Project Tasks Leads and Lags

I was sitting at a café in Seattle and I was thinking about project management; leads and lags. Why do people bother using them?

I worked on many aerospace complex engineering programs for many years, and when I ran across program schedules with leads and lags, I would cringe.

Was it because I never used them? Well, the answer is yes and no. But that’s not the reason I would cringe. It was because it was the beginning of thousands of lines of who knows what fatal scheduling errors within that program schedule?

My mind would start asking obvious questions. Did all of it have many leads? That would be an immediate remediation and repair situation. How can you have a set of sequenced tasks in a program schedule with leads (negative lag)?

If you have a schedule health assessment tool that at minimum looks at the 14 weak points of a schedule based on data and knowledge gathered by DCMA (the department contracting management association), then you could quickly count them and fill dread in your stomach if you found any.

I mean, you could manually set a custom filter in #MicrosoftProject to detect leads without having a fancy tool to do it for you, but that’s another article.

Anyway, the definition of a task lead is work that is going to be done in the past. This negative duration is not taken into account in the Duration column. That means that if I state my task has a lead (negative lag) then I’m saying I’m going to complete my work not today, but maybe yesterday or the day before yesterday (in the past). That’s a lie, no one can do work in the past.

The DCMA point, out of 14 points of inspection, that touches upon this fact states that 0% of the schedule is permitted to have leads.

Now we can get into the topic of lags. I think at this point of writing the article, I was almost done with my coffee so I thought maybe I’ll catch you next time with the details… so much exasperation.

Well, I think you reader, were urging me to finish my thoughts on leads and lags. I will tell you I wish never to talk about false statements of doing work in the past… but alas, I think I will have to continue speaking about task leads (negative lag) in the future.

I thought to be kind, and finished my thoughts on lags. I looked around and didn’t think the people in the café were ready to kick me out even though I had been there for over an hour. It was beautiful looking outside the window and the café was picturesque…

Okay lags…those are days added to a task schedule in secret. Yes, in secret. It takes a covert operations team to find this fault. It doesn’t show up in the Duration column as more days past the initial duration in this column. Ugh.

But DCMA 14-point inspection (assessment) is forgiving and lets us have up to 5% of our schedule (or sequenced task list) to have these in the network links.

It’s very hard to detect them with the naked eye. You can detect them, alongside leads, if you have your predecessor or successor column opened. If you see pluses then you see lags. If you have negatives, then you have leads. You cannot find them otherwise because there are no Lead or Lag columns in #MicrosoftProject.

Again, you could manually set a custom filter in #MicrosoftProject to detect them.

So my advice to you is, if you are at work and the boss hands you a project or program schedule with these offending facts, I would run the other way. Is the aerospace company next door hiring?

Written by Minerva Goree - Mathematician

Find me at YouTube @MadSchedules and @BudgetwithMinerva

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