I met a lovely old guy last week at a Fleetwood Mac concert at Madison Square Gardens who was an Attendant there. We got talking while I was getting a beer and he told me he'd worked there for forty years, he remembered when Fleetwood Mac first pla...
As a scheduler within various industries, I have been asked “What is Schedule Quality?” In fact, if you pose this question to various project personnel, you may receive more than one answer per individual! Why? Some view “schedule quality” as a simp...
Planning Planet members are invited to a free AIPM Project Controls SIG (PC-SIG) meeting to be held at The Water Rat Hotel, 256 Moray Street, South Melbourne VIC, 3205: http://www.thewaterrathotel.com.au/Date: Wednesday 20 November 2013, Start 5.30...
The Complex Projects Contract 2013 (CPC2013) focuses on managing time to ensure projects are delivered to specification on budget and without delays. Unlike existing contracts, which target failure by requiring financial compensation for late complet...
There is not a project in this world that does not use spreadsheets from time to time and many are run exclusively by spreadsheets – in numerous surveys Microsoft Excel is listed as the most common / popular project management tool. And generally sp...
There is not a project in this world that does not use spreadsheets from time to time and many are run exclusively by spreadsheets – in numerous surveys Microsoft Excel is listed as the most common / popular project management tool. And generally sp...
The Guild of Project Controls is in formation, and most people have a view of what is involved in ‘project controls’ but what is the ‘dictionary’ definition of ‘project controls’? To answer this question, my proposed definition for ‘project controls...
If my team and I were on a mission to standardize our program control software, we might perform a benchmarking exercise. I firmly believe if we performed such an exercise, we would find that one-hundred different organizations would have at least o...
The scheduling conundrum is simple:We know effective scheduling makes a significant difference to project success and we know what effective scheduling looks like but in most projects, the schedule is ignored, bad scheduling practice is the norm and ...
These are words of desperation, a client or senior manager who's got his back to the wall.I was faced with this exact situation on a consulting job a few weeks back, the business owner, facing heavy penalties for late delivery was desperate for answe...
It is failry common to come across lots of people in planning who are actively engaged in planning but have never visited or worked on the site. This is deeply disturbing. It also applies to other industries as well as you must have noticed. Well, in...
The quality guru W. Edwards Deming said ‘In God we trust, all other bring data’. However, developments in the Victorian Government health system (Australia) offer a salient reminder to any PMO manager on the value of data.Victorian hospitals are rewa...
The situation where a contractor has been awarded two or more different contracts for different phases on the same site must be failry common because I have encountered it three times so far in my career.It is a recipe for disaster for the Employer b...
A long time back, late Seventies to early Eighties, it was quite a fun to prepare Plans and programmes for Projects. It used to be challenging, creative effort involving lots of hard work but quite satisfying and enjoyable. This went on for quite som...
Distributed contingencies are normal in most aspects of project management but often result in sub-optimal use of resources. Typical examples include allowing some safety margin in each CPM duration estimate (eg, setting the durations at an 80% proba...
Probably the most common action undertaken by project planners everywhere is assigning a duration to a task; most of us do this almost automatically. Generally it is only when a dispute arises that the complex interaction of the factors discussed in...
The science of ‘scheduling’ as defined by Critical Path Analysis (CPA) celebrated its 50th Anniversary in 2007. In 1956/57 Kelly and Walker started developing the algorithms that became the ‘Activity-on-Arrow’ or ADM scheduling methodology for DuPo...
Undoubtedly the longest running ‘urban myth’ in circulation within the general project management community, arising from US Defence based research from the early 1990s, that the Cost Performance Index (CPI) always stabilizes at the 20% completion an...
I had a situation recently where a client stated that despite his people working as fast and seemingly efficiently as they could, he was seeing next to no progress reflected in his performance reporting, his end date was pushing out, his efficiency w...
As the end of 2012 approches, and assuming the world won't end of the 12/12/12 I have a few thoughts for every scheduler’s New Year resolutions.You can’t change the past, the present is being managed by the project workforce, the only thing you can i...