Now looking back at the past is just as important, although it's easy for people to neglect in the role of a scheduler. We always want to have a perfectly accurate record of exactly how the project was built. It's an As-built schedule, exactly the same way as you'd have an As-built drawing. The as-built drawings are going to tell you what was in fact built whereas the As-built schedule tells you how it happened, how was it built. It documents the progress of the project over time. So we're recording additional scope, we might be adding activities to the schedule for that. We're keeping records of project delays that are outside of our control, whether they be things like weather, days that we had to take off because the weather was too bad to work. You could have delays and often do that are caused by your client. Right up front in the early part of the job quite often design documents are not delivered in a timely fashion, so that would be recorded in the schedule. You want to have a record of any change in your construction sequence that out of sequence work that I talked about, you want to be able to reflect exactly how the project actually was executed now, why is this so important? It's most important as support from management of crossed or delayed claims either by you if you're the contractor or against you if you find yourself on the client side of things. Or potentially as a subcontractor for better or worse, we deal with a lot of claims in the construction industry. Now what actually constitutes the cause of delay claim, it's a contractor saying, I am entitled to either additional time or additional money or both because of some unforeseen delay or condition. That I as the CM, or contractor, had no control over. So the CM in that case needs to be able to go back and take a look at the schedule and say, look, here it is. I documented it right here, and they need to be able to prove that they themselves were not also delaying themselves in what's called a concurrent delay. Okay, so when we're talking about concurrent delays, we're talking about a situation where the contractor has delays of their own. And potentially there's a delay by the client as well or some unknown outside source, but if the contractor or CM was delayed also, then they may or may not be entitled to additional compensation for that. But the schedule is where we're going to document all that. So the scheduler is in large part, a historian the responsible for looking, not just at the future and planning what's going to happen on a project, but for documenting what's happened in the past. A good construction manager or in most large companies that I've worked for that schedules become a very powerful tool for lessons learned. Large company will maintain a database of all their schedules for passed projects so that if you have to perhaps create a proposal or execute a similar project to one that was done. Some time ago you can always refer back to those schedules and say well we planned it this way but we know that we had this particular issue on this project because it was a hospital, or because it was in this particular part of the city or the world. And that As-built schedule becomes a great tool for future development. The Cost-loaded schedule if it is Cost-loaded is, I wouldn't say often but sometimes use as a tool for invoicing. So if you have cost associated with your schedule, you can use it to show your client. Look, this is exactly the work in place that we executed this month. This is how much it's worth and therefore here's my bill, my invoice that goes with it and you can use it as a way to support your invoice. So when we're looking back to the past, we're alway asking did we achieve the project's established goals? And if we didn't, why or why not? What are the financial ramifications, did we in fact manage to finish early and get that bonus? Should we be sending our client a bill for the bonus that we are entitled too? Or conversely, do we unfortunately have to pay liquidated damages or some other form of damages because we didn't achieve the project milestone? And overall, what can we learn from this project experience? So you see here, the scheduler's role varies from stage to stage of the project, but it's equally important throughout the entire life of the project. So when you're looking at the future of the project the scheduler again is really the leader because the scheduler and the estimator, nine times out of ten are going to see the project documents before anybody else. And the estimator for the most part is looking at it in terms of quantities so it's not, they don't need to gain quite as thorough of an understanding of the project as quickly as the scheduler does. And again, because the scheduler often has no assistance or no other input than their own to start planning the project. They become narrator and the story teller, they have to then present the documents to the field team and say well here, this is what I was thinking. This is how I planned it, they may have very different ideas, and that's fine, but you need to be able to convey as a scheduler, the story that you created when you envisioned the project for the first time. When working in the present, I think the scheduler's most important role is as sort of an advance scout, there are the person again who's maybe jumping two or three months into the future and delivering back to project team, this is what I foresee, this is what I'm forecasting, these are all potential risk. As well as potential opportunities to maybe pick up time, there are translator and interpreter. One of the most important, I think that's probably the most important role that I found as a scheduler. Because again, the project team, the superintendent, the project manager, they don't always have time or the wherewithal to be looking through pages and pages of a very advanced, very elaborate P6 schedule. They need someone who can quickly tell them right off the bath, this is what this means, these are the important parts that you need to pull out of this right now. That should concern you as a project manager, so, it's translating from very dense data rich language of rover P6 into plain English I guess. There are also a creator in the present in the sense that they're working to again develop alternative scenarios and alternative schemes for completing the work in time because as we all pretty much know, nothing ever goes exactly as according to plan. So the scheduler needs to be very much a creative person that thinks on their feet, and is able to quickly come up with solutions and options for how to execute the work. And looking back at the past the scheduler again is a historian. They're a person that's responsible for keeping the record books straight and making sure that the progress of the project is documented correctly. They're an educator because they're a person that then needs to go forward to the next project and say hey. On this project we did it this way, or let's refer back to another schedule that I worked on six months ago, a year ago and use what we found there. Now the custodian for the knowledge based, of keeping all that knowledge stored in a database so that we can pull it out and use it as needed.
