2026, July 24th – Build a Better Project Schedule in Contractor Foreman

July 24th, 2026
Hosted by: César Macedo, Trainer at Contractor Foreman
Topic: Build a Better Project Schedule — Dependencies, Auto-Scheduling, and Keeping the Gantt Chart Alive

Webinar Description

In this advanced training session, César Macedo walks through the Schedule module in Contractor Foreman from the ground up — building a real construction sequence live, one task at a time, with attendees weighing in as it takes shape. Drawing on his background as a civil engineer who worked on large-scale projects for a general contractor in the Bay Area, César focuses less on where the buttons are and more on the logic that makes a schedule genuinely useful rather than a chart nobody updates.

The session opens with a deliberate choice: César shows a fully built, densely linked schedule — and then tells attendees not to try to build one. His recommendation for anyone new to the Gantt chart is to start simple, because an over-engineered schedule creates more work than it saves and quickly becomes impossible to maintain. From there he orients the audience to the interface, including a detail that surprises many users: the columns most people are missing (WBS, task ID, duration, predecessors) are hidden by default and enabled with a right-click. He also clarifies the difference between a taskbar and a progress bar, and where the schedule settings actually live — under Actions, not the gear icon most modules use.

Before building anything, César covers the setup decisions that quietly shape everything downstream: setting the working-day calendar (and the fact that it applies to every job in the system, not just one), assigning non-working days for holidays, and importing an existing schedule from Microsoft Project via XML — which he notes is particularly useful for subcontractors who receive a schedule from their GC. He also compares the two ways to create a schedule, and makes a recommendation worth acting on before your next estimate: if you build estimates in construction sequence, the schedule imports already ordered, leaving you only durations and dependencies to add rather than a full rebuild.

The core of the session is dependencies. César works through all four types — finish-to-start, start-to-start, finish-to-finish, and start-to-finish — using a concrete slab-on-grade sequence as the running example, and demonstrates both ways to create them: dragging between taskbars, and typing directly into the predecessors column, which becomes much faster once the chart gets crowded. He is candid that start-to-finish is the one he personally avoids, and equally candid that the other three are enough to build any schedule most contractors need.

Two points get particular emphasis. The first is auto-scheduling: if the toggle is off, dependencies do nothing, and moving a task changes nothing downstream. César demonstrates this live after an attendee reports that their schedule isn’t behaving like his. The second is the anti-pattern he sees most often — users placing every task manually on the date they expect it to happen, with no links between them. His assessment is blunt: without dependencies, the schedule cannot update itself when reality shifts, which makes it effectively useless as a management tool.

The session also covers lead and lag time, using concrete cure time as the example — César shares his own mental shorthand for reading positive and negative values, since the direction trips people up constantly. He then covers subtasks, progress tracking that feeds back into the project module, the critical path and slack (including why a color he set earlier in the session never applied), and documenting rain delays as their own task assigned to the customer, which creates a record you can point to later if the completion date becomes a dispute.

Taha Qureshi supported the session throughout the chat and Q&A. Attendee questions covered automatic email notifications when a task is rescheduled, whether every subcontractor or labor delay warrants its own task, changing dates without opening each task, and saving a schedule as a reusable template — which César demonstrated using the copy-schedule function under Actions. The session closed with a live walkthrough of the mobile app, showing how superintendents and foremen can update task progress from the field.

Attendees were offered a complimentary one-on-one training session to build or review a schedule specific to their own projects.

This session is ideal for:

• Contractors who have not yet used the Schedule module and want a practical starting point rather than a feature tour
• Teams whose Gantt chart exists but never updates itself when dates move — usually a missing dependency or auto-scheduling problem
• Project managers who want to understand all four dependency types and when each one genuinely applies on a job site
• Anyone who has had a completion date disputed and wished they had documented weather or subcontractor delays as they happened