Building an installation schedule

1–10 days

the length of the on-site leg of the schedule

Stand types

Working backwards

The only fixed point is the opening hour. Building backwards from it refuses an unrealistic plan at the outset. The last step is cleaning and handover; ahead of it sit product placement, furniture, graphics, lighting adjustment, power, wall cladding, structural assembly and the floor.

Some of the steps belong to the organiser’s programme rather than yours: the hour the power comes on, the day the gangway carpet goes down, the window when the main door stands open. Those sit in the schedule as fixed blocks, and your own work arranges itself around them rather than the other way round.

Each step carries two pieces of information: how long it takes and who does it. The duration comes from the crew doing the work, not from the person drawing the plan. A joiner knows how many metres of wall he closes in a day; durations guessed at a desk do not survive the hall, and the half hours lost on day one arrive as a whole shift on day three.

The freight arrival time is the first line of the schedule, not the last. If the truck cannot get into the hall, the rest of the plan is theoretical, which is why the loading order lives in the same document. That is why freight and installation sit on one schedule in our exhibition stand services.

Critical path and buffer

Some steps run in parallel, others in sequence. Graphics wait for wall cladding; furniture placement does not. Writing that distinction down turns a list into a plan. The total duration of the dependent steps is the critical path, and it sets the real length of the build.

The practical way to find the critical path is to ask of each step: what has to be finished before this can start. Steps with an answer join the chain; steps without one float. The length of the chain gives you the build duration, while the floating steps get slotted in whenever the crew has capacity.

Buffer goes into the middle of the critical path, not at the end. Buffer parked at the end is always spent early, because everyone prefers to take the job in hand a little more comfortably. Half a day placed in the middle rescues the rest of the plan after the first setback.

How much buffer depends on how much is unknown. A familiar hall and a familiar stand type need little. A first visit to a venue, with freight that has to clear customs, justifies doubling it. Where the buffer sits is not announced to the crew; announced, it stops being a buffer.

One person owns the schedule

The schedule is a shared document with a single owner. The site manager holds it, enters the changes and reports the delays. When two people update the same schedule, two versions of reality appear and both are wrong.

How the schedule gets updated is settled at the outset too. Each evening the site manager closes the day, writes the first three jobs for the next one and notes the reason for any slippage. That short record becomes the basis of the post-show report and removes any need to rely on memory.

It is shared with the exhibitor too. When the products arrive, when the photographer shoots, when the staff are briefed — all on the same sheet. If the hour the stand is finished collides with the hour the products land, two teams stand waiting for each other and each blames the other for the delay.

After the show, keep the schedule as it actually ran. The gap between planned and actual is the only solid data you have when building the next one; a schedule built on guesswork breaks in the same place every year.

How finely should the schedule be split?

Half-day slots work for most stands. The final day is tracked hourly, because there is no margin left.

How does the organiser’s schedule constrain ours?

Hall opening and closing hours, delivery windows and the time the power is energised form the frame. Read them in the technical manual rather than assuming them.