MS Project Schedule Analysis Plug-Ins

You shuld try "schedule Cracker" (www.schedulecracker.com) as it has all what you want.  It offers DCMA, GAO, EVM, Comparison, analysis, and even trend.  It is offered for Primavera and MS Project.  14 day free full functional trial is offered. You can can load any schedule size and it should be fine. Give it a try.

You should try our software Schedule Cracker. 

Schedule Cracker now supports Primavera P5, P6, and MS Project 2003, 2007, and 2010.

Schedule Cracker© is an enterprise class scheduling analysis and business intelligence tool for Project Management. It stands out with its visualization and easy to use interface, where you can click through to get deep details on any of the 214 analysis metrics, and instantly produce neat looking reports which can be exported easily in a multitude of formats, such as Excel and PDF. 

Schedule Cracker© analyzes characteristics and anomalies of schedule’s baseline or updates, compares baseline and updates schedules, and compares multiple schedule updates concurrently.  It is a must have tool for Project Managers and Scheduling professionals, who can use it to view Alerts for the most problematic activities, assess risk, perform critical path analysis and forecast future performance.

Schedule Cracker also assists in checking the compliance with DCMA, GAO, and EVM’s ANSI 748 standards.

A free full functional trial version can be downloaded from www.schedulecracker.com.  A limited time promotional price for the AACE annual meeting is posted on the website.

You should try our software Schedule Cracker. 

Schedule Cracker now supports Primavera P5, P6, and MS Project 2003, 2007, and 2010.

Schedule Cracker© is an enterprise class scheduling analysis and business intelligence tool for Project Management. It stands out with its visualization and easy to use interface, where you can click through to get deep details on any of the 214 analysis metrics, and instantly produce neat looking reports which can be exported easily in a multitude of formats, such as Excel and PDF. 

Schedule Cracker© analyzes characteristics and anomalies of schedule’s baseline or updates, compares baseline and updates schedules, and compares multiple schedule updates concurrently.  It is a must have tool for Project Managers and Scheduling professionals, who can use it to view Alerts for the most problematic activities, assess risk, perform critical path analysis and forecast future performance.

Schedule Cracker also assists in checking the compliance with DCMA, GAO, and EVM’s ANSI 748 standards.

A free full functional trial version can be downloaded from www.schedulecracker.com.  A limited time promotional price for the AACE annual meeting is posted on the website.

I have written a Excel macro that does much of this type of analysis.  Not sure how to upload to share it tho.

The Acumen plug-in is pretty glitzy, but it doesn’t perform probably the most important function in schedule analysis: drag computation, or how much time the project duration could be compressed by shortening each individual CP activity.



I just noticed that Sumatra has extended the trial offer on their Project Optimizer add-on thru October 31. The URL is:



http://www.sumatra.com/projectoptimizer/projectoptimizer.htm



If anyone here downloads and uses it, I’d be interested in how they find it. (Primavera does not compute drag. The only other packages that do, as far as I know, are Spider Project and PlanontheNet.com.)



One recommendation: one person that I’d told about it downloaded it, then emailed me that they couldn’t figure out what to do with the information it gave them. If you download it, I urge you to both read through the documentation AND to go through the sample walkthrough optimization project.



Trevor, needless to say, I’d be particularly interested in hearing whatever feedback you have.



Meanwhile, can Pakistan teach the target of 148 needed to win the Third Test against England? Currently, 80 for two...



Fraternally in project management,



Steve the Bajan

What kind of analysis do you want to do?

Why look for 3rd party tools when the built-in functionality is already there?

It seems to me that analysis is just a matter of asking specific questions about the project plan, eg, "which tasks don’t have predecessors?", "which tasks cost more than $10000?".

The answers to questions like these can be obtained by sorting, filtering and grouping, either with the built-ib filters etc or by making new ones to suit specific purposes.

Hi Darren,



I’m not aware of a plug-in for MSP that can do the schedule analysis similar to DCMA’s 14 point tripwire analysis, but one option for you could be to request a free trial of "Acumen Fuse" and see if that will do the job for you.



Acumen Fuse should be able to take MS Project files without problem and it will do the DCMA 14 analysis plus some other analyses. Their represenatives also appear very helpful "over there" in Texas, US.



Regards,



Bo