By Maria Mothibedi, Head of Operations at Southern Power Maintenance
You can put ten jobs into a calendar and make them all fit. The dates line up, teams are assigned, and each deadline looks manageable. Then two projects need the same supervisor, a call-out takes the test equipment booked for another site, or a client moves an outage window by three days. The work fitted into the calendar. It did not fit the resources available to deliver it.
A schedule records the dates to which the business has committed. Working out capacity requires a closer look at what each job will need and what else is happening at the same time. If that work is not done before dates are agreed, Operations receives a collection of individually reasonable commitments that cannot all be carried together.
Counting available employees is a poor shortcut. A project may need a protection specialist, an authorised supervisor or someone who already meets a client’s access requirements. The rest of the team may have space in their diaries, but they cannot take over work for which they lack the competence or authority. The question is therefore not how many people are available. It is whether the right people are available at the right time.
Even the right team cannot give every hour shown in the diary to the job. Travel, preparation, inductions, access restrictions and client meetings reduce the time available for the actual work. A team completing a demanding shutdown may also need time to return equipment, close outstanding matters and prepare for the next site. Placing projects next to one another on a calendar does not remove any of those requirements.
Equipment can quickly expose an overcommitted schedule. Different projects may rely on the same test set, specialised tools, crane truck or vehicle. Each project manager can prepare a workable plan without knowing that another job has reserved the same resource. When the clash is picked up late, solving it may affect transport, mobilisation and the order in which the work must be performed.
A delay does not stay neatly inside the project where it began. If a team leaves one site later than planned, the next mobilisation may move with it. If equipment is held for additional testing, another team may arrive without what it needs. One project can therefore affect several others even when those projects have no delivery problems of their own.
Urgent work places further pressure on the programme. An equipment failure may require Operations to redirect a specialist, vehicle or test set from scheduled work. The call-out is handled, but the project that lost the resource still has a deadline. Someone has to decide what can continue, what must move and which client needs to be told about the change.
Businesses rarely announce that they have exceeded their capacity. It usually shows up in smaller decisions. A supervisor moves between two sites, a team works longer hours, or equipment is collected from one job and sent immediately to another. These adjustments may protect the schedule for a few days, but they leave less room to handle the next delay, absence, or equipment problem.
This is why some unallocated time is necessary. Industrial work is affected by weather, access delays, re-testing, changing site conditions and unexpected faults. A schedule that uses every available person and resource assumes that none of these things will happen. Once one does, the business has nowhere to recover without disrupting another commitment.
Capacity needs to be reviewed across the full programme of work. Operations must be able to see which projects share people, equipment, vehicles, suppliers and decision-makers. It must also know which dates are fixed, where there is room to move and which projects are already carrying unresolved delays. Looking at one project at a time will not reveal those conflicts.
Where the programme shows that the same resources have been promised more than once, a decision must be made. Work may need to be rescheduled, additional resources secured, or activities reordered. Sometimes the business must tell a client that the requested date cannot be met. Having that conversation before mobilisation is better than explaining a missed deadline after the team was expected on site.
A full schedule shows that the business has work. Available capacity means that Operations can support those commitments with the people, equipment and time they require. Before agreeing to another date, the new work must be considered alongside everything already promised. Otherwise, teams spend their time repairing the schedule instead of delivering the work.