The Routes Through the $100K Mountain

As you start blasting past $100K and enter the mid-tier of the profession you’ll start being known for specific bits of scheduling.

You might not explicitly tell people, but who you work for and the projects you work on will.

It’s kinda like saying you go to Harvard or Oxford. People will make assumptions.

With this in mind there’s 5 Ivy-League schools for scheduling:

• Tendering & Bid

• Delivering

• Analytics

• Controls

• Leadership

Tender or Bid Schedulers 

Create awesome plans.

They can take an idea and work it into a plan, or they can take a high-level plan, and work it into a masterpiece of detail and design. Think if Van Gough painted using brushes made of time.

These folks don’t update plans because they generally don’t deliver projects, but they do know how to analyze schedule quality and risk.

And they know how to communicate. After all, what use is a masterpiece if other people can’t pontificate about the meaning of your brush strokes?

You can branch into tender or bid planning after you have put together and have experience delivering a number of schedules. After this, you just seek out more and more complex and prestigious projects.

But because you don’t deliver, it’s hard for you to learn how to improve your plans for the future. For this reason you need to understand analysis, or be good friends with one.

Next,

Delivery Schedulers 

are all about getting shit done.

They are on the job site day-in day-out making sure things happen on time.

And when they don’t, they quickly think of ways to move teams and keep people working.

They are energetic grafters. The kind of person who goes to the gym at 7AM on a Saturday morning.

These schedulers generally have a “dirty hands” construction background, because they understand the workings of the site. They don’t spend too much time in a nice white-shirted office.

Analysts 

are all about the maths, logic and technology.

They deeply know the science of scheduling, and they generally come from a science or engineering background.

You can find a lot of flavors of analysts, such as Forensic Claims Analysts who figure out who is at fault when an argument goes to court, and Controls Data Scientists who use letters like X and Y to produce $$$ for project companies.

But the common trait between all of the analysts is that they DON’T generally create, or update plans.

They simply understand and masterfully manipulate them.

If the Tender Planner is like a Paramedic, and a Delivery Planner is a General Doctor, Analysts are Brain and Heart Surgeons. You know, the specialists.

And because of this, if you’re one of the best you’re also likely to be one of the highest-paid people in the entire scheduling world.

Controllers 

stitch everything together.

In an earlier newsletter we said that a Scheduler is in control of time. Well, projects also include other things like costs, quality, risk and carbon. And someone has to pull together all the pieces and give a clear picture.

Controllers can come for a range of backgrounds - you don’t have to be a scheduler to become a controller. But a scheduler can always become a controller.

And having a deep background in scheduling makes you a very good controller, because you can understand why things happen the way they do.

Controllers are very good at managing people, because that is ultimately their job. They are the news agency of the project.

Personally, I’m surprised I don’t see more controllers with large handle-bar mustaches screaming at Spiderman from their 15th floor offices.

Finally, we have the upper echelons of scheduling. The absolutely $250K and above people.

The Leaders

These people are masters of managing emotions and multiplying their effect.

These two skills make them worth the big bucks.

By managing emotions they can keep clients, investors, management, peers and employees happy.

And by structuring and deploying teams of schedulers they can effect more impact than any individual scheduler could make alone.

Leaders rise through the ranks and come from Tendering, Delivery, Analyzing or Controlling.

Leadership skills can make you stand out if you are a mid-tier scheduler, but once you move up to top-tier they can be what you were hired for.

Final Points

Now you know the general types of scheduler.

Needless to say, they are not exclusive - you can have part of all of them in you.

But, like I said in the beginning, you WILL be known for one above all others.

And this is fine, because you can earn the big bucks in all 5 areas.

We’ve personally seen Tender & Bid Planners on $250K+

Delivery Schedulers on $250K+

Analysts on $1 MILLION +

Controllers on $500K+

Leaders on $1 MILLION+

By trying all 5 and picking a path you can absolutely Plan Rich!

Action!

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Until next time.