Reporting status of critical path

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Lucas l 👤 Member for 16 years 2 months
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Samer Zawaydeh 👤 Member for 17 years 10 months

Dear Sehari,



Maybe you can read a little bit about "Earned Value Management" and see if this is convenient on your project.



With kind regards,



Samer

L
Lucas l 👤 Member for 16 years 2 months

Thank Samer for the advice.





I will read up on that book

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Samer Zawaydeh 👤 Member for 17 years 10 months

Dear Lucas,



The Practice Standard for Scheduling by PMI, appendix D, has a Comformance Scoring list. But we had a discussion few months ago on PP and the members agree that this is not enough.



My recommendations is that you get your Construction Team involved, and let them review the critical path. The people are site are the most aware of the activities, rate of production, environmental conditions, obstacles, risk. They should review the output of your software and comment on it.



With kind regards,



Samer

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Lucas l 👤 Member for 16 years 2 months

Thank you both for the advice.



I am thinking if it is useful to come up with a S curve specially for the activities in the critical path and use it for reporting along with remarks and precedence diagram. Can anyone advice on a useful matrix for the S curve ? I am thinking of using duration as a matrix for tracking purpose



Are there any industry or actual practice when it comes to reporting status on critical path ?


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Samer Zawaydeh 👤 Member for 17 years 10 months

Dear Lucas,



You can divide it into three Sections; Data, Information and Understanding, and maybe at later stage it can be upgraded into knowledge and wisdom



Data: You can filter the Program of Works and ask for the activities with zero or negative float.



Information: Collect the information associated with these activities from the Construction team or daily reports and communication between the parties.



Understanding: Try to understand what is happening to the Critical Path, why it is changing and what are the causes.



At later stages in the project, you can add a section for knowledge of what cause and effect the activities have, and ultimately you will get some good lessons learnt.



With kind regards,



Samer

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Shareef Abdul Azeez 👤 Member for 20 years 8 months

I have pasted down a method to see the change on the critical path when compared to a previous schedule.

This from Ronwinter’s site (Ronwinter Consulting LLC)(Schedule update pdf)

I cant find the site right now. You can use this method to report the critical path and its changes whether positive or negative.



Critical Activity Summary



This last summary puts the entire update onto a single piece a paper.



This summary paper will have four columns. The first column is for the Target(earlier) Schedule’s critical path (or Longest Path.) Write the Activity ID for each

activity on a separate line, beginning with the activity with the earliest early start(or actual start if available,) and proceeding to the last activity on the list with thelatest early start.



Now do the same for the second column using the Update (most recent)Schedule and sorting by early start. Here is the first trick; line-up matching Activity IDs from the target Schedule to the Update Schedule. Never list two

different Activity IDs on the same line. Skip down to the next match with the schedules, inserting blank lines wherever necessary to keep the two lists in sync.

Unless the two lists match perfectly, there will be gaps in the two lists where the Activity IDs don’t match.

The third column is reserved for the change in the activity’s Actual Duration plus Remaining Duration. In other words, the formula is,



(Update Actual Duration + Update Remaining Duration) – (Target Actual Duration

+ Remaining Duration).



The last column contains the Activity’s description and a summary of every finding you made of that activity in the entire previous review. Small issues tend up add-up to a very interesting whole when you take the time to re-write all findings.

Now, looking down the first two columns, you can easily see where the critical path jumped off and back on to the earlier critical path.

The Effective Duration

column will indicate the problem area where the change occurred.

The fourth column will then summarize just what that project-changing revision was.



regards

Shareef A Azeez

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