Ready backlog: how many weeks of go-now work your crew has waiting

The scheduler sits down on Monday to build the week, and half the jobs on the list are not really buildable: parts still on order, a permit not yet drawn, a scope not yet worked out. The crew ends up filling the gaps with whatever is to hand, and the planned work slips another week.

Ready backlog is the metric that would have warned them. It counts only the work that is genuinely ready to go, and it tells you whether your planning engine is keeping pace with your crew.

What it actually measures

Ready backlog is the number of weeks of fully prepared work waiting for the crew, expressed in crew-weeks. A job counts only when every piece of planning is done and the materials are actually in hand, kitted, permitted, ready to start tomorrow. Work that is still being planned, or waiting on a part, does not count, which is exactly what separates this from the broader planned backlog: planned backlog is the whole prepared queue, while ready backlog is only the slice you could hand to the crew this minute. And like all backlog, it is counted in hours of work rather than in the number of work orders, because fifty quick jobs and fifty day-long ones are nothing alike as a load on the crew.

Why a separate "ready" number

You might wonder why ready backlog deserves its own metric when planned backlog already exists. The answer is that the two protect against different failures. Planned backlog tells you whether the planning function is keeping enough work prepared overall; ready backlog tells you whether the scheduler can actually build next week. A plant can carry a perfectly healthy planned backlog and still run dry on ready work, because the prepared jobs are all snagged on parts that have not arrived or permits not yet drawn. That gap, plenty planned but little truly ready, is one of the most common reasons a well-meaning schedule collapses back into reaction, and it stays invisible unless you measure the ready slice on its own. Ready backlog is, in effect, the scheduler's fuel gauge: not how much work exists, but how much can be started right now.

How to work it out

As with any backlog, the capacity figure is where the honesty lives. Take a ten-person crew whose gross week, with a little overtime, comes to well over 400 hours. Strip out the holidays, the loaned-out technician, the training and meetings, and a realistic allowance for the emergencies that arrive every week, and the net, schedulable capacity is far lower.

Ready backlog (weeks) = Ready work hours / Net crew capacity per week

Say that leaves about 235 net hours a week, with 760 hours of genuinely ready work in the queue.

Ready backlog = 760 / 235 = 3.2 weeks

At a little over three weeks the scheduler has plenty of prepared work to build a full, efficient week, without so much that jobs grow stale before they are reached.

What good looks like

The recognised target is two to four weeks, and the band exists because both ends are dangerous. Below two weeks, the scheduler simply cannot fill a crew plan with prepared work, and the team drifts toward whatever reactive job is loudest that day, the very habit good scheduling exists to break. Above four weeks, the opposite problem sets in: jobs start to age in the queue, equipment conditions change after the job was planned, parts booked out months ago go missing or expire, and priorities move on before the work is ever done. One caution on the number itself: ready backlog is a distinct, smaller pool than total planned backlog, so do not confuse the two-to-four-week target here with the larger figures sometimes quoted for the whole prepared queue.

Where it can mislead you

• Count only work that is genuinely ready, planned, kitted and permitted. Half-prepared jobs inflate the figure, and the comfort it gives is false the moment the scheduler tries to start one.
• Use net crew capacity, not gross. Subtract holidays, training, meetings and an honest emergency allowance, or the backlog will look healthier than it is.
• Watch for carryover gaming. A crew that perennially reports the same chunk of work as "in progress" week after week can mask chronic under-delivery, so keep an eye on what actually closes, not just what is claimed open.
• Review it weekly. Ready backlog swings quickly, and a monthly glance will miss the moment the pipeline runs dry and the crew slips back into reaction.

Ready backlog keeps the planner a comfortable step ahead of the crew. Held in the two-to-four-week band, it is the difference between a scheduler who builds the week from a deck of ready, well-chosen jobs and one who is scrambling every Monday to find enough buildable work to keep the team off the back foot.