Episode 1: The Inherited Monster

🏗️ Scene: Monday Morning | 9:03 AM

A black coffee. A blinking cursor. And a file titled:
“Project Phoenix – Baseline V1 (Approved).mpp”

They told me it was “ready to go.”
No need to build from scratch.
“Just adjust the dates,” they said.
“Reuse what worked on the warehouse job.”

Warehouse?
This was a residential development with underground parking and phased handovers. But hey—if it saves time, right?

🚩The Red Flags

Day one, I noticed oddities:

• Activities starting mid-week with no logic links
• Float on foundations despite sequential dependencies
• And a strange milestone: “Mezzanine Slab Poured – Week 6”

…except this project didn’t have a mezzanine.

🕵️‍♂️ I started digging.
The durations? Same.
WBS? Same.
Calendars? Copied over—public holidays for another state.

The worst part?
They had already submitted this “baseline” to the client.

🧱 What Went Wrong?

The original planner had built a solid plan—for a different job, site, scope, and structure. But instead of building new, someone hit Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, slapped on a new project name, and replaced a few labels.

They inherited a monster.

• Tasks were out of sequence
• Constraints didn’t match reality
• Key inspections were missing
• Procurement activities didn’t reflect new vendors or lead times

The copy-and-paste job introduced invisible assumptions—like that access roads would be ready by Week 3. (Spoiler: they weren’t.)

⏳ The Fallout

Rain season came.
The excavation team waited for access that never came.
The subcontractors stared at the schedule and shrugged: “This isn’t what we agreed to.”

On paper, the progress looked fine.
In reality, work was stalled for 14 days before anyone raised a flag.

Senior management asked, “Why didn’t we foresee this?”

We did.
The schedule didn’t.

📌 The Lesson

Never inherit a schedule without a forensic review.
Copying a plan without full understanding is like performing surgery with someone else’s x-rays.

✅ Pro Tips for Schedulers:

Start with a logic audit
Check for:

• orphan tasks
• invalid relationships
• milestones with no dependencies

🧼 Clean the WBS
Delete irrelevant phases. Rebuild the structure to reflect this scope.

📆 Replace the calendar
Reset working days, holidays, and shifts to match current location and contract.

🧠 Challenge the assumptions
What worked in Project A may fail in Project B. Context matters more than structure.

📝 Document everything
If you do copy anything—log what was reused, what was rebuilt, and what was retired.

wan

🕵️ Quote Board

“Schedules don’t lie. Schedulers do (when they’re lazy).” — The Scheduler

“A recycled plan without review isn’t efficiency. It’s sabotage.” — PMO Lead, post-mortem

📖 Coming Up Next:

Episode 2: Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Blame
“When a school project failed, the trail led back… to a hospital schedule.”