The roof slips two weeks. What else moves, and who needs telling?
Anybody can draw bars on a chart. The hard part of a building programme is knowing what goes on it, in what order, and what happens to everything downstream when one thing does not turn up. That is the part you have never done before and your builder has done a hundred times, and it is the part that decides whether you are still paying for scaffold in November.
How it gets there
The build you can look round, from land purchase to practical completion.
Step 1 of 6
Answer five questions about your home
Not chosen from a library of templates. You answer five questions, and the tasks, the order and the links between them all follow from what kind of home this is.
- What it is built ofTraditional masonry
- What the outside isRender, on block or carrier board
- How many storeysTwo storeys
- How you are buying the workSelf-managed packages
- Retaining or feature walls on the plotNone
Until all five are answered nothing is produced, because a programme drawn off a missing answer would be a picture of somebody else’s home.
Step 2 of 6
It builds the whole programme
It opens two years before the first brick. Land, finance and insurance. Appointing a design team. Pre-application, planning, discharging conditions. Surveys you have to commission before anybody can design anything.
Most self-build overruns are decided in that period, by somebody who did not know the ecology survey has a season. Every combination of the five answers works out: there are two hundred and forty of them and each one has been put through and scheduled.
Step 3 of 6
Our durations stay marked as ours
Every duration we supply carries the line our duration, not yet yours until you put in the number somebody actually quoted you.
Nothing pretends a figure is yours when it is not, which is the difference between a programme you can defend and a chart you inherited.
Step 4 of 6
Right through to handover
Commissioning, the air test, snags walked and re-walked, running your home before handover, the EPC lodged, the completion pack assembled. None of them is on the chart somebody sketches on the back of a drawing.
And it tells you where you stand without having an opinion about it. On this build the work finishes 3 July 2026: twenty working days before the date you said you wanted. It is arithmetic, not a verdict.
Step 5 of 6
Issue it, and that version is fixed
Issuing takes a dated copy of every row and the dates it currently shows, and records who you sent it to. Nothing on your live programme changes, and the copy can never be edited afterwards.
Which is exactly what makes it worth having when a trade tells you in April that they were never given a date.
Step 6 of 6
What you planned, against what happened
Once one issue has every duration stood behind it, it becomes the baseline, and from then on the summary reads planned against actual on the dates that matter.
Not a percentage of how well you are doing: a pair of dates, and you draw your own conclusion.
What you get out
A dated issue
Every row and every date as they stood the day you sent it, with who you sent it to, locked.
Something to print
The bars, the tasks and the dates on paper, for the wall of the site cabin or an inbox.
A file for planners
An XML a contractor’s planner can open in Microsoft Project, Primavera P6 or Asta Powerproject.
The planning file carries the sequence and the durations across into a planner’s own software, so a contractor can work with it rather than retyping it. It is a copy and not your issued record: what you issued stays where it is, untouched by whatever anybody does to their copy of it.