Are you responsible for monitoring and responding to the Contractor’s schedule performance on the project?
Do you review each schedule update and compare dates in the new update with the dates in the baseline schedule?
Do you compare the Milestone Activity dates to the baseline schedule?
There are many different methods of analyzing project schedule performance.
When we review a schedule progress update, we need to first determine if the schedule update is a valid update. By that, I mean is the logic still complete? Have there been any revisions with this update that result in the schedule not meeting the contract requirements or best practices? It doesn’t take much to render a schedule useless….
There are most likely logic revisions, changes to lag values, or possible changes to calendars or calendar assignments. There are also deletions and additions of activities and/or Activity Relationships. Then there are changes to quantities or Resources which may impact Activity Durations or Resource Calendars, depending on the schedule settings selected.
This should all be addressed in a manner that conveys the actual revisions with the reasons for the revisions as part of the schedule update narrative the Contractor submits with the schedule update. Unfortunately, this is rare. Typically, we see the “digger” report with a general comment addressing the high-level view of the update.
Not really helpful for our use.
So, we plow ahead with the intent to complete our review of the schedule update for this period.
First, we need to complete several “quality checks” of the schedule to validate it for use.
In my next post, I will walk through some of the more common items we check for.
Until then, be suspect of schedule updates without, or with vague schedule update narratives. There is much that can be changed in the program, that will not be transparent to the owner without a thorough review and analysis of the file by an experienced schedule professional.
As Planning and Schedule Professionals, we need to provide the Project Team with the “tools” they need to manage the project. The owner needs to know what the performance of the actual work in the field is, compared to the planned performance. Unless we have a valid schedule update to measure with, and against, and understand the impact of acceptable schedule revisions, we cannot provide any accurate performance measurement.
I’m sure many of you have comments or additional insight into this subject. Please share!
I’d love to hear what you think!
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Paul Epperson CCM, PMP, PSP, PMI-SP