Some time ago I was involved in the beginnings of a discussion here about “Full Time Equivalent” (FTE) with Vladimir and Rafael. I thought I would “complete” my thinking about this.
P6 is basically unequipped for this, and we have to fudge it.
I live in a world where the scope of work estimate is always in manhours. These are almost always what our American cousins call Wrench Time. No meal breaks, no permit delays, no walk-to-work.
Contractors have sophisticated Work Management Systems (WMS) that have norm based estimating systems within them that create a manhour content that is NOT FTE compliant, e.g. what does 47.45hrs of Pipefitter, and 17.32 hours of Rigging actually mean in terms of number of men on the job? I have never encountered an estimating system in my Oil, Nuclear, Defense, Ship Building, or Renewable worlds that tells me “how many men”.
For forty years what we have done next is to impose a methodology that helps us understand the impact of non productive time. We do not have “resource efficiency” or anything like it in P6 – so we either:
Reduce resource availability (e.g. I’ve got 6 electricians, so I will tell P6 I have 4)
Factor the manhours (e.g. this job is at the flare tip, needs three permits, a LONG climb to work – lets multiply the manhours by 3)
Reduce the number of working periods in the scheduling calendar. (e.g. We are paying for 12 hours, but on a satellite platform we only get 4 working hours per day.)
Option 3 is universal as it preserves the manhour content in the estimate which option 2 makes irreconcilable, and does not increase my FTE algebra as option 1 would.
So I am left with Wrench Time and an activity calendar that seeks to match CPI. Dividing one by the other to approximate FTE is the best we have got. Yes, we could ask the maintenance manager to code some FTE information on the 25,000 PMRs he has per asset, but he would probably just ask us to change our medication. The obsession with CPI in my wholly reimbursable world makes it the commercial divisor of choice.
There has been a breakthrough for the asset owners in the FTE debate. The asset owners I do most of my work for are the operators of offshore oil and gas installations. Having more men on the platform than there are beds (strictly speaking, seats in the emergency escape vessels) is illegal. The common logistics package which monitors all movements of personnel, helicopter flights, crew rotas only knows about number of men. We must have exactly a full complement of men on board at all times. Dividing P6’s manhours by anything is no way to meet the statutory obligations. The interface between P6 and the Vantage logistics system has been a tortuous path through exquisitely complex spreadsheets.
Let us take a worse case example from Vladimir’s complaint about FTE. We have to send a specialist offshore to do a job estimated at 4 manhours. We need a flight out and a flight back and a bed for all the time he is there. Only the logistics system knows the flight dates and hence the duration of the activity. We now have an integration program between the two systems (logistics and scheduling) that allows someone using the P6 Window’s client to send a request for an offshore visit directly to the queue of the logistics system, and when successful it writes back the date of the fights in and out – and a new resource assignment “Bed” for every day the specialist is offshore to do the 4 hour job. If our specialist’s return flight is delayed, then the Actual FTE is more than the Budget FTE. This is effectively “double dipping” the work to create 2 resources – 4hrs of “visiting specialist” and 4 days of “bed” on the same activity.
The bit I like most is when the crew swipe through the heli-deck with their ID cards, the Resource Availability in P6 is updated to reflect exactly those personnel on the platform.
This means all of the really difficult FTE sums are done in the logistics system, and the results written to P6. P6 behaves perfectly well with this data – I would just HATE to have to type it into the Resource Assignment table myself.
So P6 can work with manhours and the difficult relationship with number of men. It just needs some help with the maths. P6 is light on estimate-and-approval, and I put “The Valdimir problem” in that category.
Now whether this whole issue is for “scheduling” software to fix or “estimating” or "logistics" software is a rant for another time…….
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