It might not surprise many project executives, project managers, and superintendents, that most baseline or initial Construction Project Schedule is chronically inaccurate, often fictive documents. It is for this reason that they often don’t invest or participate in coordinating in their project schedules, not because they don’t have time or don’t care to. Yet, in doing so they do themselves a great disservice. The causes of this phenomenon are fairly predictable:

Causes of a Fictive Baseline Construction Project Schedule

• Over-compression: driven by demanding clients, contractors cave in and routinely make promises they know they can’t keep in order to win contracts. These promises are carried over to the hapless scheduler who is tasked with fitting the work to the agreed deadline, as opposed to a natural, non-accelerated, projection of sequences. If the Construction Project Schedule is otherwise sound, there is no cause to blame the scheduler when it slips.
• Vacuum tube: most any scheduler must consort with the players – subcontractors, vendors, and suppliers, in order to inform his sequences and duration into a master Construction Project Schedule. These parties will also massage their dates based on contract milestones, as opposed to bona fide networks of activity, so that they don’t lose the job to another contractor promising speedier service. They will also tell you ‘what you want to hear,’ driving to end the process as soon as possible.

However; a baseline Construction Project Schedule may be required before subs and vendors are brought on, thus a scheduler may be forced to develop his timelines in a vacuum. This is a recipe for disaster.

If the baseline is coordinated pre-procurement, there will be little or no schedule discussions to inform the scheduler with sequences and duration. I once was commissioned with scheduling a large hospital project. My first request was a vendor list of the major medical equipment. As this list was not forthcoming I was forced to hazard my best guesses, which in my opinion, created major vulnerabilities in the schedule.

Zero-hour: rush, rush, rush. Few schedulers are afforded sufficient background and time to prepare a proper baseline schedule. Consequently, half-cocked baseline schedules are a staple of the industry. To make matters worse, the baseline may never be refined, regardless of its shortcomings and inaccuracies.

• Absence of documentation: ask any project manager – they will tell you that they can count on one hand the number of projects mobilized based on a set of coordinated construction drawings. Projects breaking ground with half-cocked documentation are no longer the exception, but the rule. Not infrequently does the paucity of designer detail engender multiple changes to the baseline, and finally wholesale revisions well into the timeline.
• Scope creep: most projects will realizes some 5 or 10% of change order work that must be incorporated into the timeline with a contingency, or other provision. This additional change order work effort pales in comparison to  piecemeal ‘sketch projects,’ wherein the designer continually juggles, refines, and fragments information, posing endless conundrums for the scheduler, and delay for the builder.
• Cluelessness: book schedulers – or those with no practicum experience in the field – are most susceptible to irrelevance. That’s because ‘trench’ schedulers – and those with field experience, speak the language of, and relate more naturally to, their field colleagues. Conversely, book schedulers don’t think like builders, and therefore don’t relate to them as well as a trench scheduler.
• Uncharted-isle: field personnel often shun head offices because they feel they are out of touch with the reality on the ground (as opposed to up in the ether). An office bound remote book scheduler has little or no chance of keeping up as the job progresses through its mountain of RFIs, sketches, and change orders, from his office cubicle. That’s why builders who are serious about scheduling like to have their schedulers on site. Barring that, senior and chief schedulers with deep experience can often work remotely with perfect efficiency.
• In-the-house: builders without schedulers hope their own project managers or other untrained personnel develop Level I or II baselines with hold constraints on the milestones. Yet these are merely for one-time dog and pony shows, with no intention of further development or use.

Down the line a Construction Project Schedule’s level of exactitude deprecates with every designer fit and start, and whim or caprice, until it finally can be considered nothing more than mere folly. It is a wonder that ownership – or anyone else for that matter – would demand and expect high levels of exactitude in schedule updates developed from faulty baselines. This can be explained simply as ignorance of the mechanics of logic and disregard for mitigating circumstances.

Project managers tasked with updating handicapped baselines will quickly become disgruntled when they realize the futility of maintaining network logic that is no longer relevant or applicable to the project at hand. In absence of a revised baseline to reflect actual sequences, the project manager will either lose interest or give up on maintaining the Construction Project Schedules altogether.

Old habits die hard: in the mind of project managers, chronic disenchantment with poorly developed Construction Project Schedules breeds cynicism for the craft – such that they seldom invest more than a passing interest in a project schedule. This cynicism denotes an untenable imbalance that contributes to schedule failure. Without team-wide investment in the schedule, it cannot be a success, regardless of its veracity.

However; no project manager should disregard the schedule altogether because:

1. Resource and cost loading are never an option, hence, no EVA possible
2. Builder will be unable to release accurate target dates for material and equipment orders resulting in delivery delay, or early delivery requiring warehousing.
3. Not tracking the Construction Project Schedules precludes ability to request extra time, or stake a delay claim

Wholesale disregard of the Construction Project Schedule out of contempt is like ‘throwing the baby after the bathwater.’ If for nothing else, any amateur can at least pin a few milestones to set the clock by. If they really wanted to, project managers could assist in developing the schedule – a win/win scenario. They typically don’t because design and specifications are not substantially complete by the time the baseline is required.

In other words, the inability of a design team – for whatever reason – to issue sufficient information to develop a complete baseline, typically, within 90 days of the contract date, will completely stymie the scheduling effort. If at that time design development stands at 50%, the baseline extruded from project deliverables cannot be expected to be more accurate than 50%, yet no builder would ever admit his Construction Project Schedules are less than 100%.