Writing · 45 min read
The Scheduler's Standard
Everything I check when I build a schedule, everything I check when I update one, and the judgment the checks can't replace — a working reference for schedulers, with every threshold sourced and every number in one place.
Most capital programs have a schedule. Far fewer have anyone reading it. The monthly update arrives from the contractor, gets stored, and its dates get repeated in a status deck as if storing a file were the same thing as checking it. I spent years being the person who did the checking by hand, and I kept discovering that the rules I was applying lived in a dozen places — a DCMA memo here, a GAO guide there, an AACE recommended practice, a specification section, a sentence somebody said on a jobsite in 2013 that turned out to be right.
So I wrote them down in one document. The Scheduler’s Standard is that document: thirteen parts, from what a schedule is for through the network, the durations, the CPM engine, the acceptance gate, risk, the monthly update, the narrative, trends, and the craft that no automated check can see — ending with a field card that puts every numeric threshold in the standard on a single page. Where a rule has a source, the source is named; where it is judgment, it says so.
What it is for
Two jobs. The first is building a schedule that can survive review — logic that is the argument, durations that are supported, margin that is visible, a critical path that is buildable. The second is reviewing someone else’s update before believing its dates: the data date, the statusing, the logic changes, the constraints, the out-of-sequence progress, what moved and why. The second job is where owners lose money quietly, and it is the one this standard spends the most time on.
Where it came from
The thresholds are drawn from DCMA-EA PAM 200.1, the GAO Schedule Assessment Guide, the NDIA Planning and Scheduling Excellence Guide and its Generally Accepted Scheduling Principles, UFGS 01 32 01, a set of AACE International recommended practices, NASA’s schedule handbook, the SCL Delay and Disruption Protocol, and the standard texts of the discipline. It was compiled for my own practice and for the practitioners I teach, and it is the same set of checks that Ridgeline’s schedule-quality gate and my project-controls workbook implement in code. Nothing in it is decoration.
Read The Scheduler’s Standard →
It opens as a standalone document — long, deliberately, because a standard you can read in five minutes is not one you can hold a schedule to.