Subcontractor schedule: the cost of avoidance

‘Subcontractor schedule’ isn’t a neologism, but fairly as rare

To many tradespeople, a subcontractor schedule is a highly discretionary expenditure. They will mostly make the expense to comply with general requirements. These are done with gratuitous effort and little knowledge or care for critical path method. In this way are they wholly reliant on their scheduler’s ability – yet they just want the job done, without any details UON. Given the paucity of competent construction schedulers, the forecast is less than auspicious for a change of form for subcontractors. 

‘We’re all familiar with the phrase “flying by the seat of one’s pants.”

Despite the benefits to them, getting a subcontractor schedule can be like pulling teeth – which is part of the problem. Making onerous demands you know your vendors can’t meet isn’t the only way to get a schedule – there’s much more to the transaction than that, which general contractors and construction managers routinely seem to ignore, or reside in denial.

A subcontractor schedule is wholly distasteful to most specialty trades – i.e. 75% of the industry, and many don’t have anyone who can do it on their team. They ignore the requirement until they are pressured, after which they generate a rough timeline, complete with hard-dates and constraints. This document is given the GC or CM’s scheduler to fold into the master.

‘GC, CM, subcontractor, it’s not who you are, but how much you’re willing to risk, that dictates the integrity of the subcontractor schedule you design to do conduct business with

They will be hard pressed to convert or import a subcontractor schedule into the master, therefore, they manually parse the former into the latter. This they never do with more conviction than the schedule has integrity.

A scheduler with field experience is in the best position to analyse a subcontractors’ schedule, as he has familiarity with means and methods, and duration – the time it takes to do the work. Without this insight, the scheduler must take a leap of faith and hope his subcontractor schedule isn’t utterly feckless.

For myself, I like to rough out all of the scope of work for the trades that I can do on my own. I seek guidance from trades and vendors to fill holes. If they have shared a subcontractor schedule with me, I prefer to validate their schedules, and compare with my master schedule. When I see conflicts, and want more clarification, I then go through the schedule with the creator until I have gained satisfaction.

‘Best Practice Tip: foregoing a subcontractor schedule submission requirement virtually precludes any ability to bring a possible future compensable delay or disruption.

In this we often find that duration is too aggressive, or that the creator had no basis for them, engendering a discussion of acceleration scenarios, if any. This ambiguity is often perceived by the reviewer as a sign that the creator invested little effort or due diligence to the effort.

Remember you are doing the other contractual parties no favor by submitting a basic schedule, with an intact critical path. The more detailed, the easier it will be to chase down your TIA (Time impact analysis) initiative for your claim. Toward this effort, close tracking of productivity performance records must be maintained in order to substantiate a measured mile-based delay claim.