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.
The build you can look round, from land purchase to practical completion.
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.
It is composed from five answers about your house
Not chosen from a library of templates. You answer five questions, and the programme is built from them — the tasks, the order and the links between them all follow from what kind of house this is.
What it is built of
Traditional masonry
What the outside is
Block and render
How many storeys
Two storeys
How you are buying the work
Self-managed packages
Retaining or feature walls on the plot
None
Answer these five and the programme composes. Leave one and it will not.
Until all five are answered nothing is produced, because a programme drawn off a missing answer would be a picture of somebody else’s house. Every combination of those five works out — there are two hundred and forty of them and each one has been put through the composer and scheduled.
Our durations are labelled as ours until you stand behind them
Our duration, not yet yours — until you replace it with the one your groundworker gave you.
Every duration we supply carries that line. They are indicative figures that come with the template, and they stay marked as ours 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.
It tells you where you stand without having an opinion about it. On this build: started on site 15 September 2025, and on your durations and your sequence the work finishes 3 July 2026 — twenty working days before the date you said you wanted. It is arithmetic, not a verdict.
The last eight weeks, which is the part nobody remembers to programme.
Commissioning, the air test, snags walked and re-walked, running the house before handover, the EPC lodged, the completion pack assembled. Every one of those is a real week of your life and none of them is on the chart somebody sketches on the back of a drawing.
Issue it and that version is fixed for good
A programme nobody can point at afterwards is a picture of a programme.
Rev A, the day it went out, and who it went to.
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.
What you issued against what happened, side by side.
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.