What Is My Critical Path?

One of the first questions the program manager may ask is, “What is my critical path?” While it may be simple to produce a critical path chart from a scheduling tool, there are several more factors to consider.

1. Although the schedule may have little or no Missing Logic at this phase, this is not a guarantee that the logic is correct. Tasks may be fully linked, but the most appropriate links may not be in place.
2. Secondary critical paths may be lurking behind the primary critical path. These secondary paths are candidates to become the most critical path should they encounter any delays or failures.
3. “Need dates” for intermediate project milestones may be as important as the final project finish date.

For these reasons, the ability to smoothly trace logic across a schedule to intermediate and completion milestones is a vital capability. Having this ability allows the team to establish links which support the needs and goals of the project, rather than simply making the claim, “we don’t have open ends.” In short, the state of “fully linked” does not necessarily equal “properly linked.”

True Schedule Logic

In Acumen Fuse, the user has the capability to trace true schedule logic in several different ways:

Trace Forwards or Backwards

First, the user can select any task in the project and trace forward or backward through the schedule logic. This allows for a real-time qualitative assessment of program logic. Normally, a project scheduler would trace through the logic in the tool with the appropriate task owners present to comment on the accuracy and applicability of the logical links that have been chosen.

Trace Network Paths

Next, the user may trace driving paths from the project start to intermediate milestones in the project. These are effectively the “intermediate” critical paths. If there is no relationship between the project start to a key milestone, there is missing logic in the schedule. Similarly, if Fuse reveals that there is no relationship between a key project milestone and the finish date, there are logic gaps. At the core, all critical milestones must, in some way, ultimately link through logical paths to the project completion milestone.

Driving Logic

Finally, the user can specify to show driving logic only—this will show the most critical path. Otherwise, the user can show all paths between the start and finish milestones (or between any two points in the schedule). It is essential to verify and assess the risk for both the driving and non-driving paths. Often, the ultimate critical path of a project began as a non-driving path whose duration expanded. For this reason, it is important to understand driving and non-driving paths alike. In fact, non-driving paths may only be trailing the critical path by a few days. This means that even a small delay could promote them to the most critical path, which introduces the possibility of negative float in the schedule, and ultimately jeopardizes on-time project completion.

Use the Trace Logic feature in Acumen Fuse to identify driving and/or non-driving network paths.

Conclusion

The program manager must have a complete understanding of the need to correct missing logic while assuring that the links are also creating high quality schedule paths. Only then can the manager properly evaluate whether or not the program can meet its targeted completion date based on a reliable plan with no hidden logic risks.

Understanding the Approach

There may be items that one party does not fully agree on, for example the approach to solve a technical issue, but it is imperative that all parties achieve a common understanding of the approach, so that there are no future surprises.  For example, there may be multiple ways of designing the wiring to ensure secure communication. The key during the review, is that all parties understand the approach, agree with that approach, understand the risks associated with the approach, and will meet the agreed upon approach requirements.  With that understanding in place, a team can avoid surprises and finger pointing when a particular risk does occur while executing the planned approach.

Save Time, Come Prepared

It was mentioned earlier that the project review is a process and not a single meeting; this is important for several reasons.  First, it is important to ensure the most productive use of the face to face time at the project review. It is vital that all sides come to the meeting fully prepared to discuss issues.  A project review meeting should not be a discovery meeting.  To effectively accomplish this, data needs to be shared with the team prior to the meeting, and far enough in advance to give the team an opportunity to review and address questions about the data.  If the data is not provided ahead of the meeting, time will be wasted during the meeting trying to understand the actual data at it’s most basic level. These are issues that can usually be resolved ahead of the project review meeting. 

The second aspect of the process is that the post project review action items and follow up be completed.  The team should leave the meeting with set expectations and deadlines to complete the action items.  It would be rare if there were not action items or issues identified during a project review that would need to be addressed offline. 

Conclusion

Project reviews and IBRs are designed to ensure that all parties on a project have the same understanding of how the project plan will be executed, what risks may occur, and which approach to take when a particular risk arises.  By coming to the review with prior knowledge of the project data and leaving with an understanding of the agreed upon approach requirements, project teams can significantly increase their project’s chance at success.

Why Projects Fail

The equivalent saying in project management would be, “success or failure during a project is decided during the initiation and planning phases.” Most of us are excited to start a new project and energized by the new challenges that the particular project poses. It is natural in project management to want to jump in, roll up our sleeves and start working the issues as it is in sports—who plays sports to practice? However, when you think about why projects fail, most, if not all, drivers of failure can be traced back to something that should have been addressed in the first phases of the project life cycle.

The following table shows why projects fail and identifies attributes that should have been addressed to prevent failure.

Proper Preparation

In sports the test of how ready the team is, or how effective the practice has been, is determined with a scrimmage. The scrimmage is a review of how you plan to execute your game plan, to see how effective your practice has been, and where, as required, you need to practice more before game time. In project management, this scrimmage is called the project review or integrated baseline review (IBR). Like the sports scrimmage, having the project review is intended to review all aspects of how you’re going to execute your plan for success and where you need to modify that plan.

Project risk analysis is used to identify and simulate the potential impact of scope uncertainty and unforeseen events which may impact the duration or cost of the project.  In order to get an accurate picture of your project finish date you must consider factors such as the availability of equipment, delays during shipping, process of obtaining tariffs and permits, and more.  Each of these potential events carries a probability (how likely it is to occur) as well as an impact (if the event occurs, how much will the delay affect project duration and cost).

In addition to more common risk events, weather events, such as hurricanes, tsunamis, freezes, etc. can also have an impact on the project.  These events are often tied to a specific time period or season and therefore must be handled a bit differently during the risk analysis process. 

Incorporating Weather Risks: Mapping Them to the Schedule

Let’s consider two examples of risk events:

1. The risk of a delay due to fabrication yard constraints
2. The risk of a delay due to a frozen sea 

In the first risk, you can easily identify the probability of the fab yard capacity being overloaded and therefore delaying fabrication for your project.  You can also identify which areas of the schedule (any relating to fabrication) that this risk will impact.  In this case, the timing of fabrication activities doesn’t matter.  If the fab yard is constrained during fabrication you will incur a delay and this should be included in your risk model.

The second example, a frozen sea, only occurs during the winter months, but may impact multiple parts of the schedule.  If you were to map the risk of a frozen sea to the activities it may impact, as in example 1, you would get a skewed result.  If any of these activities are scheduled outside of the winter they will wrongly incur the risk—even though there is no chance that the sea will be frozen during that activity’s working time. By tying the freeze to a time period through weather modeling you are able to ensure that only activities you’ve mapped and are actually scheduled during the defined time period carry the risk.

Types of Weather Events

In Acumen Risk, the Monte Carlo risk analysis software from Acumen, there are two options for incorporating weather events into the risk model:

Calendar Events

A calendar event in Acumen Risk is a discrete risk event that occurs during a specific period of time.  An example of this is a hurricane, which only occurs during hurricane season.  To incorporate this risk you simply provide the time period (and associated frequency of event), June through October for example, then map the risk to any and all activities it may impact in your schedule.

Risk Windows

A risk window is a period of time that may cause a delay for the project.  An example of a risk window is our frozen sea example from above.  The freeze is most likely to occur from January to February, but start and finish as early as December or as late as March.  Using a risk window allows you to define start and finish of the weather window as an uncertainty.

Splittable Work

Using Acumen Risk, you once again have two choices for this modeling split/non split of work.  You can decide whether to have the work split across the non-working time or you can choose to delay the entire activity.  For example, if you could begin work on an activity but would need to stop work if a hurricane hit you would choose to split the activity.  The model would allow work to progress on the activity before the hurricane, but delay the finish until after the hurricane.  However, if your schedule included a shipping activity during the month of January which would be impacted by the frozen sea you would choose to delay shipping until after the freeze.  It would not make sense to begin ‘shipping’ only to have it stop halfway through shipment to wait on the freeze to clear.   

Conclusion

While it is possible to include weather events in a standard risk register process, using the advanced weather modeling feature allows for a much more accurate view of the impact of these events.  Combining weather modeling capabilities with discrete risks and opportunities and mapping them to activities in your schedule allows you to create a comprehensive risk-adjusted plan for your project.

See It in Action

View our latest video tutorial to see Acumen Risk’s weather modeling capabilities in action!

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Acumen Fuse^®

Acumen Fuse Schedule Cleanser™

Watch a walk through of correcting schedule flaws directly in Acumen Fuse // Watch

Project Slice and Dice

Learn the many ways you can slice and dice project data for targeted diagnostics // Watch

Acumen 360™

Schedule Acceleration with Acumen 360

Expedite your plan using acceleration scripts // Watch

Targeted Schedule Acceleration

Focus acceleration efforts to specific activities or groups of activities with this tutorial // Watch

Acumen Risk™

Prioritizing Risk Mitigation

Find and mitigate the biggest project risks // Watch

Customizing Acumen Risk

Tailor Acumen Risk to your organizational needs // Watch

Launching Acumen Risk

Acumen has teamed up with our international resellers and partners to host a series of seminars launching the new-to-market cost/schedule risk analysis software: Acumen Risk™.  Acumen Risk provides unprecedented insight into both the uncertainty inherent to complex projects and the unforeseen risk events which can impact key project milestones.  This unique software tool helps the entire project team (not just high-level risk statisticians) to accurately account for and proactively reduce project risk exposure.  Through cutting edge reporting, Acumen Risk provides unprecedented insight into project challenges and the benefits of proposed mitigation strategies and helps you develop an accurate risk model the team can actually rely on. 

Acumen Software Suite

In addition to presenting Acumen Risk, the world tour will demonstrate the unique schedule diagnostics and quality improvement capabilities of Acumen Fuse® and the ability of Acumen 360 to help remediate project slips and delays.  Acumen Fuse includes over 300 metric checks which help you to identify shortcomings in the schedule, cost estimate, risk model or project performance.   Acumen 360 uses intelligent and pinpointed acceleration (or deceleration) techniques to automatically generate a schedule scenario which meets an accelerated project goal or helps to recover delays incurred during execution. 

Second Annual World Tour

This will be the second world tour the Acumen team has embarked on. The 2012 World Tour included the launch of Acumen’s cloud-based project benchmarking utility: Acumen Cloud™.  This series of 18 seminars was attended by close to 500 project professionals.  

With the launch of Acumen Risk™ and plenty of additional planned stops, the 2013 World Tour promises to be an even bigger event!  Use the links below for additional information on each stop of the tour or contact us to add your city to the list! 

2013 World Tour

Upcoming Seminars: 

London – February 28

Milan – March 5

Bucharest– March 7

Doha – March 12

Abu Dhabi – March 14

Partners

CMCS

Milestone

SPS Solutions

Comunico

Almost 50,000 analyses later, we are now seeing some very interesting trends. Perhaps the most interesting is the fact that projects that have adopted the Fuse Schedule Index™ are undeniably seeing improvement in planning quality!

Since schedule quality helps drive more realistic forecasting which in turn helps drive more on-time, on-budget completed projects, it only follows that project-led organizations benefit from better quality schedules.

So, is the average Fuse Schedule Index™ score getting better or worse? It’s getting better – a lot better.

Results

Figure 1 shows the month on month results of average Fuse Schedule Index™ analysis over the past year. Whichever way you slice the data, the trend is positive: the average schedule score is improving. In fact, looking at the trendline, the average FSI a year ago was just over 50%. Today that score is close to 60%. That’s a 10% increase in quality! Undeniable proof that schedule critique using Fuse metrics is having a positive impact on the quality of schedules and forecasting industry-wide.

Figure 1 – How Schedules using the Fuse Schedule Index™ are getting Better

Drilling a little further into some of the emerging trends, we have also examined some of the individual metrics that comprise the FSI.

Missing Logic: Total number of activities that are missing a predecessor, a successor, or both

Take, for example, the metric Missing Logic . The results show two distinct populations: those who adhere to avoiding missing logic and those who continue to develop schedules with erroneous logic links. In this latter population, there remains a disturbing number of activities per project without sufficient logic. As we have noted before in numerous whitepapers, a schedule ultimately boils down to durations and logic – get either of those wrong and your plan is fundamentally flawed. 

Figure 2 – Logic Adherent vs. Logic-less

Logic Density: The average number of logic links per activity

Some time ago we were questioned on our recommended thresholds for Logic Density™. Interestingly, the majority of projects are falling exactly within our suggested range of between 2 and 4 links per activity! 

Figure 3 – Logic Density™

Negative Float: Number of activities with total finish float less than 0 working days

Negative float (or schedule bust) is often caused by artificial constraints embedded within a schedule. The results in figure 4 are interesting as they show that almost 4/5th of projects are carrying little to no negative float. The flipside to this, however, is that 22% of projects STILL have activities carrying negative float. These results indicate that 22% of projects will miss their targeted finish date even if they are executed as planned. 

Figure 4 – Negative Float

Average vs. P50

What is really interesting about these insights is that if we simply looked at the averages, e.g. average negative float is 8.21% then we get a very skewed view of the world. Because almost 78% of the population doesn’t carry significant negative float, the P50 (the middle of the population) average is actually close to zero negative float. Merely looking at averages can be very misleading. However, comparing project rankings provides significant insight into and context for the quality of project planning.

Conclusions

The results above are just a handful of examples from a much broader range of benchmark results that we are continuing to develop through Acumen Fuse® and the included benchmarking utility, Acumen Cloud™ as well as the free web-based Schedule Index™ Calculator, recently updated to include full support for UN/CEFACT file conversion from MS Project and Primavera.

Our vision and belief has always been that project analytics help projects be more successful. With these types of results, the proof is in the pudding!

Download a printable version of this post.

View the Schedule Quality Averages infographic.

An Ambitious Agenda

The first day consisted of industry only sessions, where the topics ranged from program strategies in a sequestration environment to specific earned value best practices, and breakout sessions for the individual PMSC Working Groups. The second day offered joint government and industry sessions where leaders from both sides participated in panel discussions. One key topic for today’s environment was finding common ground between government and industry in order to maximize utility when program cost underrun occurs. Mr. Gordan Kranz of PARCA and Mr. Jim Henderson of DCMA presented to industry attendees the latest updates and current state of business for their respective organizations. 

Acumen in the Public Sector

Acumen and six other project management software vendors were asked to present during the second day’s joint industry/government session for an informative overview of the current capabilities available to help solve the most common program management problems facing defense organizations.  Acumen provided an overview of the software tools within Fuse for program analysis, specifically focusing on schedule quality and integrated schedule/cost performance analysis.  Particularly relevant to the attendees was DCMA’s current use of Fuse as a software tool in performing their program reviews.  Acumen also discussed the capabilities in Acumen Risk for implementing schedule risk assessments (SRAs) as now mandated by the latest government policy (IPMR DID).  And finally, Acumen presented how the functionality of the Acumen 360 module can help program managers bring optimized, or even accelerated scenarios for project execution back to stakeholders after an SRA has been completed.

Overall the two day meeting was exceptionally well planned and of great benefit to those in attendance.  Acumen would like to thank Mr. Bill Altman of Battelle for the invitation to present in this forum and Ms. Tracie Thompson of ATK, PMSC Chairperson, for organizing and hosting the event.

Find out more about about Acumen solutions for government.

Acumen is hosting two online presentations to walk through a series of best practices tailored for the successful management of oil and gas projects. With some of the largest and most complex projects in the world, the oil and gas industry is even more susceptible to the downfalls of inefficient management of both project time and cost. 

Join Acumen for a review of best practices that have been implemented on oil and gas projects around the world. Ensure the soundest schedules, most realistic risk forecasts, and successful execution, again and again.

Attend the Events: 

March 13

Register 

March 21 

Register

Key Takeaways: 

• Learn how key energy providers are using Acumen’s software to both simplify and improve their planning process.
• Learn how Acumen Fuse can help you prepare for internal reviews and third party assessments such as those by IPA.
• Review Acumen’s latest product, Acumen Risk™ which uses cutting-edge analytics and reports to provide users with straightforward, accurate insight into their risk exposure. 
• Finally, hear solutions for identifying and developing the fastest to-market plans and executing these plans with consistent success.

Have a joke of your own to share? Let us know in the comments. Enjoy! 

1. A logic links walks into a bar, sits down next to an activity and asks, “Are you free for a drink later?” The activity politely declines and says, “Sorry, I have a hard constraint.”

2. A SF and FS link unexpectedly bump into each other. FS asks, “What are you doing here?” SF replies, “I don’t know. I think I may be redundant.”

3. Mama logic link says to baby logic link, “Slow down! You are trying to run before you can walk.” Baby replies, “Are you implying that I am out of sequence?”

4. Two activities are discussing dinner plans. First activity says, “When do you want to eat?” Second activity replies, “I’m open-ended. Oh wait, on second thought, as-late-as-possible.”

5. What do you call an activity that can’t swim? Negative float.

6. Critical Path takes FS Link out for a drive and gets pulled over for speeding. “What on Earth do you think you were doing?” asks the policeman. Critical Path replies, “Driving Logic.”

7. A summary activity leans over to a Level of Effort and whispers, “Do you have time to chat?” the LOE replies, “Sure. Time Now?”

8. A metric visits a friend’s new house. As he enters the front door, the homeowner says, “I think you’ve just breached my threshold!”

9. What do you call a PM with a filet mignon under his arm? A project steakholder.

10. An Early Start Date gets sent off during a rugby game. When asked why, the referee replies, “Only backward passes in this game…”

11. What do you call an undercover metric? A forensic analyzer.

12. During an interview, a metric is asked what his strongest subject is. “Logic,” he replies. To which the interviewer responds, “Makes Sense…”

Happy Holidays from Acumen!