Every weekly work plan meeting has a moment that separates the good jobs from the ones that are quietly falling apart. A foreman commits to hanging drywall on the third floor Monday. Somebody at the table asks, "Is the rough-in signed off?" Half the room looks at their boots. Nobody actually knows. So the activity goes on the board anyway, because the schedule says it should, and Monday morning the crew shows up to a wall that still has an open inspection sticker on it. Now you've got twelve guys standing around and a superintendent making phone calls he should have made two weeks ago.
That gap — between "it's on the schedule" and "it's actually ready to build" — is what make-ready planning exists to close. And your weekly work plan is only as trustworthy as the make-ready work that feeds it.
Ready Is Not the Same as Scheduled
The single most useful idea in short-interval scheduling is that an activity earns its place on the weekly plan. It isn't entitled to it because a bar chart drew it there eighteen months ago. An activity is ready when every constraint that could stop it has been knocked down and verified — not assumed, not "should be fine," but actually confirmed.
Think of the weekly work plan as the shipping dock. Nothing goes out the door until it passes inspection. The make-ready process is the assembly line behind that dock, running out in the look-ahead, resolving constraints while there's still time to resolve them. If you're discovering constraints on Friday for work that starts Monday, you don't have a make-ready process. You have a prayer circle.
The Seven Constraints Worth Checking Every Time
After enough jobs, you learn that the things that kill an activity almost always fall into the same buckets. Run every look-ahead activity through these seven questions before you let it near the weekly plan:
- Prerequisite work. Is the predecessor genuinely complete and inspected, or just "mostly done"? Mostly done is where schedules go to die. Overhead rough-in that's 90% complete still blocks the ceiling grid at the 10% that isn't.
- Materials. Not ordered — on site, staged, and accessible. "We ordered it" is a status, not a delivery. Confirm it landed, confirm it's the right submittal, and confirm somebody can get to it without moving a lift and two gang boxes.
- Labor. The right crew, the right size, the right skill. A sub who promises "a couple guys" when you need six framers is a constraint you haven't resolved yet.
- Equipment. Lift, scissor, welder, pump, whatever the task needs — scheduled, on site, and not already committed to another trade in the same window.
- Information. RFIs answered, drawings current, no open ASI that changes the work. Crews building off superseded drawings is expensive rework wearing a disguise.
- Space. The work area is physically available and not double-booked with a conflicting trade. Two crews in one room on the same day is how you get a fistfight and a schedule slip.
- Approvals. Permits pulled, prior inspection passed, sign-offs in hand. The drywall example at the top of this article is an approval constraint that nobody owned.
Miss any one of these and the activity isn't ready — it just looks ready. The whole discipline of make-ready is refusing to fool yourself on that seventh question.
Make-Ready Lives in the Look-Ahead, Not the Weekly Plan
Here's the part crews get backwards. Constraint resolution is not a weekly-plan job. By the time an activity is a week out, you're out of runway to fix most problems. Long-lead material won't arrive in five days. An RFI won't turn around in five days. The make-ready happens further out, in the rolling look-ahead, where you still have time to actually do something about what you find.
A workable rhythm looks like this. Activities enter your six-week horizon and you screen them for constraints immediately — that's the first pass, and it's where long-lead items and RFIs need to surface because six weeks might not even be enough for them. As those activities roll into the three-to-four-week window, you're actively working the constraints and tracking status. By the time something reaches roughly one to two weeks out, every constraint should be green, or the activity does not get promoted to the weekly work plan. Full stop.
This is the discipline the Last Planner System is built around, and it's where scheduling software earns its keep. A tool like LookAheadWall keeps the look-ahead and the weekly plan as the same living picture, so an activity's constraints travel with it as it moves toward execution — you're not re-deriving readiness from memory in a Friday meeting, you're reading it off the board.
Every Constraint Needs a Name Attached
A constraint with no owner is a constraint that doesn't get resolved. "Somebody needs to chase that RFI" is how a two-day delay becomes a three-week one. Every constraint you identify gets a person's name and a date — the person responsible for clearing it and the date it has to be clear by, which is usually well before the activity's start.
Then you track it. Not "we'll follow up" — you look at the list, you see whose constraints are aging past their need-by date, and you escalate before it's a crisis instead of after. The good superintendents I've worked with run their make-ready like a collections department: polite, relentless, and armed with a list.
The Make-Ready Conversation Is Separate From the Weekly Meeting
Don't try to do make-ready inside your weekly work plan meeting. Different horizon, different purpose, different people. The weekly meeting is about committing to work that's already been made ready. If you're resolving constraints in that meeting, you're resolving them a week too late and you're burning the crew leaders' time watching you do it.
Run the make-ready review on the look-ahead — two to six weeks out — and put the people who can actually clear constraints in the room. That means the trade partners. Subs know their own constraints better than you ever will; the electrician knows his gear is on a ten-week lead when your look-ahead only goes out six. Get that on the table early and it's a procurement problem you can solve. Find it in the three-week window and it's a schedule crater.
Make the Constraints Impossible to Ignore
Constraints that live in one person's head get forgotten. Constraints on a visible board get resolved, because everyone can see what's red. A simple stoplight scheme does most of the work — red for not started, yellow for in progress, green for verified clear — and a running count of open constraints per zone or per week tells you at a glance where the trouble is.
When the whole team can see that Zone 3 has nine open constraints and Zone 1 has none, the conversation writes itself. That visibility is exactly what good look-ahead software provides that a spreadsheet buried on someone's laptop never will — the status is out where the crew leaders and subs can act on it.
How to Screen an Activity Into the Weekly Plan
Promotion from look-ahead to weekly plan should be a deliberate gate, not a copy-paste. Before an activity crosses that line, walk it through the seven constraints one more time and ask honestly: is every one of these actually resolved? If a single answer is "I think so," the honest answer is no.
The temptation to force it is enormous, especially when the master schedule is breathing down your neck. Resist it. Every time you put unready work on the weekly plan, you teach your crews that the plan is fiction — and once a foreman stops believing the plan, he stops planning against it, and your whole system loses its teeth. A weekly plan that's 90% reliable and slightly short is worth more than a full one that everybody knows is half fantasy.
The Failures You'll See Over and Over
A few make-ready mistakes are so common they're almost traditions:
- Assuming instead of verifying. "It shipped" is not "it's here." "He's got a crew" is not "six framers on Monday." Confirm the actual state, not the intention.
- Incomplete constraint identification. You clear materials and labor and forget the space is still occupied by the trade ahead of you. One missed constraint fails the whole activity. Run all seven, every time.
- Finding constraints too late. If your first look at an activity's constraints is at three weeks out, you've already lost the ability to fix the slow ones. Push identification out to the six-week edge.
- Owning nothing. A constraint list with no names is a wish list. If nobody's accountable, nothing moves.
Measure Whether It's Working
Percent Plan Complete — the share of your weekly commitments you actually finished — is the number that tells you if your make-ready is real. Weak make-ready shows up as low PPC and a pile of activities that failed for reasons you should have caught: material not there, area not available, prior work not done. Those aren't bad-luck failures. Those are make-ready failures wearing a costume.
So track your reasons for variance. When an activity doesn't complete, log why. If the same constraint categories keep showing up, you know exactly where to tighten the process. And watch your lead time — how many weeks before start are you catching constraints? If that number is creeping down toward zero, you're drifting back into firefighting, and your PPC will follow it down.
The Cycle That Never Stops
Make-ready isn't a phase you finish. It's a loop that runs the whole job. New activities roll into the six-week horizon and you screen them. You work their constraints through the look-ahead. You screen them again at the gate into the weekly plan. And when something fails anyway, you feed that lesson back so you catch the same constraint earlier next time.
Do that consistently and a strange thing happens on the jobsite. The crises get smaller and rarer. The Monday-morning phone calls dry up. Crew leaders start showing up expecting the work to be there — and it is. That's the whole payoff of make-ready: your weekly work plan stops being a list of hopes and becomes a set of commitments people can actually build against. The look-ahead is where you earn that. By the time the work hits the weekly plan, all the hard thinking is already done.