Skip to the page
Northside Solutions Ltd Commercial building work · Rochdale

05 Programme and possession

A programme for a commercial job is not a list of trades with durations beside them. It is a division of the hours the premises can hand over, and the trades are fitted into what is left.

That is why we ask about opening times, delivery slots, staff rotas and the estate’s rules on hours before we ask anything about finishes. Two units with identical drawings can be a six-week job and a fourteen-week job, and the only difference between them is how many hours a week the work is allowed to happen in.

05.1 The survey the dates come out of

Nothing is dated until the unit has been walked. On that visit we measure the areas, find the intake, the meter position, the riser and the stopcock, check what the ceiling void actually holds, look at the floor build-up, and write down the things that only show up on site: the delivery wagon that cannot turn, the fire door that opens into the work zone, the neighbour whose extract runs through your soffit.

Out of that come the three numbers the programme is built from: how many areas the unit splits into, how many shifts of work each area needs, and how many of those shifts a week the premises can actually give up. The last one is the one clients are usually surprised by, and the possession planner on the opening page does that division so it can be seen before anyone argues about it.

05.2 What possession of an area means

Possession is a date and a boundary, written down. From that date until handback, the area inside the screen line is the site team’s: we control who goes in, we are responsible for what happens in it, and your staff and your customers do not use it. Outside the line, nothing changes — the premises trades, your rules apply, and we are visitors with a route through it.

Alongside the boundary we agree the hours, and the day falls into three parts.

One working day split into trading hours and the out-of-hours window A twenty-four hour strip. Before seven in the morning and after ten at night nobody may be on site. From seven until the premises opens at eight, and from half past five in the afternoon until ten at night, the area belongs to the site team. Between eight and half past five the premises trades and only quiet work is allowed. 07:00 08:00 OPEN 17:30 22:00 OFF no access shift premises trading shift no access
The two amber bands added together are one shift. The figures on this strip are the ones used as the planner’s starting values. Your premises will have its own, and the lease or the estate rules usually set the two outer edges.

05.3 Why one team means one thing at a time

A main contractor with a chain of subcontractors can overlap stages, because two firms can be in the building at once. We cannot, and we do not pretend otherwise: there is one site team, the trades in it are engaged directly by us, and when they are chasing services they are not also hanging doors.

What you get for that is a programme with no interfaces in it. No waiting on another firm’s labour, no second method statement to reconcile, no argument about whose damage it was, and one person on site who can answer any question about any stage. What you give up is overlap. On a small commercial job the overlap was mostly fictional anyway, because the unit only has one route in and one screen line.

05.4 Monday walk-round and the progress line

  1. Monday, before the premises opens

    The site agent walks the area with you or the agent, marks the progress line on the programme, and reads out what is planned for the week and which nights are the loud ones.

  2. Same morning, in writing

    You get the week’s shifts, the deliveries booked in, any isolation being asked for and the date of the next handback. One sheet, the same format every week.

  3. Through the week

    Anything that moves a date is told to you the day it happens, not at the next walk-round. A delay you hear about on Monday for something that happened on Wednesday is a second problem on top of the first.

  4. End of each area

    Handback walk, snag list, sign-off, then the screen line moves and the programme is re-marked from the line it actually reached.

05.5 What moves a date, and what does not

Dates move for a short list of reasons, and we would rather have the list in front of you at the start than argue about it later. A date moves when a consent or a licence to alter arrives later than the programme assumed; when an isolation is refused or withdrawn on the night; when the structure as opened up is not what the survey found and the engineer has to re-issue; when the premises needs its trading hours back for a period it did not tell us about; or when a lead-in on a specified item is longer than the programme allowed.

A date does not move because a trade is behind. There is one team, the stages are sequential and the shifts are already booked, so catching up means adding shifts inside the window you have given us — which is a conversation about hours, and it is had with you rather than quietly absorbed.

Everything else about who turns up and what they bring is on the yard at Rochdale.