Pull Planning
A collaborative scheduling technique, done by getting foremen and trade partners around a wall of sticky notes, where the team works backward from a target milestone to plan the next several weeks of work together, rather than a scheduler dictating the sequence alone from an office.
Why it matters
The people who actually execute a schedule's assumptions are the trades doing the work day to day, and pull planning gets their input before a plan is finalized instead of after it's already failing. It tends to surface sequencing conflicts and unrealistic durations that an office-built schedule alone would miss.
On a real project
Before a building's mechanical, electrical, and plumbing rough-in phase, the superintendent runs a pull-planning session where each trade foreman places sticky notes representing their tasks on a wall, working backward from the drywall start date until every trade agrees on a sequence that actually works for all of them.
Who this matters most to
A Superintendent typically facilitates pull-planning sessions, since building buy-in from the trades who'll execute the plan is the whole point of the exercise. A Scheduler takes the results of a pull-planning session and folds the agreed sequence into the look-ahead schedule and master schedule.
Where this goes wrong
A superintendent runs a pull-planning session but then builds the official schedule differently from what the trades actually agreed to in the room, prioritizing the sequence the office originally wanted. The trades show up expecting the plan they helped build, and the mismatch causes the same coordination conflicts pull planning was supposed to prevent.