WHY ARE CRITICAL PATH DRAG & DRAG COST NOT BEING USED IN LITIGATION?
Stephen Devaux
President, Analytic Project Management; Author, Instructor, & Consultant
I am not a lawyer. But this is something I don’t understand.
I know that legislatures & courts & judges & juries have not a clue about good project scheduling. But these days, a lot of consultants do! And expert witnesses do! You’d think they’d educate the attorneys, and use drag (and demonstrate the lack of its use!) to provide evidence of incompetence, both general & specific. And to calculate the costs of drag for liquidated damages. And just to embarrass the other side’s “experts” by displaying THEIR lack of scheduling competence!
?No?
?Or maybe critical path drag & drag cost ARE being used in litigation, and I just don’t know about it? After all, I KNOW that PMs & schedulers who have read my books, attended my courses/webinars, or just watched me as a consultant compress a schedule MUST have adopted these techniques themselves? I know of divisions of two large aerospace companies that are using critical path drag as standard operating procedure, and one learned it from one of my former grad students!
There are also many who have used Spider Project, attended a Joe Sopko or Alex Lyaschenko presentation, or Jan van den Berg 's or Kevan Kivlan 's classes, who have likely been using drag. And drag cost.
So maybe some attorneys have?
Earlier this week, Jair Aguado Quintero. I.E, MBA, PM4R?, SpS. posted about planning to use it on a major wind energy project. And Joe Russell - MS, PMP, LSSGB posted about how he went back to examine project files on some large projects and found places where use of drag could have saved the government LOTS of time and money!
Yes? No? Attorneys?
Because I think drag and drag cost would be even more powerful in a courtroom than Mr. Johnnie!?
领英推荐
If you didn’t use drag,
Here’s the price tag!
?? What’s the drag cost?
?? That’s what you just lost!
You haven’t heard of it?
Your scheduling ain’t worth…
?
Any thoughts?
Steve the Bajan
Specialist Planner at Rio Tinto SusCap
2 个月PS - the contract holds the float. RTFC
Portfolio Planning & Delivery | PMP | P3O Practitioner | AgilePM Practitioner | Six Sigma | Project Data Modelling | PredAptivePM
2 个月One of the root causes may be in lack of transparency. When a contractor hopes to gain profit via delay claims, they are not motivated to create a transparent, high-quality delivery model. Instead, they create a model with many hidden contingencies and additional links that push as many activities as possible on the critical path. Analysing activity Drag on such a model is not only useless but also not recommended as it may drive wrong decisions.
Programme Planner
2 个月some background to the legal position on expert witnesses https://www.perplexity.ai/page/expert-testimony-legal-standar-Iopd8n2xToyRSQjJR6oyfA
Programme Planner
2 个月Stephen, Under Daubert in the US https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/daubert-v-merrell-dow-pharmaceuticals-inc-1993 courts look at whether a methodology is widely recognized and reliable. Even if it’s not mentioned in PMBOK?. If you can demonstrate that advanced schedulers routinely use CP Drag and consider it essential to critical path analysis, then ignoring Drag might be evidence of incompetence. Basically, if CP Drag meets Daubert’s “reliability” and “general acceptance” thresholds, failing to apply it could indicate a key gap in an expert’s scheduling practices.