Chapter 14 — Further Reading

Sources are described rather than cited with invented precision. Standards, recommended practices, and contract documents are revised on their own schedules, and section numbering changes between editions — always go to the publishing body for the current version rather than relying on a number quoted in a textbook, including this one.

1. AACE International — recommended practice on forensic schedule analysis (RP 29R-03). The reference document for how delay is analyzed after the fact. It catalogues the major methods — observational and modeled, prospective and retrospective, additive and subtractive — and explains what each one assumes and where each one is vulnerable. Read it once now to understand why your baseline and your monthly updates matter so much, and read it properly before you are ever involved in a claim. AACE also publishes recommended practices on schedule levels, schedule risk, and cost estimate classification. For: anyone who will ever have to prove or defend a delay.

2. The Society of Construction Law Delay and Disruption Protocol. A widely referenced, freely available guidance document on delay, concurrency, float ownership, acceleration, and disruption. It takes explicit positions on questions this chapter treats as open — including who owns float — and explains its reasoning. Valuable precisely because it disagrees with some common U.S. practice in places, which forces you to notice that these are choices rather than facts. For: project managers, schedulers, and anyone working across jurisdictions.

3. AIA contract documents — the A201 general conditions and the A101 / A102 / A133 owner-contractor agreements. Read the general conditions provisions on schedule, time, delay, notice, and substantial completion, and notice what they say about means, methods, techniques, sequences, and procedures. Also read them alongside ConsensusDocs and EJCDC equivalents to see how differently three well-drafted contract families handle the same risks. Describe the function; do not treat any one form as universal — your project's contract is what governs. For: every reader; essential before your first schedule specification.

4. CSI MasterFormat, Division 01 — the "Construction Progress Documentation" group. The place a schedule specification actually lives. Reading two or three real Division 01 schedule sections from different owners will teach you more about what the industry expects from a baseline than any general treatment can. For: readers building their first contract-compliant baseline.

5. The Lean Construction Institute and the Last Planner System. The counterpart to CPM at the field level. CPM answers what should happen; the Last Planner System is concerned with what can happen — constraint removal, make-ready planning, reliable promising, and percent plan complete. The two are complementary, not competing, and Chapter 27 makes the connection. For: superintendents and project engineers who have to make the schedule real.

6. PMI's practice standard for scheduling. A general-industry treatment of schedule model construction, maintenance, and assessment — not construction-specific, and better on process discipline than on how a building actually goes together. Worth reading for its vocabulary and its checklist approach to schedule quality. For: readers pursuing PMP or scheduling certification.

7. The publishing agency's own current criteria for any schedule assessment your contract invokes. If your contract references a formal fourteen-point or similar schedule assessment, obtain the criteria from the contracting agency in writing. The categories are stable; the numeric thresholds are not, and secondary sources repeat outdated or contradictory numbers with great confidence. For: anyone on federal, state, or large institutional work.

8. Oracle Primavera P6 and Microsoft Project documentation — specifically the scheduling options. Not a tutorial recommendation. Read the documentation on the calculation settings: retained logic versus progress override, how out-of-sequence progress is handled, how the tool defines the critical path (longest path versus total float threshold), and what resource leveling does to the finish date. Two schedulers can open the same file and see different critical paths because these settings differ. For: anyone who will be handed a file and asked what it means.

9. The Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) and the Construction Management Association of America (CMAA). Both publish practice guidance on scheduling, project controls, and the owner–contractor relationship, and both run continuing-education programs. CMAA's standards of practice are a useful statement of what an owner is entitled to expect from a construction manager. For: readers moving toward CM at Risk or owner's-representative roles.

10. RSMeans and comparable published productivity and cost data. The source of last resort for a production rate when you have no historical data of your own. Use it the way this chapter uses it — as a starting point that must be corrected for your site conditions, crew, access, and season. A published rate without its conditions attached is a number that is true somewhere else. For: estimators and schedulers building durations from quantities.

11. Engineering News-Record (ENR). Industry reporting on projects, disputes, market conditions, and cost and labor trends. The dispute coverage in particular is a steady, concrete education in how schedule problems turn into legal problems. For: everyone; ten minutes a week.

12. Your own company's historical schedules and cost reports. The best scheduling reference you will ever have access to is the archive of what your own crews actually did on the last ten jobs. Pull the as-built durations for five activities you are about to schedule and compare them to what the baseline said. That exercise will teach you more about honest durations than this entire chapter. For: everyone, immediately.