Updated October 25, 2026: two more courses are live, and the WBS Scheduler now handles projects with thousands of activities. Both are described below.
WBS Academy is open at academy.woods.consulting. It is where our training in project planning and scheduling will live from now on, and the first course, Scheduling Fundamentals, is ready. During the preview every course is free. You sign in with a Microsoft or GitHub account to open the lessons and the lab.
Why we built it
Most people learn scheduling by learning a tool. A course on P6 or Microsoft Project shows you where to enter a relationship and which key reschedules the project. It rarely shows you why an activity’s late finish lands on the 14th and not the 12th, or why float went negative across half the network after someone added a deadline. Planners who learned that way can run the software. They get stuck the first time a date looks wrong and they have to explain it to the project manager.
We have spent a lot of time on the arithmetic behind those dates. Our seven-part series on an external scheduling engine for Dynamics 365 Project Operations works through the forward pass, the backward pass and float as code. Once you have written them down that way, you see how much of the method comes down to a handful of rules. WBS Academy teaches those rules first and the software second.
What is in Scheduling Fundamentals
The course is self-paced and takes about four hours. It has twelve lessons in five chapters:
- Getting started: how the course works, and a tour of the lab.
- Dependencies: the four relationship types, lags and leads, and why open ends mislead.
- The Critical Path Method: the forward pass, the backward pass and the critical path.
- Float: total float, free float, deadlines and negative float.
- Wrap-up: a capstone in which you build a schedule end to end, and a final knowledge check.
Ten of the lessons end in a lab. Review questions along the way and a final quiz with a pass mark of 80 percent show whether the ideas stuck.
Two more courses
Constraints and Calendars is a mini course of about an hour and a half. It covers work weeks, holidays and shift calendars, how float behaves when activities sit on different calendars, the eight constraint types and when each one is honest, and how to read negative float when a deadline meets mixed calendars.
Updating and Progressing a Schedule takes about two hours. It follows one clinic refurbishment through five weekly updates: the status date, actual dates and remaining durations, out-of-sequence progress under retained logic and progress override, baselines and variance, a critical path that moves, and the report that explains the update.
Each lesson in both courses ends in the lab, and each course closes with a knowledge check.
The WBS Scheduler
The lab is a small desktop-style scheduling application that runs in the browser. If you have used a desktop scheduling tool, the layout will look familiar: an activity grid on the left, a Gantt chart on the right, and a details pane underneath with the relationships and the calculation for the selected activity. Press F9 and it schedules. Switch on step-through and it walks the forward and backward pass one activity at a time, showing each date as it is worked out, so you can follow the arithmetic instead of taking it on trust.
Each lab gives you a network and a few tasks: add the missing logic, find the critical path, work out why an activity has negative float. The tasks tick themselves off when the schedule is right. Your work is saved in your browser, so you can close the tab and carry on later.
Since October 25 the lab also has the basics of a desktop scheduler: undo and redo, copy and paste, keyboard shortcuts, linking several activities in one step, and project files you can save and open again. It draws only the rows and days on screen, so a project with 5,000 activities still reschedules in a fraction of a second, and Chrome and Edge can install it as an app that keeps working offline.
Who it is for
The course is for new planners and schedulers, for project engineers who are handed a schedule and asked to keep it up to date, and for project managers who want to know what they are signing off. It also suits people who use P6 or Microsoft Project every day and have never been quite sure how the dates are worked out.
What comes next
Three more courses are planned for the planning and scheduling track. Introduction to Project Planning covers scope, the work breakdown structure, activities and durations. Building a Quality Schedule covers logic quality, constraints and health checks such as the DCMA 14-point assessment. Resource Loading and Leveling is a mini course. Their outlines are in the course catalog.
The courses are free during the preview, and we would like to hear what you make of them.
Planning and scheduling at Woods Business Solutions
WBS Academy is part of our Enterprise Project Planning & Scheduling capability, and the courses come out of project work. Zachary Woods, who founded WBS, has spent more than 15 years as a systems integrator in Microsoft business applications and specializes in large Dynamics 365 Project Operations and Field Service implementations for oil and gas, energy and industrial operators. He has worked on large-scale maintenance and turnaround projects with Marathon Petroleum (MPC), at a scale where the standard scheduling engine had to be replaced.
For organizations that run capital projects, turnarounds and maintenance programs, we take effort out of planning in four places:
- The schedule, resources, cost and progress sit in one plan in Dynamics 365 Project Operations, connected to SAP or your ERP instead of copied into spreadsheets.
- An external scheduling engine calculates the critical path across thousands of activities, with calendars, lags and updates as of a status date.
- Crews and contractors work from Field Service work orders tied to the plan, so each update starts from what happened on site, and contractor cost is approved against the project before it becomes an invoice.
- Your planners learn the method behind the dates in WBS Academy, as a team if you like.
Every engagement starts with a scoping workshop, and you get a written price for a fixed scope instead of an hourly estimate. Book a consultation to talk through your next project.
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