Programme
The build schedule for a job: tasks grouped by phase, each with a trade, dates, a status, who is responsible and what it depends on, drawn as a Gantt chart with a week view and a list view beside it. It is what the lookahead, the subbie bookings and every slippage warning are measured against. The project manager owns it; the site supervisor runs the week from it.
- The Programme module is on (Settings → Team Modules).
- A job exists. To draft a programme from the estimate or import tasks from it, the estimate has lines.
- To assign tasks to people, the people are on the job's roster (A job's team).
- Press Add Task.
- Give it a name, a phase, a trade and who is Responsible; set a duration or start and end dates; tick Critical Path, long lead or milestone if they apply.
- Save. The task appears on the chart in its phase. Open any task to edit it: status and completion, a Delay / Block Reason with its cause and who held it up, the schedule, the assignee and collaborators, its predecessors (Add predecessor — search by name, trade or phase…) and notes.
Three routes, from fastest to most considered:
- Import opens Import from Estimate. Tick the estimate lines to bring in (or Select All). Imported tasks arrive with durations but no dates; the page offers an AI sequence to date and link them.
- Quick Plan (under the … menu) builds a template programme between a start and finish date you give it, with the critical path and long-lead items marked and predecessors pre-linked, scaling durations to fit.
- AI Plan opens a chat thread in programme mode. The assistant reads the live programme and improves, replaces or creates one from the estimate scope and the engaged subcontractors, with durations, dependencies, critical path, long-lead flags and milestones, anchored to the job's start and handover dates. It shows you the plan before writing it.
- Press Lock Baseline (or Re-lock Baseline if one exists). The confirmation explains that every task's current start and end dates are captured as the baseline, and that re-locking overwrites the previous one, which is not kept.
- Confirm. The chart overlays the baseline under each bar, the At Risk card becomes Slipped (tasks past their baseline finish), and the daily check can now report drift.
- The canvas has three tabs: Timeline (the Gantt, with Day, Week and Month scales and a fit-to-view), Week (the seven-day execution window) and List.
- Drag a bar to move a task. The Linked tasks when you drag control decides what happens to the tasks that depend on it: ask each time, shift them together, or keep their dates. A red ring on a bar means it starts before its predecessor ends; a task's row can spotlight its predecessors and successors.
- The health cards at the top count completion, tasks, delayed or slipped work and critical-path tasks, with the handover date and whether it is overdue.
- Where the page lists procurement deadlines or sequence clashes, Send to the programme agent hands every issue to the assistant to validate and restructure, keeping the handover date fixed unless it cannot.
- On the Week tab, press Turn on PM Agent the first time. It runs daily programme checks, chases sub bookings, proposes replans and manages a seven-day execution window; its morning briefs land in the job's inbox.
- Once a cycle has run, the week shows your next tasks and each day's items. Reassign an item between a person and the PM Agent from its row.
- Weekly review misses lists committed tasks that were not finished in their week; name the business that held one up so it counts on their record.
- Site bookings shows who was booked on site each day from confirmed commitments and the week plan, and lets you excuse a booked day nobody came to.
Under the … menu: Export to Excel and Print programme.
- When the programme's length disagrees with the prelims priced per week in the estimate, a banner says so and offers Reprice at N weeks. Nothing moves until you press it, and the banner suggests leaving alone a line whose term really is fixed.
- With a baseline locked, the daily check posts a notification when a task drifts past its baseline finish.
- With the PM Agent on, it runs at 6:45am on weekdays (and whenever you press Run cycle now), rebuilding the week and posting a brief.
- Sub-booking state (requested, tentative, confirmed) from your commitments is read onto the bars, so a bar can say whether the trade behind it is actually coming.
- Issuing a purchase order with Create programme task ticked adds a task for it; completing the order closes that task.
- With linked tasks set to shift together, moving one task moves what depends on it. That is the point, but a single drag can shift the handover date. Check the critical path before you save.
- There is nothing to slip against until a baseline is locked. Re-locking throws the previous baseline away.
- A programme that gets longer does not reprice the prelims on its own. The banner offers to; you decide.
- A task with an open constraint should not be committed for the week. Committing it anyway is how a plan quietly becomes fiction.
- Quick Plan is a template fitted to your dates. AI Plan reads your estimate and your subbies. They are not the same thing.