, but that doesn't count towards schedule compliance. That counts as emergency break in.
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That's some thoughts around planning and scheduling, scheduling for next week. Hope you enjoyed the tip. I'm Jeff Shiver, People and Processes. Have a great day.
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