About seven years ago we were at the height of RevelPoint Advanced Cloud Scheduling development. Two of my partners visited Kenji Hoshino and his team at Project Controls & Forensics to show them the power of then new software. The AACE had just published its RP29R-03 Forensic Schedule Analysis recommended practices, which included half-step analysis as Method
Current techniques and tools utilized for project productivity analysis leave several unconsidered factors. A normalized project productivity technique should be contemplated for proper productivity analysis. Normalized productivity takes into account unit cost, production rate, and production capacity. It is otherwise possible to attain, for instance, productivity that is 25% better at twice the cost and
The universally-recognized abstract definition of productivity is the ratio of output to input. Construction and other industries today have adopted a narrow subset of productivity and generalized it as “the” productivity. Construction productivity, as utilized today, is not a useful metric to rely on for monitoring project health, creating reliable cash flow and forecasts, deriving
Part 2 When we define and understand the various components involved in a task input and output, we develop a real picture of the task performance to-date and we are able to assess means to improve real productivity going forward. If the assessment is for forensics purposes, to evaluate a claim for example, then understanding
This morning, I saw a news clip about Excel Energy announcing the use of Drones for infrastructure inspection. Cool. http://chic.clipsyndicate.com/video/play/5778511/xcel_energy_to_use_drone_technology_for_infrastructure_inspe?wpid=103
The Measured Mile is an industry and court-recognized method of quantifying loss of productivity claims. The method’s reputation as a solid quantification method has unfortunately caused the term measured mile to be one of the most misapplied labels. Over the years, we’ve seen the method misapplied, misinterpreted and, to put it bluntly, abused. The intent
Most Construction Risk analysis tools available today stress a stochastic approach to modeling risk and offer an alternate deterministic approach that is discretized to Best-case, Worst-case, and Likely. The scant deterministic approach can hardly model real projects risks. The vague stochastic approach, by itself, does not begin to model real projects either. The lack of
Scheduling Forensics Series Pick a medium to large size completed construction project at random. Assemble the project schedule and all of its updates. Compile the out-of-sequence (OoS) and relationship type metrics. If you analyze the metrics, you’ll almost always find two things: a) activities that were performed out of sequence, and b) a strong
The Systems Engineering discipline teaches the concept of a feedback loop to monitor any process with the intent of taking corrective actions, as necessary. There are many expressed variants of the concept that are being applied to design, construction, manufacturing, software, banking, and just about any discipline or industry that requires processes. The concept when
Monitor and Remedy Dangling Activities While it is generally considered a best practice to insure that a project CPM schedule has only one start activity (an activity with no predecessors) and one end activity (an activity with no successors) with no other open activities, project schedules are often not evaluated for dangling activities. Dangling activities
