Attempts at an accurate schedule vs owner insistence on 21 Cal. Day review times.

Consider updating the schedule on a weekly basis, in this way every 3 weeks (every 21 calendar days) you can give him the updated schedule he is asking for and you will keep the needed granularity along with the intermediate updates for you to administer your fast moving job. 

It should be depends on the durations of the Project. Recommended practice 6 months or less and greater than 1 month shall have at least weekly at max. For 1 year and above at least bi-weekly or monthly at max. The cycle should have time to react when issues happen. Weekly update was a good practice to consider which can accommodate any requirement if necessary.

this gives the owner time to review the submittal especially if multiple project are on going at the same time. Just think if you bombard him with submittals. This can also be the basis for a claim if a submittal is held over the 21 day calendar day window if the item turns out to be on the critical path or it becomes the critical path because the submittal was not returned in 21 days.

The 21 day window is used a standard.

One technique is to create a "HOT submittal list"  which directs the ower or the reviewer to the submmittals that are needed the soonest or are most urget. 

Spider Project fix the actual units and costs for the reported periods and distribute the remaining according to remaining allocations in combination with earned value and planned value.  Spider Project period reports are accurate (to true value) without the need to match your updates to pre-defined financial periods.

On the other hand for most other scheduling software when the update includes activities in progress but not finished, in subsequent updates the distribution of allocations for activities in progress spanning two reporting periods will most probably change for all such periods unless you use pre-defined financial periods. 

You might get incompatible progress curves where past performance distributions do not match, a problem when cost loading is used as a basis for Progress Payments.  In such case when the client cannot tolerate the difference you might need to look for some work-arounds like using separate databases each with their own financial period definitions.

Also be reminded that some software will change calculated late dates when some date constraints cannot be attained.  This will distort the late S curves, sometimes without no-one noticing but mind boggling when you get a “twisted banana curve” everyone should notice, ouch!

Best Regards, Rafael

Thanks.  This is one that cannot be answered on a generic level.  Gas vs Tranportation, Private vs Public sector etc.  I understand where you are all coming from, but there is just too much difference in industry processes and project sizes to discuss this.  In the end the suggestions were around flexibility or changes bases on variables.  In the end, there is a trade-off between doing the owner wants and what the owner's system or fighting the system when it makes sense.  Most people do not know the scheduling issue enough and just think you are bucking the system.  I have created a lot of ugly, compromise schedules when is faster or better for the politics and sometimes I guess that is the right answer.  Thanks again.

I guess what it comes down to is that you have to plan on 21 days but knowing that you can beat that duration thus improving the overall schedule.