Firms and teams seek efficiency and competitive advantage by become more specialized and more focused on their particular expertise. And every challenging project, every specialized contributor, is tied together by the construction schedule.

But silos are the downside of specialization, and no discipline has felt the negative effects of silos as keenly as scheduling. Increasing complexity has led scheduling to become more and more isolated from the rest of the construction process. Scheduling teams struggle to staff up – there are more than 17,000 job openings for schedulers in the US alone.1 And it’s probably not a coincidence that as complexity increases, on-time completions don’t. Less that half of all capital construction projects are delivered on the promised timeline.2

Silos breed distance between schedulers and their peers in the field, and distance breeds myths and misconceptions. Without exposure, communication, and visibility across disciplines, field teams are likely to misunderstand and undervalue the scheduling function. The resulting myths about planning and scheduling undermine the schedule’s credibility in the eyes of other departments. And that limits its ability to guide work to a profitable completion.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. By breaking down the myths surrounding construction project scheduling, organizations and their leaders can re-engineer the planning process. Everyone stands to benefit when scheduling is transformed into the collaborative and strategic process it has always had the potential to be.