Construction Scheduling Services and CPM Schedules That Get Accepted
We build the CPM schedule your contract actually asks for: baseline, monthly updates with a narrative, look-aheads your superintendent will use, and fragnets when the job slips. Native P6, Microsoft Project or Asta files come back with a readable PDF Gantt.
What ships with every schedule
- The native file, XER, XML, MPP or Asta, yours to update
- A readable PDF Gantt, and a plot-size layout on request
- Basis of schedule narrative: crews, rates, calendars
- Two-step check: a self-check, then an independent second pass
- A clause by clause spec matrix with every baseline
The submittal ladder, from the proposal schedule to baseline schedule development to as-built
Contractors talk about the schedule as if there is one. Your contract names five or six, each with its own due date and acceptance rule, and CPM scheduling services that ignore the difference collect comments on all of them.
Before award, and the first three weeks after NTP
Two documents that are not the baseline, and both of which get treated like it.
The proposal or bid schedule
PRE-AWARDA logic sketch, twenty to sixty activities, showing a selection committee you understand the sequence and can hold the duration. Nobody accepts it as a baseline and no update runs against it.
Outsourced bid management servicesContract time determination
PUBLIC WORKOn most public work the owner fixed the duration before the solicitation went out, from a production rate analysis on the controlling items. If it is short, say so in the pre-bid question period, not in an update eighteen months later.
The preliminary schedule
NTP TO NTP+21Due within days of notice to proceed, covering the first 60 to 90 days in detail plus the milestone spine, so your first pay application is not hostage to a baseline still in review.
Baseline schedule development, and the update chain behind it
The contract document, and the only two events allowed to replace it.
The initial or baseline schedule
THE CONTRACT DOCUMENTFull logic, every activity coded, calendars set, durations defended in the narrative, typically due 30 to 60 days after NTP. Most specifications say the owner accepts it without adopting your means and methods and without waiving anything: acceptance is not approval.
What we will not promise you
That your owner accepts it first pass. Nobody honest promises that. What we commit to: comments on scope we scheduled get a resubmittal at no charge, and you get in writing which are scope changes and which are ours.
Periodic updates
MONTHLY, USUALLYActual starts, actual finishes, remaining durations and a data date, on the cycle the specification names. Each is a dated snapshot, and the snapshots are the evidence.
See the monthly cycleThe revised baseline
WHEN THE PLAN CHANGESNot a monthly event. It belongs to a change in the work, an accepted time extension, or a sequence that is dead. Re-baselining to make slippage disappear erases the variance record you will want later.
As-built schedule preparation, and the ones outside the contract
Two documents rarely written into the specification and eventually asked for anyway.
The as-built schedule
AT CLOSEOUTEvery activity carrying its real start and finish. Assembled from the update chain if it was kept, reconstructed from daily reports and pay applications if it was not. The second route is the expensive one, and it is the one an owner's consultant gets to pick apart.
A schedule for a permit or a lender draw
OUTSIDE THE CONTRACTA phasing plan for a right of way permit, a shutdown window for a hospital infection control submission, or a schedule a lender wants tied to real durations instead of twelve equal draws.
Baseline rejected by your owner? Send the file before you resubmit
Send the schedule and the comment log. You get the metric counts, which comments are defects and which are scope, and a straight answer on what a resubmittal takes.
What we need from you before a single activity is typed
A scheduler who starts typing before this list is answered produces a bar chart, not a schedule. Here is what we ask for, what happens when a piece does not exist yet, and the jobs where the answer is that you should not hire us.
Start with the paper. The schedule specification section, whether it is 01 32 16 or an agency number, sets the software, the submission dates, the coding, the level of detail, the narrative content and the float ownership clause. Add the contract time, the NTP date, the milestones and the liquidated damages exposure. Half the rejection list disappears when somebody reads that section first.
Then the work. The current drawing set with its issue date, the specifications, and the quantities if you hold them. If you do not, we measure the controlling items first, because a duration derived from a quantity survives an owner challenge and one copied off the last job does not. Add the schedule of values if payment will run off this file.
Then the person who is going to build it. We book a working call with your superintendent, an hour and usually closer to two, taking sequencing, crew sizes, planned shifts, laydown and crane constraints, and the shutdown windows nobody wrote down. What they tell us goes into the basis narrative attributed to them, so when a reviewer asks where the masonry production rate came from, the answer has a name against it.
Some jobs should not come to us at all. A ten week fit-out with fourteen activities and an owner who wants a bar chart does not need a CPM desk, and a contractor already paying a scheduler who can absorb one more job is buying the same file twice. If your specification names a credentialed scheduler by title, read that clause before you buy: nobody here holds a PSP, a PMI-SP or a PE, and no deliverable of ours satisfies a clause that requires one.
Who owns the float, in the schedule we build
Float is a project asset three parties each believe belongs to them, and your contract has a clause about it that nobody on your team has read.
Who owns the float in a construction schedule?
Whoever your contract says. Three positions exist: contractor owned, owner owned, and project owned on a first come first served basis. Where the contract is silent, US practice treats float as a shared project resource, so the party that needs it first is the party that gets to spend it. Find the clause before the baseline is built.
What is total float versus free float?
Total float is how many days an activity can slip before the project completion date moves. Free float is how many before its own successor is pushed. An activity with thirty days of total float and none of free float will not delay the job, and it delays the next trade on day one.
What does negative float actually mean?
That the calculated finish is later than the date you are contractually held to, by that many days. It is not an error. It is the file telling you the plan misses the date, and an update carrying honest negative float is the strongest support a time extension request can have.
Can I protect float without hiding it?
Yes, and the visible method is the only one that survives review. Put the buffer where it belongs, as a named, coded activity ahead of the milestone it protects. What does not survive is padded durations or dropped-in constraints, because a reviewer counts both and it costs you credibility on everything else.
Where a defensible duration comes from, quantities, crews and production rates
Ask three schedulers where a 15 day duration came from and two will answer experience. Here is the arithmetic that answers an owner challenge, and where each input comes from.
Take the quantity off the drawings, not off the last job
Name the crew you will actually field
Apply a production rate you can name the source of
Convert working days on the right calendar
Reconcile the total hours against the priced estimate
Resource and cost loading, tied to the schedule of values
A resource loaded schedule in Primavera P6 and a cost loaded schedule driven off your schedule of values are two jobs on one file. This is what each carries and what a reviewer does with it.
| Labor hours | Crew hours per activity, off the estimate | Manpower histogram and leveling | A 42 man week you cannot staff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crew count | The superintendent's real crews | Checking the curve is buildable | Six crews planned, three exist |
| Activity cost | Your schedule of values, split down | The basis of the monthly pay app | SOV lines that map to no activity |
| Mobilization | Schedule of values, line one | Watched closely for front loading | Cash pulled forward into month one |
| Physical percent | Installed quantity over total quantity | Earned value and the S-curve | Percent read off the calendar instead |
| General conditions | Duration driven, level of effort | Extends when the job extends | Loaded as a fixed lump sum |
| Owner furnished items | The procurement log | Their long lead risk, tracked | Left out, then charged against you |
The monthly update cycle, timed to your pay application
The update is not administration. It is the only contemporaneous record of what happened and when, and it is what a time extension request gets built out of eighteen months later.
Day 20 to 22: the data date is set and published
Day 22 to 24: field status comes back on one form
Day 24 to 26: the file is statused and recalculated
Day 26: the monthly schedule update and narrative report
Day 27 to 28: the independent check, then it ships
Ask a scheduler about your spec before you commit to anything
Float ownership, a submission date you cannot make, whether the spec really requires a cost loaded file. Put it to a scheduler and get a direct answer.
Time impact and windows analysis, and what the updates have to carry
Time impact analysis is not a document written after the fact. It is a calculation run on a schedule already being maintained, which is why the update cycle matters more than the method.
The four methods, and when each one is the right one
AACE 29R-03 sorts these into observational and modeled. Which you can use is decided by what your records support.
As-planned versus as-built
OBSERVATIONALThe baseline laid against what actually happened, period by period. Cheap and readable by non-schedulers, weak wherever there is concurrency, because it shows that dates moved without showing what moved them.
Windows or contemporaneous period analysis
OBSERVATIONALThe job cut into periods at the monthly updates, with the driving path recalculated inside each one. The method most reviewers prefer, and it runs on your own updates: if nine were never produced, it is unavailable to you.
Time impact analysis by fragnet insertion
MODELED, PROSPECTIVEA fragnet, the small network representing the change, inserted into the accepted update immediately before the event and recalculated. The movement in the completion date is the time impact, which is why specifications want it attached to the request.
Collapsed as-built
MODELED, RETROSPECTIVEDelay activities stripped out of the as-built and the network recalculated to show what would have happened without them. Expensive, heavily contested, credible only on a well documented as-built.
Excusable, compensable, and the concurrency problem
Three categories, and the single argument that collapses most contractor claims.
The three categories
ENTITLEMENTExcusable and compensable gets time and money. Excusable and non-compensable, unusually severe weather being the example, gets time only. Non-excusable gets neither and leaves liquidated damages running. Cause decides, documented as it happened.
Concurrent delay
WHERE CLAIMS DIETwo delays, one yours and one theirs, driving the completion date across the same window. The usual outcome is time without money. Whether they were truly concurrent turns on both sitting on the driving path at once.
Pacing
THE DISTINCTIONSlowing your own work in response to a delay you did not cause is not concurrent delay, provided you can show a deliberate decision and the ability to resume. Undocumented, it looks identical to culpable delay.
Schedule delay analysis services, and the line we do not cross
What this desk does, plainly, including the part we will not be doing for you.
What we prepare
DOCUMENTATION SUPPORTThe fragnet and its insertion at the correct data date. The windows analysis off your update chain. The as-built reconstruction. The exhibits and narrative chronology, in a form your counsel can work from.
What we do not do
THE BOUNDARYWe do not testify. We do not issue sealed opinions, and nobody here holds a professional engineering licence to seal one with. We do not opine on entitlement, interpret your contract, or choose your means and methods.
Why the support is still worth buying
WHAT IT SAVESOnly while the job is running. If the update chain was kept, the analysis is arithmetic on documents you already own. If it was not, somebody rebuilds four years of history first at expert rates, and what they produce is still weaker evidence than the updates you did not run.
Hire a fractional construction scheduler instead of carrying a seat
A monthly partnership runs every job's update cycle on a priority queue, revisions included. A dedicated seat is eight hours a day, five days a week, on your projects only.
Agency schedule specifications, and the compliance matrix that answers them
Federal and DOT schedule specifications prescribe coding, level of detail, submission format and payment linkage, not a bar chart. Every baseline built to one of them ships with a clause by clause matrix mapping the spec to the deliverable.
| UFGS 01 32 01.00 10 | A P6 network, prescribed coding, narrative, monthly update | Native XER with the coding dictionary applied |
|---|---|---|
| SDEF export | A fixed format activity file the agency loads on its side | SDEF exported from P6 with the coded fields populated |
| Activity coding dictionary | Responsibility, feature of work, area, phase, bid item | Codes applied while building, not retrofitted after review |
| Level of detail | Activity durations capped, often at 20 working days | Durations sized to the update period, listed in narrative |
| Cost loading | Every activity carrying value, summing to the contract | Loaded off your schedule of values, reconciled to the total |
| Float ownership clause | Usually states float belongs to the project, not to you | Sequencing built knowing that, and flagged at intake |
| State DOT CPM provisions | Bid item numbers as activity codes, letting specific dates | Activity codes mapped to your own bid item numbers |
| Submission format | Native file, PDF, narrative, sometimes a printed plot | All four, on the submission date the spec fixes |
| P6 against MS Project | Agency specs name P6; most private owners accept MPP | Built in the tool your owner will accept, named at quote |
Scheduling questions, answered straight
What contractors ask a construction schedule consultant before they send anything over.
Cost and timing
Float and logic
When it goes wrong
Files and specifications
Hire a CPM scheduler
for one schedule or for every job
Send the schedule specification section, your contract dates and the current drawing set. A scheduler reads it, quotes it in writing with a delivery date, and nothing is invoiced until you approve that number.