Schedule updates-Changes to links,duration

Those people who say that making changes to future activities in a schedule should be banned are totally wrong.
It is utterly ridiculous to insist that a schedule should continue to contain incorrect information after it is known to be wrong.
All it does it ensure that the future part of the schedule, which is the MOST IMPORTANT PART, is useless.

Some clients insist that this rule is written into the contract. I imagine they do this because they are worried that if they allow the contractor to make changes to the schedule, the contractor will do so in order to hide delays.
There is no value to the contractor in hiding their delays becuase eventually these delays will become apparant, and they will be found out to not only be in delay, but also to be liars.

It is also impossible for a contractor to actually control the project without having an accurate forecast of remaining works. So if they are not allowed to make required changes, they are forced to have 2 versions of the schedule: 1 they report to the client wiothut changes, the other they use to run the job. This, of course, makes him a ’liar’ anyway and makes the schedule reported to the client utterly meaningless.


This is probably the most frequent, and most stupid, mistake clients make with respect to scheduling. I really don’t understand why it happens so often.

Hi Kumar

Revising network logic drafts the clear picture of project in terms of determining critical path and especially in case of doing delay analysis .

Necessary substantiation is enough to resolve this issue

Pro-gramme when developed it stays in ground state due to contingency involved in the project the behavior of the project tends to move in excited state which might leads to increase in duration ,increase in resource strength ,logic revision, shortening the critical path and so on.

Pro-gramme cannot be 100% concrete at all times

Thanks for your views.
But if we allow changing the durations,logic etc for the activities which are planned beyond the data date,then the update is not on the baseline schedule,but on a new schedule,in this case how can we report the project status compared to the baseline.

The same activities will still be there, so you can still report project status vs baseline.
More than that, you can report PROJECTED progress vs baseline, which in many ways is more useful.

What I do is insist the contractor supplies a change log with each update, detailing what logic, durations, etc they have changed and why.

The original baseline is nothing more than a best guess at project inception. Especially for EPC contracts where the final solution has not yet been designed, it is quite unreasonable to expect the contractor to know accurately how long activities will take, or even in some circumstances, what activities will need to be done.

In fact, I often reccomend the project is rebaselined once design is substantially complete. So long as client accepts the new baseline, and contract dates are still adhered to, all it does is give you a better, more accurate baseline.

Dear Kumar,

If your Program of Works is inline with the progress at site then you don’t need to change the logic and the durations.

I agree with Gary, that it is diffcult to come up with a detailed program of works from the start or within a month unless the project is identical to a previous one. But your high level scope should be identified and it should be futher developed when you have more details.

With kind regards,

Samer