No matter how much you perfect your schedule templates in building the ideal workflow, your schedules likely never play out as planned. Weather, delayed decisions, scheduling conflicts, mistakes - they're all bound to happen here and there.
Keeping your schedule updated on a daily basis to reflect where you are is important for keeping everyone on the same page and effectively communicating to your team and subcontractors the impact on future events.
The video below will walk through the basics of how to update your schedule tasks:
You can also easily update the schedule from the field using CoConstruct's mobile app.
Updating the Schedule
There are a number of things that come up during the progress of a job, so how you update the schedule should be reflective of what's happening on the jobsite. The "Private Notes" of a task is a great place to note what happened for future reference.
- Delayed Start: If a task was delayed because your subcontractor was sick or unavailable, materials were late, etc. the best method of updating the task will be to change the task's start date.
- Duration Changes: Sometimes a task might end up taking longer - or not as long - as you originally planned for a certain project. To accurately reflect a change of this nature, you'll adjust the "Work Days" of the task. This will push out the task's finish date as well as any dependent tasks linked through predecessors.
- Weather Delays: Projects are often affected by unexpected and uncontrollable weather conditions. Weather delays can be accounted for using one of the methods above depending on where they fall in the project and what the affect. Another option for weather delays is to add a task called "Weather Delay" - this clearly documents the change for your team and clients and makes it easier to distinguish these from other updates in the project. Simply head to the Gantt or Task View > right click on the task affected > Add > Task above. After entering the description, be sure to edit the predecessor of your current task to that weather delay item or adjust it's start date manually.
Here are a couple of keys to keep in mind when updating your schedule:
- If you're updating a single task, you can do so from any of the schedule view on web or from the mobile app.
- If you need to update multiple tasks, you'll want to work from the Gantt, Task or Calendar view on web. These views allow you to make multiple edits and publish them all at once - this way all of your assignees affected by the changes will only get one updated notice.
- To remove schedule tasks and milestones, select the task or milestone task from your project schedule and click the "X" button at the top of the page to delete the task.
- To rearrange tasks in your schedule, select the task or milestone and click and drag them to the new location in your schedule.
- You can delete or move a group of tasks all at once by holding down the Ctrl + Shift, or Ctrl + Cmd keys when selecting tasks. If you are deleting or moving any tasks that have subtasks underneath them, those subtasks will also be removed.
Saving the Schedule
When working through the app or Field Update View from the web, when you save your updates to a single task, the schedule is automatically re-published with those changes.
If you're working from the Gantt, Task or Calendar views on web, you have a couple of saving options to choose from:
- Save Draft and Keep Editing locks out other users from making changes at the same time that you're working on updates. If you're going to be updating several items in the schedule over a period of time before publishing, be sure to use this option.
- Save Draft and Return to Published Schedule keeps your updates in "Draft" status. This prevents trade partners or clients with access to the schedule from seeing your changes and no notifications will be sent for updates made. Anyone on your builder team with access to edit schedules will be able to view the draft to make further changes or give input before saving or you can come back at a later time to continue working.
- Publish Changes will overwrite your current schedule with the updates you've made. At this point trade partners and clients with access to view the schedule will see your updates. Any assignees on the schedule whose tasks were affected will receive notifications about updates after the changes are published.