Scheduling Practice Standard Conundrums

Emily,

I suppose many of your readers have bosses and customers of the mind, "don't bother submitting for review until all 14 DCMA metrics are green," so of course they're looking for the advice you suggest.  In the long run, I don't think this leads to a more valid or dynamically responsive schedule.

In your example, the suggestion to insert preferential logic ties solely to manipulate total float is a dangerous tactic. 

Hi Tom,

Yes, over here some US Government customers take the DCMA metrics very seriously and I agree that this may not lead to a better schedule. We're still seeing schedule quality as a huge issue and are always surprised at large organizations that turn out really poor schedules.

Hi Emily,

I appreciate your response, and I agree that schedule quality is a big issue, not just in government projects.  What I take issue with is the oversimplified pass/fail nature of the "DCMA-based" scorecards. I put that in quotes because the original DCMA analysis thresholds were solely intended as prompts for additional investigation by a trained and competent schedule analyst.  Unfortunately, there seems to be a shortage of trained and competent schedulers and schedule analysts, so project owners simply revert to the "green-pass, red-fail" criterion.

This is indeed a conundrum.

(Your "over here" comment reminded me to try - and finally succeed at - removing the "GPC Qatar" group from my profile.  It's  been stuck on there for years due to a glitch in PP.  Though I work in many places, I'm still based in USA.)

Hi Tom - I do think the pass/fail nature of the DCMA is overly simple, although seeing so many poor quality schedules out there (not just “over here”), I’m left thinking it may be better than nothing. I know this is not a good answer  :-)

you can use the DCMA 14 point but have to also your your own experience to validae the schedule.