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What's your approach to handling jobs that take twice as long as estimated?

Keiko Tanaka

We're seeing a pattern in our electrical division where complex commercial jobs are running 75–100% over initial time estimates. The immediate impact is cascading delays through the afternoon schedule, frustrated customers, and technician overtime that wasn't budgeted.

From an operational standpoint, I'm less concerned with the occasional overrun and more interested in how teams structurally account for this reality. A few specific questions:

  • Do you build buffer time into every estimate, or only certain job types?
  • How do you communicate delays to downstream customers without damaging trust?
  • What visibility do your dispatchers have into job progress before the technician marks complete?

We're currently evaluating whether to move toward "optimistic" scheduling with explicit buffers, or "realistic" scheduling that bakes contingency into every job. I'd welcome perspective from teams that have made this choice deliberately.

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  • Keiko, we've been down this road. The "realistic" approach won for us, but with a twist — we stopped calling it padding and started calling it "mobility time." Technicians accept it when they understand it's job transition and documentation, not slush.

    Here's what actually works:

    • Commercial jobs: 25% buffer minimum, often 40% for first-time sites
    • Residential service: 15% buffer, but we also hard-cap at 4 hours and split anything larger
    • Daily float slot: One 90-minute emergency slot per crew that dispatch can use proactively

    The key is dispatcher authority to trigger the float slot without management approval. If your dispatchers are waiting on ops managers to authorize schedule changes, you're already behind.

    Pro tip: We also trained our CSRs to book slightly longer windows than the estimate suggests — "between 2–4 hours depending on what we find." Sets expectation without promising precision we can't deliver.

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  • Keiko, we've been down this road. The "realistic" approach won for us, but with a twist — we stopped calling it padding and started calling it "mobility time." Technicians accept it when they understand it's job transition and documentation, not slush.

    Here's what actually works:

    • Commercial jobs: 25% buffer minimum, often 40% for first-time sites
    • Residential service: 15% buffer, but we also hard-cap at 4 hours and split anything larger
    • Daily float slot: One 90-minute emergency slot per crew that dispatch can use proactively

    The key is dispatcher authority to trigger the float slot without management approval. If your dispatchers are waiting on ops managers to authorize schedule changes, you're already behind.

    Pro tip: We also trained our CSRs to book slightly longer windows than the estimate suggests — "between 2–4 hours depending on what we find." Sets expectation without promising precision we can't deliver.

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