Ways to Schedule Work

[RJH]

I'm running out of time/ability/patience, and need to get someone in to finish up my house. Basically, a load of light building works - plastering (mainly patching and skim), replacing floors, boarding and insulating top floor rooms.

I've got a couple of recommended people coming round next week, but I'm not sure how to approach it. Think I'll create a 3 column table - task, time to complete, and cost. In that way I can figure out what I can and can't do. Money and time is quite tight.

Any suggestions on this theme?

Thanks, Rob

[Nightjar]

One of the important things you need to do is to allow for the interdependence of various tasks. For example, getting electrical work chased in and completed before plastering. That is easiest with a project scheduling technique, such as critical path analysis, program evaluation and review technique (PERT) or Gantt charts. I suggest reading up on those and seeing which one you like best.

Colin Bignell

[Mike Barnes]

RJH :

There must an app for that. :-)

[Tim Watts]

On Friday 17 May 2013 12:31 Nightjar wrote in uk.d-i-y:

The easiest way for the OP to Just Do this (IMO) is to

1) Open a spreadsheet

2) One line per task - one column lists what the task is dependent on and one column lists what tasks are depended on this one (read "messed up by")

Fill it in.

Now reorder the rows until it's in order - which means:

A row that depends on other rows comes lower down after all those rows.

A row that is depended on by other rows comes above all those rows.

It's a bit manual, but there is no learning curve and the OP is not planning the Moon Landing.

Now you can add duration and costs colums in and it should be sane enough for a tradesman to get his head around.

Colour rows for DIY vs ContractOut

Tim

[John Rumm]

I seem to recall that

was a fairly decent cross platform tool for doing all that sort of stuff.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I seem to recall that a roll of otherwise useless wallpaper and a carpenters pencil was a suitable cross platform tool, and cheaper.

[Nightjar]

Much the way I was taught to do CPA, back in the days when computers filled entire rooms.

Colin Bignell

[Mentalguy2k8]

Personally, I'd discuss the job list with the people coming in, preferably all together if you've got more than one tradesman. Then you can all thrash out what's possible in the time/cost framework, they can decide what the priorities are and which order to do them in (within your budget and timescale), and at least you'll get the major stuff done in the right order, and leave the more trivial finishing-up stuff for another time or payday.

[Mentalguy2k8]

Plus the combined experience of the tradesmen involved. There's a danger of over-complicating things with spreadsheets, Powerpoint presentations and seminars, when all you need is to get everyone together over a cup of tea. They'll know if they need to do a particular job before the other guy does his.

[Nightjar]

The advantage of the formal approach is that it tells you which jobs you need to worry about getting finished on time and which ones you can let slide a bit.

Colin Bignell

[The Natural Philosopher]

The formal approach is nothing to do with the tools you use to actually write the answer down on.

[RJH]

Impressive, thanks.

I've done a simple table - room/works/materials/time/cost - for now. Can't quite get my head round order of things just yet - so I'll talk it through and use the thorough planning tools if needs be.

Thanks all for the guidance.

Rob

[rbel]

Agreed, Gantt is the way to go.

[Big Les Wade]

Tim Watts posted

You mean *all* the task's dependencies go into one cell? Formatted how?

Sorted by what? What if some tasks have several predecessors and several successors? What do you sort on?

[Tim Watts]

On Tuesday 21 May 2013 17:03 Big Les Wade wrote in uk.d-i-y:

Please read those 2 lines again - it is clear.