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Master Scheduler Roles, A Hundred Thousand Decisions, XER-Free Scheduling

Master Scheduler Roles, A Hundred Thousand Decisions, XER-Free Scheduling

Micah Piippo
April 07, 2025

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Welcome back to Beyond Deadlines newsletter—a free perk for people looking to improve in Planning and Scheduling. Each week, we provide tactics, prompts, jobs and food for thought. We want you to succeed today, tomorrow and throughout the rest of your career.

You don’t run thirty miles; you run a single step many times over. That’s all running is; that’s all anything is. If there’s somewhere you need to be, somewhere you need to get to, or if you need to change or move away from where or what you are, then that’s all it takes. A hundred thousand simple decisions, each one made correctly. You don’t have to think about the distance or the destination or about how far you’ve come or how far you have to go. You just have to think about what’s in front of you and how you’re going to move it behind you.

The End of the World Running Club by Adrian J. Walker

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Stop waiting for the XER file.

If you’re sitting around waiting for a native .xer to start your review—you’re already behind.

Some of the best schedulers I know build full reviews without ever touching P6.

Here’s how:

Start with the contract.
The General Conditions and Division 1 are loaded with scheduling gold.
You’ll find milestone expectations, submittal durations, delay clauses, sequencing rules, and even the actual language you’ll need for escalation.

Dig into the PDF schedule.
Clunky? Yes.
Useless? Not even close.
You can still extract:

Start and finish dates
Durations
Activity IDs and names
Logic and float (with a little reverse engineering)

Use site photos and drone footage.
Look for:

What’s actually been built
Crew sizes and equipment
Potential access constraints
Workface congestion that isn’t called out in the schedule

Check the master plans and logistics layouts.
You’ll uncover staging zones, haul routes, crane placements, and sequence expectations the schedule often leaves out.

Scrub resource data from field reports or progress logs.
Things like daily manpower, crew mix, or equipment logs can validate whether the plan was ever feasible in the first place.

Look for cost data—even at a high level.
Draws and SOVs (Schedule of Values) give away priorities.
If a line item is 30% billed but only 10% complete on-site? You’ve just found a red flag.

Bonus: Review the narrative.
It’s not always accurate—but it shows what the contractor wants the client to believe.

Great schedulers know: The XER is a tool, not a crutch.
The real pros can spot risk, logic gaps, and misaligned priorities without ever opening Primavera.

Because schedule intelligence is everywhere.
You just have to know where to look.

Create Excellent Process

Copy and paste this prompt into ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude.

Act like a senior construction scheduler and Excel modeling expert with 20+ years of experience forecasting electrical labor for complex projects.

You’re given a list of construction activities.

Each activity represents a project or a project phase. Your task is to generate a monthly labor forecast and manpower curve for the electrical scope, assuming work occurs during the last 75% of each phase

Follow these steps

Parse the Schedule:

Identify each project and its phases.

Determine duration (12 or 16 months).

Apply Labor Curve:

Peak electricians: 100.

Use the following spreads:

12-Month Curve (% of 150): [0, 0, 0, 13, 25, 30, 80, 80, 100, 100, 100, 40]
16-Month Curve (% of 150): [0, 0, 0, 0, 10, 20, 30, 50, 70, 100, 100, 100, 80, 50, 30, 10]

Build Excel Output:
Tab 1 (Config): Peak labor, spread tables, short narrative, clean layout.
Tab 2 (By Project): Monthly forecast per project and total.
Tab 3 (By Phase): Monthly forecast per phase and total.

Format the file clearly and export it as an Excel spreadsheet.

Take a deep breath and work on this problem step-by-step.