At my previous job I managed 5 crews (about 30 guys), three truck drivers and 30 - 40 pieces of trench shoring and earth moving equipment. I found that the dry erase board can work as good, if not better, than most scheduling tools. The hardest part is making it a priority to keep the board current. When it's current it works great. When its neglected it's almost worse than having nothing. My board had:
- about 15 rows of job names / owner names, labels on left side of board
-about 20 "weekly" columns across the top (I use weeks of the month becasuse my jobs typically run two weeks...6 months)
-magnet tags (3/4" x 2"?) with foremen's names represent (1) time interval (a week)
- I assigned foremen tags (crews) to each job by the duration of the job (estimated time) and the time slot I expected that crew to man the job. Sometimes multiple crews would work simultaneously, sometimes a crew will start a job, move off and another will finish.
- I used a piece of ribbon, as long as the board's height, with a magnet attached to each end, to indicate "today". I positioned the ribbon vertically across all rows at the current date and moved it along daily. Make's for a quick way to see where jobs are in terms of % complete (it's not good when the ribbon gets past the last magnet and you're not done yet) and gives you an idea of when a crew is next available.
As an example: If I expect crew #1 to be on job ABC for 3-1/2 weeks starting Monday the 18th then I put 3 tags end to end in job ABC's row (starting on the 18th) with another tag turned sideways (1/2 week) at the end of that period. If crew #2 will come in 4 weeks later and take a month to finish then I skip four weeks worth of columns and place four more tags (for crew2) end to end in that job's row.
I also assigned a magnet tag to equipment pieces and moved them from job to job accordingly.
