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Tag Archives: Resource scheduling

Everything old is new again – especially when there is a $ to be made………..

Posted on August 8, 2022 by | 1 comment

Following on from a post by Raphael M Dua (Raf) in LinkedIn, the number of people posting about their ‘new’ way to solve project scheduling and controls issues seems to be expanding.  The problem is most of their claims are false and misleading.

Some of the most frequent claims are around lean construction management the advocates claim they can solve your project scheduling problems (for a fee) because:

  • Lean construction management has introduced the concept of using input from the first line supervisors to plan the work. While this is a really good idea it is far from ‘new’….  Go back to 2009 and the concept of ‘last planner’ was floating around (and making the same claims), see The Last Planner and other Old Ideas.  Go back even further to the 1970s and major construction companies such as Bechtel and Fluor were applying schedule levels. The Level 5 schedules were short-term ‘look-ahead’ schedules developed every couple of weeks that considered in detail the work for the next month.  These schedules were developed by the foremen and subcontractors responsible for the work, based on the resources available on site to do the work. See more on Schedule Levels.
  • Lean construction management considers resource availability and CPM cannot analyze resources. This is a blatant lie. Every CPM scheduling tool from Microsoft Project to Primavera has the capability to analyze resource. Most have multiple options for scheduling activities against resource availabilities. The image is from a Primavera (P6) training course.  The simple fact is CPM scheduling tools have included resource levelling since the mainframe scheduling tools of the early 1960s.

I’m not sure if the proponents of lean construction making these claims are simply ignorant of the existing capabilities, or making dishonest claims for commercial gain.  But the problems they are claiming to solve are significant and won’t be helped by this type of false narrative.  The core issues appear to be:

  1. A large number of CPM schedules don’t include resources and the projects fail (the USA GAO is addressing this by demanding a resource loaded schedule on all government projects above a defined size). The root causes are untrained schedulers (being taught how to run software is not the same as teaching people how to be effective schedulers….) and the contractor’s management being unwilling to invest in developing the skills and allocate the time and resources needed to develop a comprehensive resource loaded schedule.
     
  2. The inability of main/head contractors to rely on subcontractors supplying adequate levels of resource at the time needed. This is a price and supply chain issues that has been around for decades – see the Latham report from 1994.
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  3. The lack of improvement in resource management techniques for the last 40+ years – there are better options than CPM scheduling, see Resource Optimization at: https://mosaicprojects.com.au/PMKI-SCH-013.php#Process5

Until people actually address these core issues spending money on another fad solution won’t change anything.

I cannot do much to solve the cultural issues outlined above, but my Book Easy CPM goes a long way towards providing the knowledge framework needed to develop a skilled scheduler after they have learned to drive a scheduling tool: https://mosaicprojects.com.au/shop-easy-cpm.php   

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Scheduling Tools

Posted on February 20, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Has Microsoft overcooked the price and performance of Microsoft Project (MSP)? With the impending release of Project 2010 most organisations should be re-evaluating their scheduling tools. Blindly following the Microsoft upgrade path should not be an option.

The trigger for this post is a number of emails I have received plus comments in a number of published articles and on Planning Planet.  Some users criticise MSP for flawed analytical performance, poor data handling and lack of real power in analysis. Other users criticise MSP for being too complex and too hard to use (you could almost feel sympathy for the MSP development teams dilemma). These criticisms have not changed much since the release of Project 2003 and Project Server. What has changed dramatically is the scheduling software market.

Through to the early 2000s Microsoft virtually gave MSP away, almost anyone could access a ‘competitive upgrade’ for under US$100. The very low cost of MSP effectively destroyed 90%+ of the mid to low end competition, TimeLine, CA SuperProject and a host of other businesses closed merged or changed focus.

Today most people outside of major corporations pay around US$1000 for a set of MSP. This tenfold increase in the ‘real price’ of the tool, primarily caused by the elimination of heavy discounts has opened the window for a host of new players in the mid to low end scheduling market place. Many with free options.

Asta PowerProject seems to be a complete replacement for MSP with equivalent levels of capability and sophistication and better presentation and analytical capabilities.

Other graphical tools include CASCAD-e and NetPoint™

Some of the tools that are completely free, or have free entry level options include: jxProject, Gantter.com, PlanningForce and OpenProj™

This is not a comprehensive list by any means more tools are documented on our ‘scheduling home page’. And I have not ventured into discussion of the high end products such as ACOS, Micro Planner, Primavera, Spider and the Deltek range.

The purpose of this blog is to challenge every organisation to really evaluate their scheduling requirements and test the market before letting their IT department blindly follow the Microsoft upgrade path.

Project 2010 may still be the best answer, but this needs to be an informed decision based on a proper review of the available alternatives. Simply paying the cost of upgrading to project 2010 (including licence fees, retraining and data conversion costs) without re-testing the market should be seen as being totally unacceptable because in 2010 there is a real choice of tools available!

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The Planner as a Leader

Posted on January 1, 2010 by | 1 comment

With New Year resolutions in mind, the power of a written plan to influence outcomes cannot be underestimated. This works at the personal level and the business level. The only requirement is the people involved in making the plans happen need to be committed to the planned outcome.

Barbara Anderson, from Shire Coaching a long term friend and colleague who specialises in executive, business & personal coaching quoted the following survey in her New Year e-zine.

HARVARD STUDY – Evidence that writing down your goals works

Students in the 1979 Harvard MBA program were asked: ‘Have you set and written down goals for your future and made plans to accomplish them?’
–   Only 3% had written goals.
–   13% had goals but hadn’t written them
–   84% had no specific goals

10 years later the same students were interviewed. The 13% of the class who had set goals were earning twice as much on average as the 84% who didn’t have goals.

The 3% who had written goals – were earning 10 x as much on average as the other 97%, and also reported better health, better relationships, and overall happiness and success.

The message is clear, from New Year resolutions, to life goals, to project goals having a written plan makes a huge difference. But achieving the required effect is not so simple. The minority of MBA students who had taken the trouble to write down their goals, and their plans to achieve them, were most likely committed to the plan. The challenge for project goals written into a project plan is developing the same level of commitment.

I have posted numerous blogs discussing ways to make the project plan and in particular the schedule into an effective document for communicating the agreed goals and plans, but on its own a well crafted document is still of little use (click on the ‘Scheduling’ category to see the posts). Creating buy-in and commitment to the project plan is a leadership role and requires the project planner to act as an effective leader, supporting their project manager.

Leadership is a learned skill, based on personal integrity. Some of the key learnable skills of a leader that directly relate to the roles of the project planner as a leader include:

  • Interpreting situations and information that affect the project, including:
       –   Seeking information from multiple sources
       –   Knowing how the project fits into the organisations overall strategy
       –   Analysing how resources and team members work together and understanding their capabilities
       –   Knowing your own capabilities and motivations
  • Shaping a strategy for the work (the traditional planning function), including:
       –   Involving the right people at the right time
       –   Standing up for what is important
       –   Keeping the plans relevant by appropriate updating and statusing
       –   Communicating the plan effectively and showing how it fits into an overall organisational strategy
       –   Remaining positive
  • Helping mobilise resources to work the plan, including:
       –   Communicating clearly the results expected from others
       –   Leading people towards the planned ways of working
       –   Demonstrating caring and confidence in the capabilities of team members and resources.
       –   Letting people know how they are progressing towards achieving the plan
  • Inspiring others to achieve results:
       –   Recognising the contribution of others
       –   Helping them to feel and act as leaders in their section of the project
       –   Stimulating the thinking of others
       –   Contributing to the building of the group’s commitment and enthusiasm for the project’s objectives.

Obviously the project planner cannot accomplish all of this alone; support is needed from project management. Helping the project manager help the planner to be successful requires a different skill set, ‘advising upwards’ but that is the subject of another paper (see Managing Upwards from our publishd papers).

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Resourcing Schedules – A Conundrum 2

Posted on September 12, 2009 by | 9 comments

Following on from comments to my post ‘Resourcing Schedules – A Conundrum’  there are still some basic problems to resolve.

As the commentators suggest, KISS is certainly an important aspect of effective resource planning: ie, planning resources at an appropriate level of detail for real management needs. But the basic issues remain; you cannot rely on a scheduling tool to optimise the duration of a resource levelled schedule.

We use the basic network below in our Scheduling courses (download the network – or – see more on our scheduling training)

Network for Analysis (download a PDF from the link above)

No software I know of gets this one ‘right’.

When you play with the schedule, the answer to achieving the shortest overall duration is starting the critical resource (Resource 3) as soon as possible.

To achieve this Resource 2 has to focus 100% on completing Task B as quickly as possible BUT, Task C is on the Time Analysis critical path not Task B and 99% of the time software picks C to start before B.

This is not a new problem, a current paper by Kastor and Sirakoulis International Journal of Project Management, Vol 27, Issue 5 (July) p493 has the results of a series of tests – Primavera P6 achieved a duration of 709, Microsoft Project 744 and Open Workbench 863. Play with the resource leveling settings in P6 and its results are 709, 744, 823, 893 – a huge range of variation and the best option (P6) was still some 46% longer than the time analysis result . Other analysis reported in the 1970s and 80s showed similar variability of outcomes.

As Prof. George Box stated – All models are wrong, some are useful… the important question is how wrong does the model have to be before it is no longer be useful.

Computer driven resource schedules are never optimum, done well they are close enough to be useful (but this needs a good operator + a good tool). And good scheduling practice requires knowing when near enough is good enough so that you can use the insights and knowledge gained to get on with running the project. Remembering even the most perfectly balanced resource schedule will fall out of balance at the first update…..

How you encapsulate this in a guide to good scheduling practice is altogether a different question. I would certainly appreciate any additional feedback.

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Resourcing Schedules – A Conundrum

Posted on September 8, 2009 by | 3 comments

I have recently been forced to think about the value of incorporating resources into schedules. At one level it’s not too hard to do, but is it useful?

From one aspect, it is impossible to schedule at any level without the active consideration of resources. Resources do the work in a given time and changing either the quality or quantity of the resource has some inevitable impact on duration. Consequently, it is critical to know the resource assumptions used in planning to validate the schedule and more importantly understand deviations from the plan during the execution of the work.

Generally what I mean by term ‘considered’ is the basic need to know the resources needed to undertake the work on every activity:

  • At the feasibility stage big picture tied to the strategy for the project.
  • At the contract stage to determine which tasks are the responsibilities of what contractor/subcontractor.
  • At the weekly level, the supervisors need to know who is working where and when.

These decisions also need to be recorded and monitored. How much detail is recorded in the scheduling tool and what scheduling functions are used though is an altogether different question – this I refer to as ‘quantitative’ resource analysis.

Consideration is not the same as quantitative analysis within a scheduling tool. Quantitative resource analysis requires answers, or assumptions to be made, about a range of uncertain issues. Some of the nearly insoluble questions include:

  1. There is no direct ‘straight line’ correlation between resource quantities and either task or project durations – there is a complex ‘J’ curve relationship and in some circumstances a negative correlation. For more on this see: The Cost of Time or for a more learned approach, The Mythical Man Month by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. originally published in 1975.
  2. It is nearly impossible to define skill levels for people who will be employed on a project at some time in the future but we know a skilled worker can be far more productive than an unskilled worker. The skill of the worker changes the production rates and consequently the durations.
  3. The other issue is the degree of motivation/moral of the people – a highly motivated team will always accomplish more than a ‘business as usual’ team and both more than a de-motivated workforce. Therefore the question of management and more importantly leadership also influence resource performance and therefore durations.

These unanswerable questions are complicated by the fact all scheduling software fails to optimally level resources . Basically the tools get it wrong the only question is how wrong: some are not too bad others unmitigated disasters. Resource scheduling needs both knowledge and common sense – no software applies common sense yet. But we have to plan resources – they need working space, accommodation, etc. And resources are the source of all cost expended on the project!

Another really interesting factor is the emerging understanding of the interaction between the schedule and the behaviour of people. IF the people believe the schedule represents a realistic approach to their work, they will (and do) modify their behaviours to conform to the schedule to be seen as successful. Obviously if resources are included in the schedule it is far more credible than if they are not. This was touched on in Scheduling in the Age of Complexity (read from p19 – the rest is not relevant and it’s a horribly long paper…. with a bit of luck this may turn into a book in a couple of years….).

So in conclusion I would suggest, consideration of resources is critical, as is having some form of method statement; together they dictate the planned durations of the work.

However, whilst using scheduling tools to calculate and level resource demands is useful, and can help gain valuable insights, you need real skill on the part of the scheduler and the right tools to achieve sensible results.

My feeling is the value of the process to the development of a realistic and achievable schedule depends on the circumstances of the project. Probably the biggest determinant of the value of quantitative resource analysis is the ease of adding to or reducing the resource pool. If this is easy, rudimentary quantitative analysis is all that’s needed, if any. If it is difficult to quickly change the resource pool far more rigour is required (eg, developing remote area mine sites in Australia). The quantitative analysis will still be ‘wrong’ but it is important to reduce the level error as much as possible.

This is a complex issue – what are your thoughts?

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