A calendar can look productive because every hour has been assigned. In field services, that appearance can conceal a serious omission: the person must travel between the places where the work is meant to happen. The visit blocks may each be reasonable, yet the combined day may be impossible on the terms shown. I learned that through a programme I approved, not through a scheduling mistake I discovered in somebody else's plan. My approval gave an incomplete account the authority of a commitment.
In 2018 we prepared thirty-six daily plans with two site examinations of four hours each. That was eight hours on site before travel, access arrangements and other practical needs. Twenty-three routes required more than three hours of travel. The other thirteen required no more than three, which still did not make their original schedules adequate. The distinction helped us understand the routes, but it was not a basis for declaring one group acceptable simply because its journey was shorter.
The central plan had made the examination time visible and the movement invisible. That can happen when a schedule is built from standard activity blocks without asking field colleagues to explain the conditions connecting them. Each block has a clear label and duration, so the total feels disciplined. The missing activity is less tidy: roads, site windows and arrival arrangements vary. But variation does not make it optional. A plan that excludes the journey has not simplified the work; it has left part of the work unplanned.
The missing activity was unavoidable
Field colleagues challenged the arrangements before we treated them as instructions to make the examinations shorter. Their contribution was not a request for a more comfortable calendar. It was evidence that the proposed sequence did not account for how the work could actually be carried out. We needed their knowledge alongside the technical owners' view of the examination scope and the site owners' view of access. None of those perspectives alone was enough to produce a credible programme.
We replanned all thirty-six arrangements. Twenty-three were split across separate days, and thirteen were resequenced with appropriate visit windows. The response did not prescribe a fixed maximum number of visits for every engineer or property. It examined the particular work and routes. A shorter journey can make one sequence feasible while a different site requirement makes another unsuitable. The operating judgement needs that context instead of a universal productivity ratio detached from the conditions in which evidence is gathered.
Extra travel, lodging and coordination cost ₹46 lakh. I retained that amount against the correction because it was a consequence of the plan I had approved. The revised programme also required conversations with commercial and site colleagues who had expected the earlier dates. We could not claim that the work became more efficient merely because the calendar was now credible. It occupied a different sequence and required additional resources. An honest operating account should make that tradeoff understandable before celebrating the correction.
Change the plan, not the evidence requirement
The dangerous convenience would have been to ask the field team to reduce each examination until the original day fitted. That would turn a scheduling error into a change in the evidence collected, without the technical judgement needed to decide whether the narrower work was appropriate. Operations can propose a different arrangement, but it cannot quietly shorten the task and assume the original description still applies. If scope changes, the qualified owner and authorised recipients need to understand what that means.
The arithmetic itself also needs care. Eight hours plus more than three hours is more than eleven, before other needs. It does not prove that a person actually worked an eleven-hour day, that every route took the same time or that a health incident occurred. The case records a flawed plan and its revision. Those facts are sufficient to explain the management error. Adding an unmeasured outcome would make the story more dramatic while making the evidence less reliable.
We also do not claim that every revised appointment was subsequently completed. A workable plan enables delivery; it does not document it. Site access can change, equipment can become unavailable and another condition can require a further decision. Keeping plan status separate from completion is part of the same discipline that asks the calendar to include travel. Both resist the temptation to let an administrative record stand in for an event on the ground that has not yet been established.
What a board can ask about a full calendar
For a board, the useful question is how management knows that its capacity plan describes real work. Directors do not need to choose routes or appointment times. They can ask whether the model includes the activities that connect the visible deliverables, whose experience informed the assumptions and what happens when those assumptions fail. A programme may look fully resourced because it counts only the examination and leaves preparation, travel or access coordination to an unspoken reserve of effort.
The answer should not be a reassuring statement that experienced people will manage. Experience is valuable precisely because it can reveal what a simplified plan has missed. Management needs a way for that knowledge to change the commitment before the field team is judged against it. If a programme has already been promised, the leader must be willing to explain why the dates or cost need revision. Otherwise the organisation rewards the neat schedule and leaves colleagues to absorb its missing conditions.
There is also a commercial reason to be clear early. A customer may organise access or staff around an expected visit. A revised sequence can inconvenience them, and the operating team should acknowledge that rather than describe the change entirely as internal process improvement. The responsibility is to explain what is changing and why through the appropriate relationship owners. A credible account can admit that management made an error without suggesting the customer caused the difficulty or that the technical work is expendable.
My approach now begins with the proposed examination and follows the person through the journey needed to perform it. Where must they be, what conditions must hold and which activities sit between the obvious blocks? I want those questions answered before a dense calendar becomes evidence of productivity. The thirty-six corrected plans did not teach me that field work cannot be planned. They taught me that a useful plan must respect the physical world it is meant to organise, including the road between two perfectly reasonable appointments.