Construction schedule
A construction schedule maps the timing of a project: which tasks, in which order and over which period. It is the central instrument for keeping deadlines and coordinating trades.
What a construction schedule contains
- All essential tasks with start, duration and end.
- Dependencies that set the order.
- Milestones for the important stages.
A construction schedule is often shown as a Gantt chart. In Menira it is built visually and can be exported print-ready for the meeting and the site.
Not one schedule, but three levels
In practice one does not work with a single schedule, but with three levels of granularity: the project programme across all phases, the master programme across the construction process, and the weekly programme for control on site. They do not replace one another – each answers a different question.
How to recognise a realistic schedule
A schedule does not become reliable because every bar follows the next without a gap. Three things are most often forgotten:
- Lead and production times – some components are only measured on the finished structure.
- Drying times, during which nothing happens and yet work cannot continue.
- Winter and summer shutdowns, and the period between completion of the works and handover.
The calendar is a given, not a variable
Company shutdowns are not a vagueness to be made up later, but a given like any other. In training they are set out in the programme from the outset – usually two weeks in summer and the weeks around Christmas and New Year. A schedule that calculates straight through those weeks is right on paper and wrong in practice: dates do not slip by days but by the full length of the shutdown, and for every following task at once.
The unit of time is no more arbitrary. In Swiss practice, milestone lists spanning two years of construction are kept in calendar weeks rather than dates – the calendar week is the common currency for deadlines on site. That is more than habit: it matches the precision that is honest at this level of planning and avoids the apparent precision of a date that will move by two days regardless.
A schedule also only becomes binding once it is agreed or approved as a schedule programme. Without that step it remains a statement of intent – useful for coordination, but without effect if dates are later disputed.