Planning and scheduling are two different jobs

Planning is deciding what a job needs: the steps, the parts, the trade, the access, the isolation, how long. Scheduling is deciding when it happens and who does it. They are different skills and different times of the week, and most teams collapse them into one person doing both badly under pressure.

What a planner produces

A planner works ahead of the work, not on it. The output is a job that somebody can start without stopping to find something.

• •The steps, in order, with the pass conditions written down
• •The parts, reserved or confirmed in stock, not "should be in stores"
• •The trade and the number of people needed
• •Access, permits and isolation arranged
• •A realistic duration, taken from the last time it was done

What a scheduler produces

A week that fits. The scheduler takes the pile of planned, ready work and places it against the hours actually available, allowing for the reactive work that history says is coming.

The rule that makes both work

Only planned work gets scheduled. If a job is not ready, it does not go in the week. This sounds obvious and is broken constantly, because a supervisor under pressure schedules a job hoping the parts turn up. When they do not, the crew loses the morning and the whole week shifts.

Schedule to less than full

Look at what proportion of your hours went to unplanned work over the last six months and leave that much of the week empty. A schedule built at 100 percent of available hours is a schedule that fails on the first callout, and once it has failed twice nobody believes it again.

Use real durations, and use the middle

Estimate from the last twenty runs of that job, and take the median rather than the average. One job that waited eleven weeks for a part will drag an average somewhere useless. The median tells you what a normal day looks like.

The Thursday meeting

Fix next week on a set day, with the planner, the scheduler and whoever controls access to the equipment in the room for twenty minutes. Most scheduling conflict is not a software problem. It is that maintenance and operations were never in the same conversation before the week started.