Learners will discover the key project scheduling techniques and procedures including; how to create a network diagram, how to define the importance of the critical path in a project network, and defining project activities float. Also covered are the fundamentals of Bar Charts, Precedence Diagrams, Activity on Arrow, PERT, Range Estimating, and linear project operations and the line of balance.
Schedule Analysis and Applications
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En provenance du cours de Columbia University
Construction Scheduling
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À partir de la leçon
Technology Applications for Scheduling
Dareen Salama, of the STV Group, discusses the technology applications used for scheduling. Dareen provides an overview of the applications used for scheduling development, schedule analysis, sharing and collaboration and visualization.
Rencontrer les enseignants
Ibrahim Odeh, Ph.D., MBAInstructor, Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, Columbia University
Director of Research and Founder, Global Leaders in Construction Management
All right, so now that you've defined your software,
now that you've defined your work breakdown, you've created your schedule,
you've developed a schedule and you're creating your updates.
Typically, you will need to do some level of scheduling analysis.
Why would you do that?
I mean why would you want to analyze the schedule, what context would that happen?
So first example, is that if I'm a construction manager and everything
contractor who is working on the project is required to produce a schedule.
They are typically required to produce a schedule,
following the critical past method that is inclusive of
activities that do not exceed the certain duration of course you don't want
your whole project to be one activity that is completing the project.
Most of the time you have that broken down into different types of activities into
manageable pieces of work.
So you need to figure out as a construction manager,
do all these contractors have some kind of sound and achievable plan?
Is this plan possible?
Is this sequencing of work possible?
That's the first thing.
Analysis and context with other projects.
So let's say again, I am working on an airport.
And I've got multiple projects happening on that airport at the same time.
Is it possible to have every project to have roadways that are on top of each
other, for example, people working on them at the same time?
I need to analyze each project separately if they're separate contractors.
Is it possible for the foundations contractor to keep
working while the superstructure contractor is working as well.
Well at some point the sequencing could overlap.
But there has to be someone who is managing that work.
And that's typically the responsibility of the construction manager.
So we would need schedules from from these different contractors, we would need to
put them in context throughout the facility that we're working at or
with other projects, neighboring and interfacing projects.
The other thing that you need to look at is whether the schedule
meets the contractual milestones.
Are there milestones mentioned in the project?
Do I need to deliver by a specific date?
Do I need to finish, for example, if I'm doing a high rise building, let's say,
the first six floors have to finish at a specific date, and they're going to be
occupied, then I need to finish working on the rest of the floors above.
So there could be any contractual milestone there that I need to make sure
that the schedule includes and
the schedule actually meets those dates for these milestones.
And in the future, once the baseline is set, I need to analyze the project status.
Now there's much more about schedule analysis that we could go into, but
this is just an introductory aspect of what it is that I'm looking in a schedule,
why do I even do schedule analysis?
There are different types in software applications out there that support
schedule analysis.
So typically some people could go with just using P6, looking at the schedule and
start filtering, start creating different lay outs.
Start looking at the critical path.
Start running certain plug ins that are in addition to Oracle P6 that
allow them to explore that schedule.
I'm not going to talk about that typical aspect.
There's additional methods and additional software that I've, within my experience,
have found very beneficial and very time-saving for
any scheduler who's reviewing schedule data.
So, what you see here are snapshots of Acumen Fuse,
which is one of the software that does schedule analysis.
So typically you would upload your schedule or link that to
your P6 database and that would run all these metrics that you see right here.
Run these metrics for you automatically.
It even produces a report for you.
With a cover page and with text,
with everything that's describing what is really happening in that schedule.
Now, I'm not saying that you would run this platform and say, well,
produce a report, print it out, here, I'm done with my schedule review.
No, that's really not the point of the software.
But it's really to help you.
It's really to help that schedule reviewer
to make sure that they've covered everything.
To make sure that instead of going through P6 and clicking filter this,
show me this layout, show me how many activities here and a lot of people I
know extract that data from P6 because they want to produce beautiful reports,
put them in Excel and address that there.
But Acumen Fuse really gives you the ability to do that
much faster and automatically.
The other idea is that it also has all these quality checks on the schedule.
A lot of time the scheduler doesn't really have time to do all that on P6.
So if they use this platform they can go in and
they can produce all these different metrics.
For example, I'm looking for milestones.
The metric here is milestones, I want to know the number of milestones.
How many milestones are available within the project.
They are too much then there is a result.
If there is too little then there is a different result.
Another thing is how many activities took longer than planned?
How many activities took less than planned?
All these metrics are, I believe, extremely helpful and
you can focus on different metrics at different points of the project.
So, to drill down into a little more detail on what that means and
what Acumen really offers.
So, what you see here is one
of the views of the diagnostic tools within Acumen Fuse.
So, right here, what do I see?
Each one of these lines is a project.
And each of these projects has all these metrics shown here and
you can specify it's up to you to set up whether what shows green,
what shows red and so on and what shows yellow.
These colors are under your control and
it's under your control to show what it is that is shown here on this graph.
So right here I'm seeing at completion duration.
And right here in yellow I'm seeing the original duration.
So clearly that scope has increased
because I'm doing much more work than I was doing before.
The other aspect is right here, so, I'm seeing all right, so I have well,
83% of my schedule has negative float.
Two activities here have a missing logic, 1% so maybe that's not too bad.
Three here, but having that ability to see that
quickly in the dashboard by merely uploading the schedule.
Has tremendous value for you to be able to do that very quickly and
be able to identify what are the points that really need my attention?
What do I need to look at more closely rather than trying to analyze the whole
schedule in detail?
So this tool really helps make this more beneficial for the scheduler,
helps with that evaluation of scheduler review that happens on a monthly basis.
And typically really how much time does the scheduler have to review
the schedule and provide feedback?
Hopefully, somewhere around a week or ten days.
That's if they're lucky, sometimes they get even less time.
So that's challenging, to be able to produce all these metrics very quickly.
Another dashboard here shows you for example, all right, so,
how many relationship types do I have.
So here I have finished to start, I have to start to start I have finish to finish,
so that allows you to evaluate,
okay what kind of relationships do I have in the project.
How many lags, how many leads, do I have any redundancy,
do I have any circular logic hopefully not hopefully I don't have any circular logic.
Do I have soft constraints, hard constraints.
If they are identified of course not every software identifies what's hard and
soft logic.
And any open ended activities, you don't want any of those, of course.
Any activities that are happening, so if it's an update, happening out of sequence.
How many activities are normal activities or level of effort activities.
So, all that gives you, again,
gives you that ability to analyze that data in the schedule very quickly.
And not have to dig in deeper into areas that are doing well, so
typically We don't want to look at everything that's in the schedule.
You want to look at what's not really working.
What is going to get delayed,
what is going to cause the project to have any problem.
So that's what you want to focus on and
that's really what these dashboards help direct you in that sense.
Another closer look on these dashboards.
For example here, I've got a sketch for a project.
I have a baseline schedule and I have an update.
And you're comparing between both.
So you want to see what happened.
So what happened here?
So very quickly, just by looking at that table, no bar charts,
no PDF that's about 20 pages that you have to dig through.
No scheduler that has to go through and extract data within P6.
That's coming right out of that Acumen Fuse platform.
So it's quickly telling me that in my baseline I
had three activities that were critical.
But in my update I've got 27 activities that are critical.
So critical activities moved from 1% to 13%.
Now that's a big change so that means
very quickly you need to identify why did these activities become more critical.
So clearly I'm using up my float and clearly my project may or
may not get delayed if I keep doing that with other activities as well.
So if I was monitoring closely three
activities now I have to monitor closely 27 activities for example.
So that, again, gives you from a very small table
I'm giving you very quick data about that project.
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