Tools for evaluating health of Schedule

I will not say top 5 but some tools that I used before.

1. Deltek - Acumen Fuse

2. Schedule Analyser

3. XERTool Kit

4. Steelray Project Viewer

If you are confident to extract the data yourself you can follow the DCMA guidelines (link to pdf) although some of the checks are a bit questionable and you might want to adjust some of the limits depending on the style of your project, plus DCMA does not include a settings check (look up Ron Winter for details on that). DCMA is the system that US DOD contractors are subjected to. Steelray (and probably others mentioned in Rodel's post) can apply these constraints but also can be adjusted for your use

There is a curent list of schedule quality tools at https://mosaicprojects.com.au/PMKI-SCH-030.php#Plan4

• Let's tell it like it is; DCMA is rubbish, most of mentioned tools do not define health, they provide some statistics at best.
• It is not wise to define schedule health using arbitrary schedule statistics.
• On the other hand schedule statistics can be useful if used wisely.
• https://www.ronwinterconsulting.com/DCMA_14-Point_Assessment.pdf

Rafael,

100% agreed, "Schedule Quality" or "Schedule Health" are just diagnostics of a schedule. Like data collected about a car. - it says nothing about the driver, the destination, the objectives of the journey or whether these were met or not.

I am firmly moving to an opinion that the focus on these "Quality/Integrity" checks has actually been a hinderance to improving planning and scheduling than anything else.

Rafael and Santosh,

I agree with your opinions.

Schedule statistics is one of many standard reports created by Spider Project. It can show some problems with the project schedule but cannot guarantee the schedule "health" even when all DCMA requirements are met. Besides, these requirements make sense for certain types of projects and for certain clients.

Hello,

I have to agree with Vladimir and Rafael, however, in my opinion using professional judgement for the schedule health and fesability may lead to disputes between parties (at least in my experience). Using a set of standard parameters to judge the health of a schedule avoids this problem. The problem is in choosing these parameters since not all parameters may fit all projects under all circumstances and not all sofware have the same capabilities.

For example:

01. Using only F-S constraints may result in an impossible to manage schedule, however requiring that all activities that have S-S links should have F-F links is a good practice and may provide some information regarding schedule health and fesability. But using the previous stated parameter (test) you ensure that MS Project will always fail this parameter (test).

02. In a construction project all activities should have quantities of work...checking for activities with duration but without quantities of work and vice versa may also be another health check...but then you cannot use either Primavera or MS Project since either do not have build in fields for quantities of work...and so on.

DCMA 14 points don't measure schedule quality

A schedule may meet all DCMA criteria and has critical schedule quality issues or may have good quality but be RED based on DCMA health assessment. It is just an indicator that the schedule requires attention. Nothing more.  

It means that tools measured schedule quality based on DCMA, create an illusion of quality control. 

Regards, 

Alex Lyaschenko

Here you can read more about the DCMA 14 schedule health check guidelieness, as well as learn more about the benefits of using the ScheduleReader software to perform your schedule health assessment.