Module 8:

8.4 Creating an annual maintenance schedule

8.4.5 Create your own maintenance schedule

1   There are many ways of creating and presenting a maintenance schedule, with several ways of splitting the year up. You could take a very detailed weekly, monthly or quarterly approach.

For this activity we will split the year into quarters and months:

1.   Sep/Oct/Nov [Autumn]: This can be considered the early part of the playing season.
2.   Dec/Jan/Feb [Winter]: This is the mid-season and often provides the worst ground conditions, plus there is usually a couple of weekends over the Christmas and New Year period when games are not scheduled (excluding professional games).
3.   Mar/Apr/May [Spring]: This is the later part of the season, including end of season renovation, which will typically be the first or second week of May.
4.   Jun/Jul/Aug [Summer]: This is mostly the out of season to start of the playing season, which includes establishment of a new pitch following renovation and pitch preparation for the playing new season, which might commence anytime in August.

2   For now, we will use all of the main activities that were previously identified, but for your worked example you can add or amend the activities to better suit your own specific football pitch. It doesn’t really matter if you don’t use all the activities shown because the aim here is to help you create an initial and preliminary annual maintenance calendar to suit your particular needs.

The values that we have included in our example schedule should be thought of as general and indicative figures only for a Grade 3 pitch based on a sand-gravel slit pitch being located in the Midlands, with 100 games being planned. These assumptions help in demonstrating the practical use of an annual schedule.

Actual values, especially for your own situation will be influenced by many factors and will, no doubt, be different from this one. These maintenance schedules demonstrate the principle of estimating likely inputs for different activities so as to help with forward planning of resource requirements.

Activities in the work plan marked with an asterisk symbol (*) might be carried out using a combination implement, such as a SISIS Quadraplay, so more than one activity might be carried out at the same time. This would be important to know when a subsequent work programme was being created to avoid counting the time as two separate activities for the combined activities.

3   As you build-up your quarterly schedules think about why the activity is being carried out in the month, or months, you are putting it into. In particular focus on how the activity is expected to influence the pitch playing performance as well as the overall pitch quality grade. Don’t carry out an activity just for the sake of it. You will want to reflect on the reason why you are doing it at the planned time.

A few other points to consider are:

1.   Do you have the resources, especially finances, to be able to achieve your plan? So, you will want it to be realistic.
2.   If you are using a contractor for any of the activities, do they have the capacity to do the planned work when you require it to be done?
3.   If you are hiring any machinery for some activities, then make sure you have them ordered well in advance of requirements.
4.   For the materials that you are going to use, do you have a safe, secure and suitable storage facility?

Don’t forget what we mentioned at the start of this module about a work schedule being a forward planning tool that is a ‘work in progress’. The prevailing weather and ground conditions will be the main factors that influence what actually takes place and the schedule will therefore require adjustments to be made as the year progresses.

You will want to spend about 2 hours completing your own four quarterly work schedules by using the blank tables we have provided. Do not rush this because it isn’t a race. In a real workplace situation, you would want to discuss this with other people to ensure that any assumptions you make are correct and that any data you have is accurate for the coming year, for example, budget, planned usage schedule, etc.

4   For now, we would anticipate you just attempt this on your own so as to gain experience of thinking about and creating a maintenance schedule by yourself.

If you find this activity is taking longer than you thought or we have estimated, then don’t worry. You might just want to focus on a few of the maintenance activities, just one or two of the schedules, or even consider putting some additional time aside to complete all four of the schedules. The choice is yours.

The main thing is that you have made an attempt at engaging with the creation of a maintenance schedule. This will provide you with a sound basis for developing more detailed ones, as well as acting as a steppingstone to more extensive work programmes, in the future.

Just one more guide before you start. For the number of games planned in any column, then (typically) rows for the line marking, pre-match-checks, and post-match repairs, will be the same number. So, there’s some easy few lines to complete to start your schedule off.