Let’s Challenge SPIDER

Rafaela



I would have that a "Lead" would have been better for a dog



:-)



don’t forget that Micro Planner not only does lags,



it does Leads too



Well it is the silly season :-)



Raf

Rafaela

I have just placed a two week lag on the link between my Task and end and the Hammock has correctly calculated the duration as I would expect from Micro Planner X-Pert



Oh dear Oh Dear



Never ever be as dogmatic to say No other software does it



Keep telling you I was the pioneer to much of the computations and facilities which people like Vlad have been able to find on the public and other domains and use

in their products

I know most of them, especially in the past twenty years haven’t a clue where they got the knowledge from, but when they ask, I have .. so far ... dragged out my OLD OLD OLD workings from back as far as 1957 and Lo and behold, we were doing what ever back them



It is Christmas, you should be eating Christmas pie not H ..... pie



I am back to work again



Such fun :-)

Raf

Rafaela



I just tried it using PDM - one task with a hamock linked by a start and end event



X-Pert calculated the hammock OK



Raf

Rafaela



Yes YOU do know of a software package which can place a hammock across ONE ACTIVITY



Arrow Diagrams can do it



Micro Planner X-Pert for Windows and Mac does it



Raf

Vladimir,



Your handling of the calendar along with the hammock activity is sheer genius.



Your creation of the hammock is cheating.

a) You cannot create a hammock linked to a single activity with no other software I know of.

b) You cannot use lag in hammock activities with no other software I know of, it is simply disregarded.







My next dog is to be named LAG.



Best regards,

Rafael



P.S. Yes it works well for me.

You can download the first version from the following link. I opted to cost load directly on the activity without use of resources, using cost components and cost centers.



http://rapidshare.com/files/324872310/MO.001.sprj



Best regards,

Rafael

Yes it makes sense.



The ball is on my side of the court, remember is holiday season, 73deg F/ 22.77 C and the sun is shining so today I will take some spare time, we have some US relatives escaping from their frigid winter.



Best regards,

Rafael

Vladimir,



Not only will pay a few per completed jobs/task/activities but others will be paid on a regular basis say next week for payroll, next 30 days for invoices and receive BOQ payments 60 days after invoicing prior month during first week of the following month.



Of course I do not pretend exact granularity but an approximation good enough to make a computation for NPV that is close enough, a computation that will tell me months in green and months in red, I don’t think I need to model exact payment day. Anyway it is never going to be exactly on target especially the further away from today.



I am starting to get hooked not only into BOQ, but I am also thinking ahead when I might start using NPV available in Spider Project. As far as I remember you also mentioned IIR, internal rate of return, a computation that at times yields two values, one is the solution and the other is not, and even “modified” IRR so it is more than that. But "that", modeling of BOQ is going to be a common issue.



Hope you understand if others at home are to follow me it cannot be that complicated, otherwise they will do their cash flow analysis using Excel, even when is kind of static, not as dynamic when modeling into Spider Project.



Here on average, the Water Authority pays 3 to 6 months after invoicing, meanwhile you have to pay US equipment suppliers in advance to manufacturing. Banks and Sureties know and expect your cash flow shows this. Spider Project table reports can show the required details, just give me ease of use with regard to the offset between the resources (and activities) to cash flow.



Best regards,

Rafael

Vladimir,



In order to set the hammock you need to know in advance which activities or portion of each is to be applied on each payment on your always changing activity dates prediction.



I am looking for the software to estimate the cash flow without telling the specific activities that will fall within each particular period.



Best regards,

Rafael

Vladimir,



I believe I can handle all my physical resources the way you suggest, I forgot about strong links, functionality that was not available in Primavera SureTrak. Please understand I am still not wired to think on it as an available tool for my schedules, it is not available everywhere on CPM literature. Don’t be surprised if you have to remind me of it a few several times again.



The remaining issue is about modeling cash flow in all your activities where cash income and expense payments will lag activity execution. Here I don’t want to create a new activity for every one impacting BOQ modeling for income and maybe another one for modeling actual payments or expenses. Here we pay payroll on a weekly basis, invoices on 30 days after receipt and with luck get our BOQ payment 30 to 60 days after activity execution in private jobs, about Government jobs you would be surprised how much latter we get paid, “prompt payment” is a fantasy here.



Probably a SS/FS lag and duration (if you want it to be different) can be defined at cost assigments as not to mess with resource allocations but making costs to follow resource allocation dates within the rule. In this way for example you can model payment 2 weeks after an activity finishes. Of course Earned Value will have o lag and will follow activity duration.



Best regards,

Rafael

Vladimir,



Under Suretrak, for my non leveling resources it is not uncommon for me to assign a resource lag and resource duration different from activity duration. This I use when I want to model cash flow (costs and income).



How you model this within Spider Project and how it works under resource leveling?



By the way I don’t know how it would work under SureTrak resource leveling.



Best regards,

Rafael

John,



Yes now I am clear. I was confused when you referred to “we”, I interpreted it as to be your actual coworkers at MPI, I could not understand why another software option if working at MPI.



Best regards,

Rafael

John,



I could not find your info under PP directory search but found it at MPI site.



In your posting 251 you wrote, “In my industrial experience we used Micro Planner X-Pert as the selected planning software for over twenty years.... The Micro Planner X-Pert software tool we used was excellent, ...”



Do you have the option to select other vendors scheduling software at Micro Planning to develop your own scheduling software, if so which?



Best regards,

Rafael

Carlos,



What can Spider Do that your Tool can’t?



Isn’t it a valid question, remember we are confined to this posting? Does it means we will be forced to a single question, a single thread forever?



I have no other place to go and ask questions about Spider. Please be patient maybe, eventually Spider will have its place and this monstruous topic will be thing of the past, and issues will be easier to follow. Mike gave us hope as well as other PP moderators, is just that it takes time. For the moment we were asked to keep here and limit our reference to Spider on other topics.



About your question on not being able to edit a single relationship by clicking on my current graphic view I am not experiencing this issue, if you refer to clicking on the bars. Or do you refer to clicking on a bar and moving the cursor to another bar to create a new link? This you can also do.



Some fields are locked in your activity pane, I suspect to protect the traceability of updates and integrity of the data, same at other screens, is this your issue?



Mike,



Can we create other topics specific on Spider Project? Under which category?



Best regards,

Rafael

C’mon, people, we’re losing scope here. Let’s challenge Spider! In giving challenges to Spider we give Vladimir the oportunity of improve Spider Project. He’s asking for challenges, he’s not asking how much are your projects worth, he’s not asking "What can Spider Do that your Tool can’t?", he’s asking "What can YOUR tool do that Spider can’t?" or, also, "What can’t YOUR tool do that you’d wish it can?"



The goal should be defeat Spider with something it can’t bear, "functionality that is useful but is not supported by the packages that you use". Something that requires workarounds.



Sure, Spider can’t model human behavior so please don’t come here to bluff that you can manage with eyes closed and your hands tied in the back. Can you? Then make a topic on how to do it.



Here’s my question for Spider:

Why can’t I edit a single relationship by clicking it in my current graphic view? Why must I go to the activity properties and find the link between all activity links?.



I’m one voice more claiming for a Spider category in Planning Planet. I hope Mike hears us.

John,



“You said: "Other software, I don’t know Micro Planner X-Pert, do not level resources based on the quantity because such data doesn’t exist.”



This was Vladimir, this is a kind of argument of a software developer that know better than I do. I am an end user who is starting to appreciate good resource leveling as my prior experience with Primavera SureTrak was no good at all. As a matter of fact most of these years I was using soft relationships to force the software to solve in this way resource constraining issues and then verified resource loading vs. availability without running resource leveling at all.



My projects rarely go over 600 activities, 30% procurement, they rarely go over 30$M US but they need all the functionality of advanced CPM software.



I believe there is a high possibility MP-X has a superb engine. If so this will confirm my argument, not all resource leveling algorithms are equal and this is a relevant functionality that differentiates the software. By the way Spider keeps several algorithms for your choice as these yields different results, one of them looks for a solution set that yields minimum job duration within your constraints but it might happen you prefer other solution, or that under certain circumstances one yields better results than the other.



Thanks for your contribution, many of your suggestions can be adapted to other software if need be, also I am sure many MP-X users appreciate it also. I hope you continue posting in PP about MP-X here and even in threads of your own, these will be enlightening.



Best regards,

Rafael

Agustin,



“Variable quantity and workload”. I noted this but not yet there, your experience will be of great help.



If you noted on one of my prior posting about synchronization of update among several versions I called it as easy as 1,2,3 or a piece of cake so about probability and trends I will give it a try and maybe ask for your help. Perhaps it looks like much work but at a click of the mouse, the computer got to work and multitask also.



About norms, are you referring to reference books? If so, not yet there also.



About multitasking you should know that for 30 years I worked at the construction site, first as project engineer then as project manager, we did not multitasked but mega-tasked or giga-tasked.



But it also happens with equipment, a tower crane would be assigned several jobs at the same time, at times would be handling rebar materials, then gang forms, then a few other things.



Best regards,

Rafael

Hi Anoon,



Vladimir gave the best answer. Is the way of thinking and how we can get a project model as closed as to the reality.



Best regards,

Augustin

Hi Rafael,



You can work with the default options at the Resource Assignment level, but if you have information and want to model better the way project will be run, than you can use a specific workload and productivity. The productivity together with the resource quantity and Volume of Activity will allow calculating the activity duration during scheduling.



The estimation we made for activity duration based usually on the same info will be avoid. But using productivity means to have some recorded history. In the Eastern part of Europe we have work norms (or corporate norms) with this kind of information. It helps you not only to easily estimate the project cost for tender purpose (it is a huge database), but also to plan and schedule construction and to monitor and control it.



The priority will be used to fine tune the schedule, or to define some important resources over others.

But, what is in my opinion an important option, is “Variable quantity and workload”. It will allow to model multi-tasking phenomena which is the reality.



Any person involved in a project may perform in a certain day (or time interval) several activities. Other software, I don’t know Micro Planner X-Pert, do not level resources based on the quantity because such data doesn’t exist. Even Critical Chain suggests to avoid multi-tasking. But this is in the nature of how we work.



Using this option will give you a shorter duration of the project after resource constrained scheduling. Try it with two or three resources and activities and compare the results with what will give you SureTrak or MSP.



Best regards,

Augustin

John,



Thanks for your prompt reply, I used Micro Planner Manager for the Mac before and loved it.



Vladimir,



I kind of prefer the software to look at the options and make the decision; I am not to ask the PM for his preferences on every run especially on jobs with hundreds of activities, I prefer him to tell me the assignment priorities when preparing the model for the first time.



As you know I might be proficient with Primavera SureTrak that lacks the functionality for skills, crews and a few others Micro Planner and Spider have. As a rookie at these functionalities within Spider Project I know we have at the resource assignment tab the following options among many others, workload, productivity and priority.



Please tell me if I am correct with the following statements;



1) in Spider Project work load and productivity are kept separate and there is no need to use one to mimic the other as these parameters can be set up individually per activity assigment, keeping the interpretation simple and both available at the same time.



2) in Spider Project the priority field is also independent per activity assignment and that it can provide me with the rule for the software to make the appropriate decision for hundreds of activities every time I run the schedule. Of course a schedule is dynamic and preferences can be adjusted on an exception basis if the PM finds it appropriate.







Best regards,

Rafael

John,



Because the main theme of this topic is to challenge Spider and it does provides for different resources to be assigned the same skills with different productivities I would like to know how Micro Planner X-pert handles this issue. For example you have available one C+++ expert engineer that can code 1.5 times as fast as 2 rookies, how you take this into consideration within MP-X.



Best regards,

Rafael

Hi Vladimir,



The Schedule means, What if??? (for me)



You can define the tasks or activities logically and then - What if?



The thing is, you are assigning resources to the tasks, and not tasks to resources (remember this question before?).



What if you had defined the Labor resources first and then assign the tasks? (I supposed you said that this cannot be possible in scheduling).



To make it simple:



Work out your tasks first,



and then work out your resources so that it will fit your tasks.



Resources are consummables, and Tasks are deliverables, and time is? (is time a constraint?)



So which one is more Critical?

Hi Agustin,



Thanks for your view.



"No Resources - No valid Schedule" (by Glenwright)



What if you reverse it?



No Schedule - No valid Resources!



Which one do you define first? The Tasks or the Resources?



For me, resources is a matter of options, but you will always define the tasks first and not the resources - I mean in scheduling.



So if you don’t have enough or available resources at a certain time, you still can wait for that time to come, but that doesn’t mean that your schedule (of tasks) becomes invalid (maybe invalid to show only the earliest possible time).



Well, that’s my view.



Best regards

Raphael



Calling somebody a "dingo" in Australia is actually an insult, sorry I did not know I just meant "you must be though" as if a lion in the wild but used a reference from the Australian fauna, it was meant to be praise in the context of the whole sentence. I was trying to be nice, not being mean.



About your name Raphael it was without even noticing, here Ralph is so common that instead of Raph it just came to my mind. We are not so sensitive to name misspelling especially when dealing with other nationalities, we are more tolerant, don’t even pay attention to such issue.



"Microsoft has happily soldiered on for over thirty years not allowing SS and FF between two tasks and they have over 90% of the market. What does that tell you?"



This tells me that it satisfies most people needs for Gantt chart software and not the more sophisticated Precedence Scheduling software. Some of us have more sophisticated needs, I do not need a fancy Gantt chart software I do need the more sophisticated precedence scheduling software. For Gantt Charts I prefer Excel spreadsheets.



"Microsoft in the form of their top guru in Project tells me that according to their research about 80 to 90 % of projects are run simply using Excel spreadsheets."



This tells me a lot about why Microsoft has no interest at all in what serious precedence scheduling is about, judging from how slow (over thirty years ! ) they have been at adopting many missing PDM functionality in their product and this comment from one of their so called Gurus. Seems like they are more interested in that 90% than in the rest 10%, the rest of us.



"It is great pity that none of you are actually reading what I am saying about Total Float and the fact that as a Planner and Scheduler you should be working hard to provide the best solution to deliver your clients needs."



I read what you said about total float is just I completely disagree with you, about the fact that as a Planner and Scheduler you should be working hard to provide the best solution to deliver your clients needs I completely agree, so I have no comment in this regard.



Goodbye,



Rafael

Rafael



As an Australian born Italian-German; speaking English as a third language, I am afraid I don’t quite understand what your post 226 is meant to mean.



Sugar Gliders are left in the wild here in Australia, but I believe prople in the Americas tend to keep them as household pets, so what do you mean by your reference?



Sometimes I find it quite amusing in trying to figure out what some of the various folk who type faster than their brain operates in English mean in their posts.



Also



1) I don’t like being called Ralph, because it is an English name, not a diminutive of Raphael, you can spell Raf as Raph, because mostly my American cousins do, but then they speak English-US



2) Calling somebody a "dingo" in Australia is actually an insult



It is great pity that none of you are actually reading what I am saying about Total Float and the fact that as a Planner and Scheduler you should be working hard to provide the best solution to deliver your clients needs.



It is not about software, unless like me you are actually teaching a degree course at University where all these wonderous way of calculating have to be taught.



If you are a believer of PDM, you will know that there are four precedence link types.



Microsoft has happily soldiered on for over thirty years not allowing SS and FF between two tasks and they have over 90% of the market.



What does that tell you?



Microsoft in the form of their top guru in Project tells me that according to their research about 80 to 90 % of projects are run simply using Excel spreadsheets.



BTW, it is going to be almost 40C here in NSW today, I have many critical task to carry out before our Christmas shutdown, the moment the temperature hits 38.6C, under our OH&S rules the workers will stop work.



I haven’t even considered any float values, because I will have to shuffle the work around tomorrow and Saturday to ensure the tasks which have been resource scheduled to occur, and perhaps don’t because of the heat do get completed by end Saturday.



Now I have better things to do with my limited time as I have six big projects on the go in three countries and I will now drop off this posting and ensure my clients continue value me in providing the schedules required.



Goodbye



Raf (the Elder) :-)

Vladimir,



I already synchronized my first updating of two versions, in order to do so I had to define the second version twice but it worked at a click of a mouse.



I still got to do some exploring into this functionality to get used to it and understand how update version numbers are kept into sync.



Up to now a piece of cake, is a matter of getting used to it in order to fly with it.





In a couple of days I should be exploring Risk Analysis and Success Probability, at first glance does not seems like a piece of cake and wonder if my clients will be interested on getting into this.



Best regards,

Rafael

Anoon,



In my posting #205 I made a reference to a 2 activities schedule most CPM packages cannot handle, because this topic have become so large I migh have not included here but at another thread.



So here it is:



Schedule a 2 activities network, not tied one to each other by precedence logic but sharing a limited resource.



For example:



Activity A – 5 days

Activity B - 5 days

Both activities demanding one unit of Resource A, of which only one unit is available.



Most software under resource leveling will schedule A and B at different time, the first one depending on your priorities selection. This is ok up to this point, but the problem is most will show float of 5 days on the first activity while a delay in this activity will delay the completion of your schedule.



Imagine that you as a Project Manager look at the available float as per your CPM schedule and start paying attention to those shown as critical and even start moving resources from those showing some float as to keep under control those showing no float. Because most software under resource constrained schedule will show the wrong float for resource critical activities you most probably will end up moving resources precisely from the wrong activities. You either will discover too late it was wrong or start doubting about the CPM float display. Well better start doubting about the CPM float display and either buy a glass ball or software capable of showing resource critical float.



Anoon, just schedule it by yourself the sample 2 activities job. I used to call it abominable error and science all software developers are aware of this it cannot be called an error nor an omission, from now on I will call it an ABOMINABLE LIE.



Best regards,

Rafael

Hi Anoon,



If I may, I will give you an answer to your question. I see Vladimir already did it.



I’ll quote Earl Glenwright (he was quoted before by Raf) from a presentation made in June 2005 at AACEi, “Issues & Controversies”:



“NO RESOURCES = NO VALID SCHEDULE ! “



There is a very interesting interview gave by Jim O’Brian in the PMI COS website (http://www.pmicos.org/jointerview.asp) about the history of CPM.



The questions put firstly were: how to organize the project activities ? in what sequence ? how much time will take them ? which activities are more important than the other ? … and so on. And the result was the Critical Path: critical and non-critical activities, free float and total float. But the focus was only on activities without taking into account if there are or not enough resources. Do not forget what the social, political and economical context was when CPM was developed.



So, in this approach, the activities are those who consumes (need) resources, no matter if the resources are available to do them.



This kind of project model worked for a while, but mainly in very organized, based on a chain of command environment similar to the army.



Later on they asked what will happen if there are not enough resources. It is interesting that Dan Trietsch from University of Auckland revealed in a paper published in 2003 - “Why a Critical Path by Any Other Name Would Smell Less Sweet? Towards a Holistic Approach to PERT/CPM” that Russian mathematicians had made deep researches during ’60 years in what we call the scientific work organization. I have a great admiration on Russian mathematicians as time as I learned from their work.



Coming back to the subject. In the lets’ call new approach, the resources are those who made possible the activities deliverables. If you don’t have the available qualified resources, you will not get the deliverables from a certain activity. In this approach the focus is on resources. The real life shows us this. So, if resources does not have float (because of their calendar and availability), than the activity to whom they are assigned are called “resource critical activity”. The sequence of such activities it is called “resource critical path”.



Why is more realistic such a schedule ? Because … What happen if you don’t have the right people and equipment in the right time ? What happen if you don’t have a certain material at the right moment to be used in an activity ? But most of all, what happen if you don’t have enough money at the right moment to pay for people, equipment and materials ? And the answer is not: I have float.



The usual feeling a Project Manager has is the frustration. He is responsible to do something with almost nothing. I suppose Raf will confirm this feeling.



So, planning is about future. And the future can have different faces, or you can think that there are many possible futures. From all of them, you are interested in only one. And try to bring that future into current reality. Spider just help you to foresee different aspects might affect your commitment.



And come back to Earl: No resources = No valid schedule !



Best regards,



Augustin

Vladimir,



How do you, or how do Spider define critical activites?



Is it from the task’s floats, or from the resource floats?



What if your schedule is not resource loaded?



Can you just rely on the task’s floats to determine criticalities?



cheers

Hi Vladimir,



I’m not good in math, but here I supposed you’ll only use a little plus (+) and a little (-), and a combination of calendars, with days and hours.



I just cannot think of a reason why what you called an "assignment float" (do you mean resource float?)may differ from the activity floats, when the resource is to be assigned to the activity?



Do you mean because of the availability of the resource(s)?



Best regards

Start floats and Finish floats may be different especially under activity splitting and/or resource constraining. The other occasion I can think of is when updating changes the original duration of activities that originally had same Start floats and Finish floats.



Float might be tricky but very useful to the extent Contracts in USA make reference to it. Unfortunately some (shall I say many) CPM software fall short of updating their computation of float in agreement with the functionalities available after “old” CPM which in its beginning did not included resource leveling and not to mention other real life constraints.

Hi "elder Raf",



Yes, I believe when you said that Total Float is a chain, and it seems decreasing from a higher value or units (in the early activities), and maybe it can become zero when it reaches the end or the last part of the activities.



What really drives the movements of floats? Is it plainly from the relationships as defined? So that only FS relationship will show the real value of float?



Best regards

Raphael,



“These were originally derrived from arrow diagrams, you cannot correctly calculate them in Precedence.” – a quote from your posting.



Arrow diagrams should never die, Micro Planner is the only software I know provides you with this functionality and although I prefer to work with precedence diagrams the comparison between the two methods shall be available forever, it is not a rarity it is valid mathematical computations.



I hope eventually Spider Project gets its own forum category and believe that same as Tilos also Micro Planner should have its own forum category I will follow as to keep watch on the difference between the two methods. And yes I know Micro Planner can handle both methods.



I am not rallying for Micro Planner because two new categories at the same time might be too much for PP, but believe the beauty of PP is about options. A small space on the screen for Spider and Micro-P will do no harm, on the contrary.



Best regards,

Rafael