Time & completion
A simple programme for a small job, and why you need one
The programme in your head is real, you run jobs on it daily. Its one defect is that nobody else can see it, which means it cannot prove delay, cannot warn the client, and cannot show the plumber why his week matters. Writing it down is an hour. The hour pays all job.
QScope Team·17 April 2026·5 min read
Forget the software. A small job’s programme is a one-page table: stages down the side, weeks across the top, a bar or a pair of dates per stage, and a note of what each stage waits for. Groundworks, frame or shell, roof, weathertight, first fix, plaster and drying, second fix, finishes, externals, snagging. An hour with last job’s memory prices the durations; honesty about drying and lead times prices the gaps.
What the written version wins you
- Delay arguments become measurable. Every page in this series about extensions of time ends at the same evidence question: what was planned, what happened, what waited. A written programme plus a daily diary is that answer; a head-programme is a recollection contest. The client’s late kitchen decision only becomes three weeks of provable delay against a document that showed the kitchen was needed by week nine.
- The money plan gets its spine. The cash forecast is the programme with prices on it, and the prelims are priced per programmed week: both are guesses until the weeks exist on paper.
- Client decisions get deadlines. The most useful line on a domestic programme is not your work, it is theirs: tiles chosen by week six, sanitaryware ordered by week eight. Handed over at the start, it converts the future “why is nothing happening” conversation into “we are waiting on the decision the programme flagged in March”.
- Trades coordinate off one document, and the sub who saw his fortnight in writing has fewer excuses than the one who was phoned on Sunday, both directions of that street being covered elsewhere.
The three dependencies that actually matter
A small job’s programme fails at the same three joints, so mark them explicitly: lead times (windows, steel, kitchens ordered by a named week or the programme is fiction); drying and curing (screeds and plaster do not negotiate, and the programme that ignores them is lying to everyone politely); and the client’s decisions, above. Everything else on a £100k-300k job mostly follows in sequence.
The status question: is it a contract document?
Know the difference between the programme as tool and as obligation. On most small jobs the contract binds you to a completion date, and the programme is your working plan for hitting it, useful, evidential, but not itself promised. Attaching the detailed programme as a contract document cuts both ways: it disciplines the client’s decision dates, and it hands them a document to measure your every week against. Whichever way, the quote should state the completion date, the key client decision dates, and that the detailed sequence is for planning; and if phases will be handed over separately, that is the sections question, decided at signing, not improvised.
What to do this week
1. Draw the one-pager for the live job, as built to date plus plan to completion, one hour.
2. Extract the client-decision lines and send them, framed as help: “the dates we need choices by, so nothing holds the job”.
3. Put the monthly ten-minute update in the valuation-day routine, where the rest of the job’s paperwork already lives.
Where the information stops
On a genuinely complex job, phased occupation, structural sequencing, tight external constraints, a proper planner’s programme earns its fee, and this page’s one-pager is not a substitute; the test is whether the three joints above cover your risks, and where they stop covering them, so does the kitchen-table method.