Outage Schedule, Progress Reporting is an Advanced Process

Anyone can build a schedule. But a lot fewer can successfully report progress as the complications can be numerous.

The Scheduler must have a Means to Capture Progress

Once the schedule is built and project starts, then the scheduler must ensure he has a means to capture progress. A large schedule can have thousands of activities, and twice as many logic ties. At any given moment there can be 50 or more activities sitting on the data date (called straddlers). These are the activities that need to be progressed.

A project status meeting is sometimes run by the outage coordinator. This might be a daily meeting (or even every shift). The coordinator goes through his list of updates and the scheduler listens carefully to glean valuable update. Sometimes the straddlers are not mentioned during the meeting and therefore the scheduler must speak up or worse yet, go run down the owner of this activity.

The data date would normally be linked to the scheduled update meeting. If the meeting is today, then the data date needs to be the same. For example, the data date might be 12 Sept 2018 at 8 am. This means any entered activity progress is “as of” this date/time. If someone says they have 2 days left to work on this activity, then the remaining duration (called RD) is entered as RD=2 as of 8 am.

Note: Some schedules have time units of hours versus days.

Progress Reporting Options

I think of activities as logs on wheels, and, these logs should be going up hill. Therein they will slide back to the project start or data date if nothing is “holding them in time”. Reporting progress on schedule activities is one of those methods to hold an activity in time. After entering a new data date, the scheduler can report activity progress several ways:

• Actual Start
• Actual Start and RD
• Actual Start and RD with Restart Date (2-3 days from now, for example)
• Actual Start and RD but work is stopped; thus, the WO status is HOLD.
• ETC -- estimate to complete as man-hours by craft (assuming the work has already been given a start date)
• Actual Finish
• Percent Complete of 100% (or some other value)
• Expected Finish (this means they do not want this date to move, and when the next Data Date movement crosses this date, the expected finish date remains the same)

The Business of Progressing also includes Schedule Activity Alterations

By alterations, I mean, (1) expanding level of detail as more information becomes available, (2) correcting bad logic, (3) applying new constraints, (4) altering resource estimates on future activities, (5) changing activity ownership, and (6) change working calendar for the activity. This is an expected occurrence as when the scheduler is gathering progress, 9 times out of 10, the person being interviewed will provide more detail.

Stuff is Going to Move

Activities downstream are often impacted – including the critical path. Different management styles come into play here such as (1) Don’t tell anyone the critical path moved; only publish the original schedule, or (2) Show the current schedule so that crafts have a realistic plan for the day.

In the Old Days

The “schedulers” had a draftsman (or, they had that role too) whereby they drew up the schedule on a mylar using a draftsman pencil and electric eraser tool. This was done on a large draftsman table. In order to “publish the schedule” the mylar was run through a blue-line machine whereby multiple copies could be made – and a runner distributed.

Reporting progress on a mylar was a matter of drawing "heavy lines" on top of the schedule activity. If the heavy line went up to the data date then this activity was "on schedule". If the heavy line was to the left of the data date, then this was "behind schedule", and so forth. Obviously, this manual process made it very hard to forecast outage schedule finish or extrapolate cost at completion.

Earned Value Calculations

If schedule activities are linked to a cost account (the lowest element in a WBS as stored in project cost tracking), and, if you can come up with the percent complete of these linked activities, then you can calculate Earned Value == budget * percent_complete. The assumption here is that a WBS-CA structure exists, and has budget values stored at cost account level.

Note: Earned Value provides the true measure of project performance as you could be ahead of schedule but have poor project performance.

The Benefit of being Connected to the CMMS

If you can find a (project scheduling) software package that connects to the CMMS/EAM product then you are doing good. After establishing the critical path and performing resource leveling, you want the ability to send schedule dates back to the work order. More importantly, by having a direct connection to the CMMS/EAM product you can leverage the WBS capabilities to produce a Project Cost Tracking report. All of the data is intersected at the WBS cost account and dynamically presented on the report. This data includes all actuals costs (accrued n the CMMS/EAM tool), budget values stored at cost account, and percent complete from the schedule activities. The report output can be shown in summary level such as indented WBS hierarchy which upper management prefers as opposed to detailed work order status (or schedule activity) reports.