NUMBER OF ACTIVITIES

Hi Philip,



With regards to your first question, you can do it on a number of ways, you can break your activity into Grid Lines, Areas, Zones, Segments or Parts. Again, i will only do it if the situation calls for it.



I will let Gary answer your second question.



Regards,

Daniel

Hi Daniel,



You make a good point, about limiting durations to a specific time, ie 1 week. I have had this problem before. If you have a specific activity, which use a single resource, that will last one month, how do you split it? However, how do you lump activities together with different resources, to minimise the number of activies? Maybe Gary can answer the latter question.



Regards



Philip

Very Good Subject! Some contracts are very un-reasonable in that they require you to breakdown your activities to not more than one week duration. However, you can worked around with this type of contracts (afterall we are Planners), for example. for repetitious works, you can create one detailed program and submit this separately as an attachment to your program. And for major commodities, as long as you can define your production rates and resources required to achieved those rates, I believeed a reasonable manager would accept a resonable level of detail. The formula i always apply is KISS. (Keep it simple S?????)



Cheers,

Daniel

Hi Gary,



With regards to your earlier post, how do you prepare your detailed resource programme if you will limit the number of activities?



As a Planner/scheduler, I don’t see the point of doing your resource analysis using summary/hammock activities. If you’re referring only to scheduling of activities I may agree but to some extent only.



I am now working on my second airport project, the first one, we handled the construction and airport development and if you combine the total number of activities used, it is around 15,000 activities. Now I’m only handling Airport IT systems, we’ve got around 3500 activities excluding some roll waved plans for training and testing.



If you’re just coordinating with client representatives, executives, managers etc, its best to stick to high level programme. But if I will be dealing with the above I mentioned plus supervisors, engineers, cost engineers, procurement people, design coordinators, consultants, practically most of the key people of project management team, I would certainly will have a hard time managing and maintaining a not so detailed plan.



Cheers,



Se

sorry, it seems I uploaded my reply twice!!!!

Hi there,

I am involved in a 800M€ petrochemical EP project (27 months duration) with over 40,000 activities in which 300 resources are assigned to, in P3 environment. Since the project is consisting of 5 separate sub-projects, are handling with 2 distinct parties for basic and detail design and procurement, we are dealing with 10 sub-nets. (5 sub-projects defined for each party’s activities)

I don’t want to say this is very easy for updating especially in this occasion that planners are located in different task forces far from each other, but we are doing it in our side as detail designer with 1 planner for each sub-project (5 planners in total) and one senior planner for supervision/coordination, that is updating twice a month.

Again, it is not detailed to each bits and piece such as bolts & nuts. We have over 2100 itemized equipment and for each item we have fabrication and delivery activity because we are invoicing for each individual equipment and this is important to be able for planning our cash-flow with respect to the delivery time of each equipment (payment milestone) depending to the value of that item.

I suppose more important than qualification of the planner would be our real requirement and what we are expecting from our time schedule that of course depends very much to the type of contract. Whether Owner is going to pay us by progress or by milestones, for instance.

Anyhow, I agree with other guys that are saying limited activities with long durations will make it very difficult to calculate (not estimate) the real actual progress unless a well-organized performance measurement system is established if a repetitive kind of activity is taking place in all projects. (for example plant modeling)

kamran

We regularly see schedules for industrial plant turnaround maintenance projects average around 5,000 tasks per major unit. There are some significant differences in managing turnaround projects versus EPC projects and a high level of detail is required to maintain visibility, objectivity and control.



The level of detail to be used should be a balance between planning and estimating projects to as detailed a level as possible to help minimize guesswork in estimating, allow greater flexibility/accuracy in critical path scheduling, and improve the accuracy in progress reporting versus practical considerations for updating progress, analyzing updates and disseminating information in a useable format.



One large project that I was involved in covered over 750,000 manhours over a span of 6 months for the execution phase. We had a team of 8 planners managing over 49,000 resource loaded tasks (not in P3, however). We updated the schedule twice a day every day for the duration of the project (execution ran around the clock). Because of the high level of detail, management was able to stay on top of the project. It finished on time and within 3% of budget.



During that project, one of the contract engineers on site commented about a similar 600,000 manhour turnaround that he had been involved in. They had used a 6,000 task schedule with one planner. Updates took them 7 hours to perform (they only did one per day). They did not have the fresh, objective information necessary to drive or manage the project effectively.



Bernard Ertl

ATC Professional Shutdown / Turnaround Management System

Hi Guys,



I agree with Vladimir, that the number of activities should be dictated by the size and complexity of the project, and not by the capabilities of the planner. I have handled up to 35000 fully resourced activities, with the assistance of two junior planners, and normally most projects I have been involved in exceed 3500 activities, with the average around 5000. As a matter of interest in the 35000 activity programme, one activity for instance was the brickwork for ninety house and had a duration of three months, so it definitely was not down to nuts and bolts. I think it is a question of being properly organised. However, my answer to the original question is, it is dependent on the capabilities of the planner, but an average planner should be able to handle 5000 resourced activities in a project with a duration of one year.

David,

in large projects we insist of establishing a position of project planner who works with the information and helps project manager with scheduling and analyzing. Without such person project manager has too much work and of course the dimension of the project model shall be lower.

But I am sure that every project manager will be happy to have a precise project model that can give answers to any what if questions and additional project planner in his team who is responsible for this model creating and updating.

Vladimir

I agree with Gary’s philosophy as to the number of activities that should be applied to any project - what is the point of increasing the number of activities unnecessarily provided that what has been displayed acurately covers the work that is intended to be done?



An experienced planner will have the knowledge to update the schedule taking into consideration all aspects of what has yet to be concluded within the activity & be able to report on any criticalities that have manifested themselves - there is absolutely no need to break a schedule up into a nuts and bolts scenario unless the work is related to shutdowns that require to have additional detail purely to ensure that work outages are minmised and that resources can be deployed super efficiently



Imagine if I was planning a mining project whose capital value was 500 million USD and I had 20,000 construction activities (my normal number would be around 1500 maximum)let alone a whole host of commissioning activities to boost that number significantly - that would be total overkill especially when durations per activity may be at a minimum of a week and the project had to be concluded in 24 months - the additional time having to be spent on creating & updating schedules would hinder and completely stiffle all other functions that I have to perform such as chairing meetings, writing & issuing minutes, regular site visits and liasons with contractors & suppliers



The only time when I can truly say that I have had up to 40,000 activities has been in power station construction where perhaps infrastructure and 6 x 360 meg units have been at various stages of construction and commissioning - belive me, there is no time to rest when being the only site planner for the client in such circumstances.



I suppose if finance was no object to the contractor or client, then additional planners could be employed to manage projects that have a multitude of activities listed in teh programme but from what I have been through in the last 40 years,these luxuries are not the norm and additional planners on projects has just not materialised to any great extent and one needs to become super smart to manage large projects on ones own hence the least number of activities created but yet still capable of holding the project together as far as all parameters of resource and cost are concerned would be my ultimate answer



Gary, you have my backing in what you have stated

Gary,

we have meetings each week estimating project performance, analyzing problems, risks, forecasting future results, changes in resource and material requirements, discussing corrective actions, etc.

It makes sense only if we can state that some activities were finished between our meetings.

Remember Murphy’s law: 90% of activity takes 90% of time, the rest 10% - another 90% of time. That is why it is necessary to be able to state that activities were done, not just performed.

We consider project models as tools for decision making. If we cannot answer the question what if we will add some resource to the crew or will change one machine by another then our model does not work. It does not mean that we do not set target dates for major project milestones. It does not mean that we cannot suggest project overview - if will show the project schedule only for 4th level of WBS then the number of project phases is exactly what you suggested - around 500, and only near 100 on the 3rd level. A part of Caspian Pipeline construction project that we planned costed close to $700 mln, Ship building project - $1.4 bln, telecommunication project I mentioned - near $300 mln. I don’t think that there is direct correlation between the cost and project complexity.

And of course we utilise the skills of the other people we are working with. They participate in creating their subnets and we include in our project schedule these subnets. They are specialists and we work with them to create proper schedules of their work. Our task - to help them to plan their work better and to coordinate their efforts with the efforts of other project participants.

We use project presentations that help to see the whole schedule on the one page. This presentation we call Linear diagram.

And don’t overestimate the problem of monitoring project performance - there are between 20 and 30 activities that are performed each day even in complex schedules. It will take not more than an hour - to input performance results, to recalculate the schedule (resource levelling) and to prepare all necessary reports. Of course much more time may be spent for communications, discussing corrective actions, etc.

Oh good. Some healthy debate.



Of course, the project plan should reflect the relevant detail of the work to be undertaken. However, I after 31 years of planning construction projects, I firmly believe that a project plan should be exactly that – a plan. Not a detailed list of every single activity to be undertaken, with activities of say a week each – that doesn’t allow an overview to be taken, neither does it properly utilise the skills of the other people you are working with. Call them subcontractors or specialists – they are exactly that – specialists and they should be able to plan their own work far better than a generalist planner can.



Ronald, I respect what you say about small projects vs. large projects. I would be interested to hear from you what you consider each to be. For me, a large project would be £500m ($850m) and that would generally be the construction of a building. For my overall project plan, I would rarely exceed 500 activities because of what I said earlier. I believe communicating the overall plan is vital and having a plan with, as Vladimir suggests, with 9000, 18000 or even 93000 activities is simply bewildering. I cannot understand how this would help – a planner should be able to give his or her professional opinion about how a project should be undertaken, not just being a software junkie. Controlling a project with that many activities means that a planner, or even a team of planners, more time is going to be spent inputting data, administering the network and the like. This would leave no time for what planners are really good at – creative and logical thinking.



Vladimir, do you think that having 104 activities on the critical path actually helps? I am not sure that this would help, for how can the user of the plan ever hope to understand all of that? Don’t you think it is better to have (say) 4 targets a year that everybody can aim at. For my part I do. In the construction of the buildings I plan, I would typically set out a date for foundations completion, structural frame completion, cladding start, watertight, start of plant installation, etc. These are the only key dates I want everybody to remember, so I make them very easy to remember – 1st of the month, Easter, Christmas etc. This helps the entire project team focus on simple key dates and to pull together to achieve them. I simply do not believe that can happen with a project plan with 9000, 18000 or 93000 activities.



What do others think – detailed and precise, or strategic and simple?



Gary France

Mace Limited

Gary,

our usual construction projects consist of 3000 to 4000 thousands activities and loaded with a lot of resources. These projects are of the middle size. Construction part of Caspian Pipeline construction project inside Russian borders consisted of 9000 activities and used 1145 resource types. Large telecommunication project managed by three planners consist of 18000 activities. Large ship building project consist of 93000 activities.

All these examples were managed on a daily or weekly basis though sometimes by more than one planner.

When you create project schedule you should check that usual activity duration does not exceed 1 week. If the project lasts for two years you will need at least 104 activities on the critical path. Many of them will last less than 1 week, so you may double this estimate. But in construction many activities are performed in parallel or with start-to-start dependencies. So you may multiply this number by 10 at least. Now you have the minimal estimate of the construction schedule dimension.

I will add that our schedules are used for setting shift tasks to construction workers and thus activity durations are even smaller and the number of activities is larger.

Project schedule is not a picture, it shall be used for the process simulation and decision making. This may be achieved if the schedule simulates the real process and is loaded by resources that perform schedule tasks. Resource work is what is simulated - so the schedules that are not loaded with resources may be used for performance measurement but not for decision making.

We use other software but I think that what I wrote about does not depend on the software at all.

Gary,



This is just your opinion. While many of my small projects use 500 activities, most large projects spanning multiple years will easily require more that 1000 activities to describe properly. It is not the Scheduler’s decision. If no activity may be longer than 20 days and may only cover the work of one sub or work group, then the number of activities required is parentally a numerical function.

Whilst I have not personally used Primavera for a long time, I cannot help but respond to this posting. Paul, are you serious that you often plan with between 4000 and 6000 activities? And, you sometimes go to 10,000? Are you mad? How on earth can you expect to properly plan a project with that many activities? More to the point, how on earth can the recipients of your plans ever expect to understand them? This to me seems like planning for the sake of planning.



I would stick to no more than 500-1000, at most. Anything greater than that is unmanageable, likely to contain many errors that cannot be recognised and likely to cast aside without being read by the very people the plan was created for.



Stick to a reasonable number and do it well.



Quality, not quantity!



Gary France

Mace Limited

I generally feel that it depend a lot on the capability of the scheduler and the type of schedule and if the schedule is resourced and also is the schedule integrated with a accounting or job costing systems and finally are we doing EVPM.



Some of my previous examples are



I am quite happy with 4,000 to 6,000 unresourced activities in P3 and I go there often.



I found when I got to 10,000 fully resource with 12 resources and a weekly update for an 6 month schedule it got difficult.



When I was doing full EVPM with a weekly schedule importing and checking the actual hours from a timesheet system and cost for an accounting system with manual input and checking ETC in hours, cost and time for each task and the % Complete for hours, cost, time and deliverables, then about 200 was fine but in another schedule with 400-500 activities only worked only because we had good systems and disciplined people.



I have not had the pleasure of working with Primavera Enterprise in a large integrated system, I am looking forward to the experience!



Paul E Harris

Eastwood Harris Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Australia

Planning and Scheduling Book Publishers, Training & Consulting

www.eh.com.au