Most small contractors plan forward. Framing starts Monday, drywall in three weeks, paint after that. Then handover arrives and nobody can say which trade ate the slack.
Pull planning flips it. Start at the milestone you promised and ask, step by step, what has to finish before this can start, and who does it. And you ask the people who will do the work.
What pull planning is, and what it is not
Pull planning is the phase planning step of the Last Planner System. It takes one chunk of the job between two milestones and works out the handoffs. Each handoff is a promise between two crews: the tiler asks when the floor drains will be set, and the plumber gives a date he will stand behind.
It does not replace your master schedule. The master still carries the contract dates and the overall sequence, as we covered in master schedule vs lookahead. A pull plan usually details one phase of about six to twelve weeks of work (per the schedule.construction pull planning guide).
Before the session
Pick one milestone that ends a phase and that everyone understands. "Kitchen ready for cabinets" works. "Phase 2 done" does not, because each trade reads it differently.
Invite the foremen and lead hands who run the crews, subs included. If a trade is missing, someone else guesses its work, and you are back to a push schedule. Ask each lead to bring their tasks and durations for the crew they actually have.
Running the session
Book two to three hours for one phase. Past that, people start agreeing just to leave. Sticky notes, a whiteboard or a shared screen all work, as long as each lead writes their own tasks.
- Put the milestone on the far right with its date and a clear definition of done.
- Ask which task must finish right before the milestone. Place it, then keep pulling backward, one handoff at a time.
- On every task, note what that crew needs before it starts: an inspection signed off, material on site, an answer from the client, access to the room.
- When the chain reaches today, read it forward out loud. If it does not fit the time you have, compress it as a group and keep any buffer visible to everyone.
Procore's pull planning guide describes the same flow, with each constraint logged against an owner and a date.
Turn the needs into a constraint list
Every "I need" note from the session is a constraint. Give each one a name and a due date before people leave. A fixture with a four week lead time is the office's job this week, not the electrician's problem on week five.
Weather belongs on that list too. If an exterior phase runs through the rainy months or peak summer heat, mark the days you expect to lose. Our guide to planning weather delays into the schedule shows how.
Feed the plan into the lookahead and the weekly score
A pull plan left on a wall photo dies by Friday. Within a day or two, put the tasks, durations, handoffs and owners into the schedule. If the session showed a duration in the master was wrong, fix the master and flag the milestone if it is at risk.
As the phase gets close, its tasks roll into your 3-week lookahead, where you clear the constraints before the week arrives. Each week crews commit to ready tasks, and you count how many got done. That count is your Percent Plan Complete score, and it shows whether the promises made in the session were real.
Putting it on one plan
After the session, set the milestone in the plan and link each task to the one it hands off to with a dependency. If the plumber slips two days, everyone after him sees it on the Gantt chart. Assign every task to the lead who committed to it, and let the crews open the same plan on their phones.
Zace gives you milestones, task dependencies, Gantt charts and task assignment, on web, Android and iOS, so the plan your foremen built is the same one the office tracks.
Frequently asked questions
What is pull planning in construction?
Pull planning is a way to schedule a phase of work by starting at a milestone and working backward. The crews who will do the work agree on each handoff and list what they need before they can start.
How long should a pull planning session take?
Plan for two to three hours to pull plan one phase. Longer sessions tend to lose focus, so split a big job into several phases and run one session for each.
Does pull planning replace the master schedule?
No. The master schedule keeps the contract dates and the overall sequence. A pull plan details one phase, and what it learns about durations and handoffs should be fed back into the master and into your lookahead.
Start at the date you promised, let the crews pull the work back to today, and the plan they build is the one they will work to.
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