Give everyone on a job full edit access to the schedule and you will regret it by the second week. I have watched a well-meaning plumbing foreman drag his rough-in three days to the right so it lined up with when his guys were actually going to show, never realizing that move rippled into the inspector's window and the drywall crew's start. Nobody edited anything maliciously. He just had a button he shouldn't have had. The schedule is a shared source of truth, and the fastest way to make it untrustworthy is to let anyone with a login change it.
Permission levels are how you keep a look-ahead schedule honest while still letting the people who live in the field actually use it. Done right, each person sees what's relevant to them and can only change what they're accountable for. Done wrong, you either lock the field out so hard they go back to the whiteboard, or you leave it so open that the plan drifts and nobody trusts it. This is the balance worth getting correct, and it's worth understanding before you roll any scheduling tool out to a crew.
Start With the Question, Not the Roles
Most people set up permissions by copying an org chart. That's backwards. The better question is: for any given piece of the schedule, who is accountable for it being right? The person accountable gets edit rights. Everyone else gets a view scoped to what they need to do their job, plus the ability to report back what actually happened. That single principle — accountability drives edit, everyone else reports and views — solves most of the messy edge cases before they come up.
The three verbs that matter are view, edit, and commit. Viewing is passive. Editing changes the plan for everyone downstream. Committing is different from both — it's a trade or crew saying "yes, we'll do this work in this window," which is the beating heart of the Last Planner approach. A lot of bad permission setups collapse these into one big "access" toggle, and that's where the trouble starts. A foreman should almost always be able to commit and report without being able to edit the underlying sequence.
Administrator: Fewer Than You Think
The admin sets up the account, adds and removes users, configures how the whole thing behaves, and holds the keys to everything. That's exactly why the admin list should be short. On most projects one or two people — usually the scheduler and one backup — is plenty.
The failure mode here is generosity. Somebody asks for "admin so I can just fix my own stuff," you grant it, and now five people can delete other people's work and reconfigure the project. When someone leaves the company six months later, nobody remembers they had the keys. Treat admin like a master key to the trailer: you don't hand it out because it's convenient, you hand it out because someone genuinely needs to lock and unlock the whole building. Everyone else gets a key to their own door.
Project Manager and Scheduler: Own the Sequence
The PM or scheduler owns the plan itself — the activity durations, the logic ties, the trade-flow sequence that says framing feeds MEP rough-in which feeds inspection which feeds insulation and drywall. These are the people who should be pushing and pulling the six-week and three-week look-aheads, running reports, and distributing the weekly work plan.
What earns them broad edit rights is that they hold the whole picture. When the field wants to move an activity, the PM is the one who can see whether that move breaks a downstream dependency two weeks out. This is precisely the coordination a good scheduling tool is built to protect: when you connect activities into a real trade flow instead of parking them as loose bars, the software can warn you that dragging the electrician's rough-in also shoves the inspection and the close-up. That's the whole point of tying the sequence together rather than letting each trade freelance its own dates.
Superintendent: The Field's Editing Hand
The superintendent lives where the plan meets the dirt, and they need real editing power — but scoped to their project, not the whole portfolio. The super is the person adjusting the near-term plan for the reality of the day: a concrete pour slipped because of weather, a delivery came in short, an inspector wants a re-look. They need to reshape the four-week and three-week window without filing a request and waiting.
Here's the coordination gotcha worth stating plainly: give the super edit rights on the near-term window, but be deliberate about the far-term logic. It's healthy for a super to slide next week's activities around the actual crew availability. It's dangerous for a super to quietly rewrite the milestone logic three months out because it made this week look better. The cleanest setups let the field own the short horizon and route structural changes to the deeper plan through the scheduler. That's not bureaucracy — it's the difference between a plan that flexes and a plan that quietly rots.
Foreman and Crew Leader: Commit and Report, Rarely Edit
This is the role people get most wrong, and it matters most because the foreman is closest to the actual work. A foreman does not usually need to edit the sequence. What a foreman needs is to see the next one to three weeks for their crew, commit to the work they can genuinely hit, and report what got done and what got in the way.
That reporting loop is gold. When a foreman marks an activity complete, or flags that it's blocked because the area isn't ready, that's the data that makes the whole look-ahead trustworthy. It's also where a mobile companion app earns its keep — a crew leader with the plan on their phone can confirm the week's commitments and update progress from where they're standing, instead of trying to remember it back at the trailer. But notice what they're doing: confirming and reporting, not rearranging the master plan. Give a foreman full edit rights and you'll get well-intentioned local optimizations that wreck the global sequence, like my plumber sliding his rough-in to suit his crew and blowing up the inspection window.
Subcontractors: Scoped to Their Scope
Trade partners should see their work and the work immediately around it — the predecessor that hands off to them and the successor they hand off to. They shouldn't see the whole schedule, and there's a real business reason beyond tidiness: your schedule can reveal how you're staffing, where your float is, and what your other subs are up to. That's competitive information. A drywall sub does not need to see how you're sequencing the sitework package.
What subs do need is the ability to confirm commitments. When you push next week's plan and the electrical sub can look at it and say "we'll have four guys on that riser Tuesday and Wednesday," you've turned a schedule into an actual agreement. Scoping their view to their activities keeps it focused, keeps it clean, and keeps the coordination conversation on the two or three handoffs that matter to them rather than drowning them in the whole project.
Owner and Stakeholders: Visibility Without a Steering Wheel
Owners, lenders, architects, and inspection agencies usually need to see progress without touching the plan. View-only is the right default for nearly all of them. An owner watching the three-week look-ahead to plan their own move-in or financing draws is legitimate and useful. An owner who can edit activities is a support ticket waiting to happen, and worse, a source of changes nobody in the field asked for.
Owner views are also usually the right place to hide the trade-level detail. The owner wants to know the building is on track, not who your framing sub is or how thin your labor is on the west wing. A clean owner dashboard shows the milestones and the overall look-ahead; it doesn't expose your subcontractor management down to the crew. Give oversight the visibility it deserves and none of the levers it shouldn't have.
Time-Based Rules: Lock What's Already Committed
One of the most useful and least-used features is letting permissions change based on when an activity sits. The logic is simple: the further out an activity is, the more freely it can move; the closer it gets to execution, the more locked-down it should be, because people have already committed to it and built their week around it.
Practically, that means completed activities lock so nobody can quietly rewrite history — which matters enormously if you ever end up in a delay claim and need a clean record of what was planned versus what happened. It means once the weekly work plan is published and trades have committed, late changes route through an approval instead of a silent drag. The Last Planner discipline depends on this: a commitment you can erase without a trace isn't really a commitment. Locking the near-term and requiring a deliberate act to change it is what protects the plan's integrity right when the stakes are highest.
Audit Trails: The Boring Feature That Saves You
Every permission change and every schedule edit should be logged with a name and a timestamp. It feels like paperwork until the day you need it, and then it's the most valuable thing in the account. When two parties disagree about what was planned for the third week of a phase, "here's exactly who changed the date, and when" ends the argument in about thirty seconds. On a contentious job, that record is worth more than most people realize until they're staring down a schedule dispute.
Audit trails also quietly enforce good behavior. People edit more carefully when they know their name is on the change. It's the same reason a clean, visible plan makes crews take their commitments more seriously — accountability that's visible is accountability that works.
A Setup That Actually Holds Up
If you want a starting point that survives contact with a real jobsite, it looks roughly like this:
- Admins: the scheduler and one backup. No one else.
- PM / scheduler: full edit on the plan and the trade-flow logic; owns the sequence.
- Superintendent: edit rights on the near-term look-ahead window; structural changes to the deep plan go through the scheduler.
- Foremen / crew leaders: view their scope, commit to their work, report progress — no sequence editing.
- Subcontractors: scoped view of their activities and immediate handoffs; can confirm commitments.
- Owner / stakeholders: view-only, milestone-level, trade detail hidden.
- Time locks: completed work locked; committed near-term changes require approval.
Notice the pattern running through all of it. Edit rights follow accountability. Everyone else gets a view sized to their job and a clean way to commit and report. That's not about control for its own sake — a schedule that everyone can rewrite is a schedule nobody can trust, and a schedule nobody can trust gets ignored the same week you roll it out. Get the permissions right and the tool becomes what it's supposed to be: a plan the whole team believes, updated by the people who actually know, and protected from the honest mistakes that quietly wreck a good week's work.