NOVEMBER 2017 ANALYZE, COLLABORATE, WIN

good morning or afternoon everybody depending where you're calling in from today wanna thank you for joining us for our monthly technical webinar this month's webinar is titled analyzed collaborate and win crush your project reviews we're gonna have Darrell Townsend he's one of our senior project controls consultants here at dharmic Maddie and Tom Paulin he's the project planning solutions architect for Dell tech presenting today it seems to be a great topic I've kind of got a good overview of it before we get start with the presentation there's some housekeeping items we'd like to take care of first and foremost phone calls all of the lines are muted today that's because we are recording this webinar we'd like to preserve the quality of the audio for the people that cannot make the presentation today if at any time there are any questions there is a questions box in your GoToWebinar window you can submit your questions and time permitting we're gonna try to get to as many as possible if we cannot get to all the questions we will be sending a follow-up email to all of the attendees today and the registrants who cannot make the webinar and in that follow-up email we're going to include a copy of the presentation link to the recording of the webinar that you could share with colleagues and also a question-and-answer sheet with every question that comes in either online or offline we're gonna get started with today's presentation and we're going to turn it over to Tom Poland from Dell tech cool thanks Sam pleasure to be here today and this is going to be I'm really been looking forward to this this is going to be a very special episode today any time you get Darryl and I on the line who knows who knows where it's going to go because today what we're going to be doing after setting the stage a little bit is we're going to be doing a project review of a project that Darryl has been working with and he'll tell us more about that project in a little while but I do want to emphasize and this should be a lot of fun because it's unscripted it's not I haven't seen the project I'm going to be playing a certain role of the customer and Darrell is going to explain to all of us today how that project is what they're planning on doing how they're addressing risk and some other things as well so it's going to be a good gonna be a good time I'm excited about it Darrell why don't we have you go ahead and introduce yourself and then I'll talk a little bit about my background and we'll get into the slide sure thanks Tom thanks Dan Darrell Townsend I approach controls consultant here for Dr McNally so my background actually mostly oil and gas I am actually in the Houston area so it would be kind of obvious that the oil and gas market here in this areas is where my focus generally is been doing scheduling for a long time I'm actually a mechanical engineer so I have a little background in the mechanical side as well so we're gonna look today to a project this actually is a house building project so it's a little more generic as far as kind of cross cross disciplines and most people recognizing schedules for what they are recognized the components included in building a house and unfortunately some on the line may have had to deal with the ugly process of building or a worse case even remodeling a home I'm just outside the flood zone from the Harvey incident but close enough to see a lot of what people are dealing with now and it's it's not a pretty picture anyway so I hope I'm looking forward to the conversation Tom and I back and forth tom sounds a lot better than he did a couple days ago he sent a little bit like Darth Vader a couple days ago so his cold sounds better well you know the show must go on and thanks Darrell as I mentioned my name is Tom Poland I'm Darrell I met just a few years ago but we both been planners for for a long time just over 20 years for me I was a software engineer by trade before I got into these planning functions and project reviews and all that good stuff are you seeing the agenda slide now I just want to make sure my slides are advancing the audience okay cool what we're going to do today is a little bit of past review style that we've experienced our odd I'll be asking you kind of what you've experienced I'll talk a little bit about some of the project reviews that I've been involved with and conducted Darryl is really going to deep dive on this next one on what he analyzes and what's best practice to analyze as that plans being developed talk a little bit towards the end about wine on collaboration fails and why some of those old school project reviews aren't necessarily the best recipe for success and we'll talk about the benefits of doing this the larger benefit so what if you have a good project review so what if you have a good process for it you're excelling at it what are the tangible and intangible benefits of of doing that a little bit before we begin this is a planning methodology pioneered here at Deltek now this is also an age-old planning philosophy that we like to bring up on on each and every one of our calls when we talk about planning in baselining and when we talk about the acumen software which Darrow will be showing us in a little bit s1 that's the base that's the schedule baseline some call the performance measurement baseline that you may already be establishing today using Primavera Microsoft Project open plan or some of the other tools out there one thing you're going to see Darrell do today just a sneak peek you're gonna see him critique that plan that house building plan that he's been working on the critique comes after getting the information down on paper but it's also an iterative iterative part of the process so I'll explain that we're going to touch on risk adjustment today we could have a real beautiful sunny day scheduled for that house build but if it doesn't take risk into account it's not going to prove to be a reliable schedule over and over again which we really wanted to be such a little bit less on optimization today we'll save that for a future webinar but we will be talking a lot about the best by team alignment parentsí keeping everybody on the same page by giving them the right information at the same time so they all know where we are and where where we're heading that's our maturity framework in a nutshell sometimes we spend a little more time on this slide but I just want to set the foundation for what Darrell and I are doing today we're following a process where we'll play it by the seat of the pants sometimes but we're following a process here today as we establish this day fine and get the customer and the supplier to buy in on it move forward with it that's what it's all about now there I'll ask you to chime in in a moment here but I'm gonna share some of my experience on what I call old school project reviews I've been reviewed under some of these practices and I've reviewed others under some of these same practices a lot of times ninety days I was being generous when I said 30 to 90 days after work begins a lot of times it was 90 to 120 days after working in 3 4 months now if you're thinking that's a little bit late to review a plan you and I are thinking the same and with that there would be rules of engagement there would be data that was on limits and data that was off limits for those program reviews really in an attempt to keep it concise or to keep engineering discussions from breaking out I think back on that and I was like that's about the best thing that maybe could happen is we come across something in the plan that we do want to take off the rails a little bit maybe break out into a subgroup and really make sure that everybody's on the same page I've seen that deliberately ignored or deliver deliberately removed from the rules of engagement of a program review I've been on a lot of projects where there's been one project review on a five-year project 90 days after and then we communicate very narrowly through a very thin lines or email after that I've also been an expert in internal hire gun to go to different project reviews and just review the data make sure the schedule and cost tie out and other semantic aspects of the plan that really don't create a litmus test as to whether or not it's a good plan it just needed to pass some mathematical standards that I put in place and similarly I've had plans reviewed for certain aspects that I didn't think were the most important health measures or integrity checks for a plan but I needed to pass those tests in order to get the plan certified so Darryl that's a little bit on what I've done and participated in that maybe in hindsight seems suboptimal have you Darrel kind of underwent some of these same aspects or maybe there's some others as well where you look back and you say wait a minute why were we measuring it this way when it's not really a reliable measure yeah Tom I do see that happen over and over again where it where the review happens too late and and then it's in it's either a train wreck or you're trying to herd cats to trying to put everybody back on a plan that may be drastically different than the plan that you might have started out with the other thing I see when the reviews happen and we may talk about this later or maybe not is that these reviews don't always necessarily have the results plowed back into the into the project itself so in other words they maybe go through this exercise to do the review and in some cases maybe they're just checking the box to say that yeah we did that review we're good to go now and maybe in some cases not plowing that result back into the base plan to actually build you a more realistic robust actual achievable schedule as opposed to maybe a deterministic schedule that's that's got little to no chance of success and everyone on the project recognises it for that cool yeah I hear what you're saying I've heard you know different program managers say to me at the review after the review oh I'm glad that's out of the way you know we can check that by mark finish date in the schedule on project review you know in other words as though it were a drawing that just needed a signature and then was ready to go on to the next part of the process rather than something that should be iterative we should all take to heart and work together on that's really a lot of what we'll be talking about today so now what we're gonna do is is we're gonna put our rolls on for today and there I'll turn it back over to you in a second here to talk about yes that's Daryl everyone in real life and today Daryl is the president and CEO of Daryl Coe who is the supplier of this home that he's developing so Daryl tell us a little bit about your your role at Daryl Coe and and and what you your approach towards project reviews and this one in particular sure well I'm uh I'm a one-man show so I'm responsible for the whole the whole thing and it sits on my shoulder so I take it heavily so this this is a house built in a what would be considered a typical West Houston building area in fact I initially collaborated with actually a custom home builder on this particular schedule hypothetical at the moment and they build custom homes and so we're actually in the process of discussing that conversation around what the schedule needs to include he has a number of sub contractors engaged to do various pieces and components one thing I guess that would come up now in conversation that maybe didn't come up several months ago when I initially built this schedule is that there's a an additional cloudiness if you will around this particular area due to the recent Harvey incident which flooded many homes in the area hundreds of thousands of homes actually in the area so there's an additional sensitivity toward some of those things which is isn't the risk topic that we'll talk about more a little bit later but keep that in the back of your mind if you would as being one of those risky items potentially in in our area particularly the homes that were built potentially in those flood zones that didn't think they would ever flood and had never flooded in the 70 years that the dam had been there so yeah so I'm gonna use want to use up-to-date tools processes I want to be able to do a real-time review of this schedule and I want basically to recycle as Tom was suggesting I want to review this schedule on a regular basis that run it through its paces as we're gonna do today I want to be able to do that on a regular basis I'm not gonna do it one time check the box and turn to look the other way I want to be able to do this review on a regular frequent basis as I get updates from the from the sub I want to be able to review his schedule to understand what changes he's making that could impact changes to the overall plan does that kind of get us where we want to go Tom yeah yeah so let me go ahead and pull up my customer page here this that's me for better or worse that's me on the left-hand side in my deltek shirt and I'm Poland Tech I'm the customer of this of this house and I do want a project plan and actually Darrell's got me Darryl Koh has me pretty excited about this because I am you know what some people consider to be a demanding customer I want status of the project I want to know that the supplier is addressing their plan keeping their playing current and and is addressing risk preemptively and and proactively and frankly that scared suppliers away they've sold that those requirements have been burdensome to them and I don't think of them as burdensome at all I think of you know that's part of running your show is keeping your house in order and understanding where you are and what your risks are and then you know occasionally sharing that with me maybe you know once or twice a day or you know maybe just once a week I just want to know that you've got a plan you're working the plan and when there's problems with the plan you're prepared to communicate and address them now I know that you know that that can be more complicated than it seems and I might need to support Darrell Coe and some things that are outside both of our control like some of the risks you managed but I don't see this and maybe I'm naive customer but I don't see this as an intense requirement for a contractor that really has their their ducks in a row so I expect quality to build into the plan from day one I expect a series of refinements I'll go in as we learn more about the work and the site and the particulars to do in business but I I want to see it run and managed well I'm not going to dictate how that gets done but I want to see that it's there back over to you Darrell for a little more detail on your planning approach I like your motto too sure as I kind of mentioned before hinted to it the schedule is a live document and so depending on your project you may have one scheduler I've been I've done reviews and been on projects where they could be 10 or 12 schedulers in various locations in some cases separated by many time zones and so that schedule is live and so you have a few people's hands in it constantly so it's changing some of those changes maybe planned changes and some of those may be accidental software type changes whether whether or not a keystroke ended up going wrong so what I want to do is I want to be analyzing and optimizing that plan I want to be looking at it picking up those changes and I can do that inside tech acumen looking at forensics I can pick up every change that happens so I want to avoid some of these things and I'll describe those there on that screen so the lags open ends and then maintaining proper logic density one of the arguments or push backs on the lags my schedule is not detailed enough to have true finish to start relationships I need to include lags or another another plan is well I've got more detail in a spreadsheet over here on the side that is represented in the summary level at my schedule okay so let's work through those lags and figure out what they are lag has become a real problem and struggle in the in the actual risk analysis and there is a tool inside inside acumen that allows us to actually convert those lags so we can take some of that problem away from us we also I'm also interested in making sure the right details in a schedule so those things that do need to be detailed out if these long duration activities don't have any detail on them I don't know that I necessarily believe some of those long durations and really what Inbal how did how did you come up with 40 days what makes up that 40 days unrealistic float values that leads me a couple of places either open ends could be consume constraints and and and you could just have some really wild especially if you have external relationships come in and play some of the float values can be crazy in and really I want a smooth flowing basically from the data date to the end of the project and to be able to flow and some some method to not have gaps or spaces where you would expect to have a constant critical path and then I want everybody on the team to participate I've been in situations where you had a key person or to basically build it in a vacuum and immediately what happens is you have a descent from the project team saying well that's not our schedule that was a schedule you that you built and really what you need to do is produce a team effort so there's a team buy-in otherwise you're gonna be fighting a losing battle for the life of the project trying to convince team members that what you've built put into the schedule from a logic in from a duration standpoint is actually something that's achievable and manageable cool all right real brief because I'm dying to get into a Jericho's project review here here's the polling tech review approach we firmly believe that if you have a good plan you're really giving yourself a likelihood to complete that project successfully on time all budget derecho I'm only going to ask you folks one question today when this project review starts I'm just gonna ask it now show me how you plan manage and execute this project the ball is going to be in your court for the first minute you've even asked to have this early I wanted it at 90 days and you said we're going to have this before we snap the baseline so when I turn it over to you for the project review you're not going to hear me asked a lot of questions I might ask you to clarify some things but you're gonna show me that you conduct your orchestra and I'm in the audience so rather than me trying to manage your resources and telling you how to get the job done that's what you're you and your group are an expert at like I say yourself govern identify and mitigate your risks but communicate to me before small problems become larger surprises I like birthday surprises I like surprise parties things like that I don't like project surprises those caused everybody a lot of heartache now you know that and and I know that so that's why you know up front and you have the expectation up front that will communicate sooner than later however the ownership this is a very important one for the customer here no matter how bad the news is no matter how how big you say the small problem could become my promise to you is will be collaborative every step of the way even on those rainy days we're going to be collaborative not punitive otherwise you're going to be very hesitant to bring up small problems in the future because you've felt the punitive pain from past experience and we don't want that we want to solve problems together not not avoid problems or avoid communication due to fear let's let's see we are we agree on a couple things you're man I'm dying to get to this review good planning makes sense at the team effort we've been through these transparency and collaboration this won't be an interrogation as we talked about earlier I don't want ground rules of what's on and off limit if something needs to come up it needs to come up and it's not a pass/fail event in fact it's a long term conversation that we're going to have about the health and then maybe ultimately the wealth of the project so what I'm gonna do Darrell is you should be able to take the screen now we're going to switch over we're going to go into the program review project review mode and Darrell's going to do it live unscripted in the acumen software and show us show us what he's got so far and fight chime in with questions along the way all right let me see if I can do that let me make I let me try we're gonna push it over to you okay I got it I got it all right for those yeah yeah good all right maybe for those that have not seen this before this is actually tell tech acumen this is the home screen or the main screen project screen this is actually the newest version coming out in a couple weeks so if you see something if you are in the tool if you see something that comes across the screen that doesn't look normal it's because there's some other functionality that might have been added more so than the version you currently are using so I would encourage you to get the new version when it comes out it it actually is real cool a couple things in it that hadn't been there before so here's my project I've actually already imported the schedule again for those that don't know I can import a Microsoft Project file a p6 file a Primavera risk file an excel file asked to power project saffron deltek open-plan Phoenix I'm missing something else than though - anyway so I can import a bunch of different things I've imported this actually as a p6 file and the hundred-and-twenty there for those that aren't aware that's actually the activity count so there's a hundred and a hundred and twenty activities of some type whether they be normal activities milestones level of efforts whatever there's 120 of them in this project so I'm gonna jump right over this actually is the Gantt chart view of the schedule and the project screen I don't gonna labor the issue here cuz I'd really like to get into the the actual program itself so I'm gonna jump over to the s2 as Tom mentioned at the beginning is the the different s one through five are listed actually at the top of the screen we're going to jump into the s2 or the Diagnostics this is where all the metrics are inside acumen fuse this is where the horsepower comes in so across the bottom of the screen you see all the different tabs they're actually groupings of metrics those groupings of metrics can be modified or changed to suit a particular client or maybe a particular contractors files so right now you see a blank screen I'm gonna click the fuse button it actually runs through its calculations in this case we're actually looking at schedule quality and these are the metrics that are contained in the schedule quality tab as you see in this particular project I've got 15 activities missing logic I've got 41 critical activities I have one hard constraint with insufficient detail I have a number of lags eleven activities and I have a number of leads as well there's a couple of things on here that are unique I would guess to to acumen and that is a logic density which is the average number of logic links of all the activities that are in the schedule so you would expect the minimum to be two so you would have one predecessor in one successor unless it's open ended at the first activity is last activity but two you would expect across especially a large project somewhere between two and four or five I think is fairly comfortable getting more than that then that means your average again thinking about it in terms of an average across the entire plan something greater than four or five starts to feel maybe a little bit a little bit weird a little bit maybe uncomfortable the other thing here that I wanted to describe was in sufficient detail so this is actually looking at activities of a certain duration in this case 10% of the overall project duration so these three activities that it's picked out have a duration that's ten percent or greater than the overall project duration itself so what it's trying to pick out for you is the number of long duration activities in this case it's 10% if we wanted to change that number we certainly could 10% feels about right this project here is about two years long and so you know that's just what it is lags it also picks up the lags I've got eleven in this project which I'm not proud of but they're there and then merge hotspots that's actually taking the looking at logic in a slightly different way and it's actually looking at the number of predecessors coming into an activity so if the if if they're greater than two or greater assessors coming into an activity it counts those activities for me so I have 10 activities that have 10 or more so that's just kind of a metric or a tool for me to look at to try to understand really kind of more the health of the act of the project itself I can actually go to it yeah they're a customer question here from my team we're looking at that score in the upper right hand corner it says 68% can you tell me a little bit about that you know what does that represent is that the percent of like the awards fee we can give you or is that something different sure the percent of the award fees probably what you should give me 68% of it right up front no not really it's actually a composite score if you will you can actually add or take away from the metrics that are shown in this particular screen whether or not you want those to be included or excluded from that scoring and so for me personally it's it's it's kind of a measurement I don't I don't get stuck on the actual 68% itself but it is sort of a guideline if you will of leading me to understand if it's a really good schedule a really poor schedule now some of the metrics the groupings have been structured so that maybe only one or two of these metrics actually play into the actual scoring and then other metric tabs may include all of those metrics toward that scoring so it just depends on how they might be weighted you can weight them differently and they could that could certainly be customized for the end-user in some cases you could even take that score off because I know in one particular client the score itself kind of scared some of the subs and it didn't they didn't recognize or understand what that really meant so we actually hid that score so they wouldn't actually see it as you see across the bottom of the screen you're actually looking at it in slightly different way so we're looking at the one project but we're actually looking at it in timeline so we're looking at it by quarter down in the bottom and you also see a score down in the bottom so if you are paying attention to the score and as I do I might look at that overall score across the horizontal and then actually drill down and look at the score vertically by time in other words I may find out that things are really good score near the data date and then as time progresses the further and further away you get from the data date which generally has the the the least amount of detail those scoring and start to go down in this case I see one in q4 of 18 which is actually a higher score than the rest of the project but typically what I see is most of the scores actually tend to tin the trail or fade off the further you go away from the data date good question tom the characteristics is another tab I generally go to I'll hit the fuse button so I'm looking now at total activities milestones and then I'm looking at the milestone ratio so I would probably not like to see a one-for-one ratio their milestone to normal activities typically it's you know maybe maybe one in four one in five or maybe even something more than that I did want to be sure because it's one of my sticking points one of my hot button issues and that is the lags so lags is one of my my pet peeves if you will and so this actually is counting the number of activities that have lag so I have 12 activities that have lack so I'm not real proud of that some of that has to do with the amount of detail that's in the schedule and some of that's just in in some cases it's just laziness on someone's part I do have some leads to where actually or- lags so I wanted to start work maybe before something was completely finished this also gives me an idea of how what that minimum lag or that negative lag is so I have one in there that's minus ten days and then the maximum lag fortunately is only 15 days so the I'm not while the lags are concerning to me the fact that the the longest one of them is only 15 days makes me feel a little better about it overall if that were a hundred and fifty days for that lag then I might feel a little a lot more concerned about that particular leg so I'll briefly jump over into the logic tab just for purposes of showing what the breakdown is I could certainly get the same information from the Diagnostics tab if I were to looking at the logic this gives me a different breakdown of the actual activities that would so in this case I'm looking at the lags these are the activities that contain those lags if I were looking finished to start this actually gives me the finish to start activities and actually gives me a count as well as a percentage of those activities in in regards to the total I can also find any redundant open ends open starts open finishes as well and then if I wanted to I could do a logic trace say back from the from the last activity or startup activity project completion activity in logic trace backwards to actually find that path that the activities tie together to get me to that final milestone maybe be on track yeah yeah keep going I love that you're checking these things I like that you initiated this review and you're not pretending to show me a perfect plan at this point if you did I'd be skeptical because we're in such an early phase I'd be surprised that you had everything filled in and perfect at this point in time you're showing me a score of 68 and it was yellow that has a certain implication but if you showed me a hundred percent I'd be far more concerns that you showing me that this is a work in progress what you're doing is you're making me more confident that I've selected the right company because you're willing to look inward and even be critical you mentioned on the legs you said something along the lines that I wish I hadn't done this or I wish I didn't didn't have these you're building credibility in my eyes because you're showing me that you're not necessarily a hundred percent content with what you have so far you're doing what a lot of contractors would normally expect me to come in and do I just don't have time to do that for everybody I need to make sure that everyone's running on their own so keep rolling with it I love that you're showing me the pros and cons of your plan so far sure and then the the Diagnostics tab I didn't show it but I'm actually looking at it in terms of just the actual project itself I could certainly drill down and actually look at it by by particular subcontractors so what I may tend to see and I typically do is you start start to see certain patterns by certain contractors doing certain things certain ways I may have a schedule that's coming from a sub that actually uses Microsoft Project then I might see certain things characteristics in that Microsoft Project file that I might not see if somebody were sharing a p6 file in other words one of the things that capture is those activities that are in the past that to the left of the data date that might not have actuals and then I also could have activities that are actually to the right side of the data date or in the future that may actually do have actuals and if if that contractor that sub is not paying attention to that sort of thing he could pass that off to me and then I'm gonna find it here so I'm gonna be able to capture those events in the lags could very well be some of that handoff if you will between subs and there's just no good way or there will become a better way to maybe model that in the schedule I'm thinking a little bit into the future but I did want to show you in back in the project screen I mentioned my pet peeve on the lags so there actually is a tool you inside acumen called cleanse and so I can actually take in the cleanse function and actually convert these lags so I in you might have remembered that we looked at when we looked at the Diagnostics a minute ago there were actually twelve lags but when I go back to the project screen and look at the cleanse there's actually 13 the reason for that is and I've had had this very issue related to me and been dealing with it on with with a client right now this is actually counting the actual physical lags themselves whereas the other metric that I was showing you before was actually counting the activities with lag telling me that there are is at least one activity that has two lags connected to it which is I guess it's obvious once you think through that but anyway I just wanted to point out if somebody recognized that there was a difference in the number count that would be the reason why so I'm gonna convert these lags I have the ability to actually convert them which will actually convert them to a task physically in the schedule it'll describe that task for a activity name it will say lag task and then the activity ID it will describe what relationship type it was finished to finish and then we'll also in that activity ID have the predecessor and successor IDs in that one number so you could physically see where it came from where it's going what type it was and it actually puts it in the WBS element of the predecessor so i'm gonna convert these lags that fast and I just did and so now you can see if 120 to 120 activities has now become 133 activities now for grins and I typically do this is I will go over to forensics right quick and then I can actually see the differences between the two projects and as you might expect the 313 activities that were in the original plan are now in the scenario which is the copied file with the lags removed or converted to tasks and then you see the descriptions there there's the actual lag task and then as I described earlier verbally now you can physically see that there is finished to start and there's the predecessor ID and there's a successor ID so you get a glance real quickly of where your lags were and the durations of those lags and now that they're part of your new scenario schedule all right so that's that's going through real quickly we went through the project's tab we went through the Diagnostics tab I jumped briefly into the logic tab now we've gone into the forensics tab now Tom you want to discuss briefly in the next ten minutes or so the the risk tab itself yeah I'm going to talk a little bit about risk in a moment I do have a question for you though and I love what I'm seeing but I'm a little bit skeptical this seems all a little bit too good to be true one you initiated the review before that I wanted it before I wanted it you're showing me all these different checks very invasive stuff you actually had acumen make changes to your schedule to get rid of some of those legs that you yourself said you didn't like and now no you went ahead and you're in the process of taking care of them how much of what you showed me is what you're actually going to do every week just be honest with me how much is is what you're actually gonna do every week and how much was just to kind of strut your stuff for this project for you I'm gonna do it every week what you saw is what I'm gonna do every week and I let me take taking my my my hat off of Daryl Coe right quick I have clients right now that have 20 30 40 50 thousand activity schedules and I do this for them every month gotcha gotcha gotcha I take my hat off what a minute I knew it but I wanted to hear you say it yeah whatever but what I didn't show on all of those tabs is a publish button the publish button allows me to actually produce in the projects and diagnostics tab I can produce an executive report which I actually provide to my client on a monthly basis as well and then on the forensic side I'm actually able to produce a a either a current report or the current analysis the current report creates an Excel spreadsheet and creates a separate tab for each one of these checks that have found the published current analysis will do a Excel spreadsheet of just what you see on the screen here once it's in Excel you can do all sorts of formulas to add and subtract and do all kinds of cool things to your heart's content I've had to do a few of them myself dealing with specifically with relationships and the changes in the relationships and you can actually see the the lag the lag duration itself is can is included in the parenthesis there and so I'm able to actually produce this document really quickly that fast and now I've got a spreadsheet that I can then send to my subcontractor and say here's the problems that I found you need to address these problems and then he could address those problems or he choose not to he may tell me he did and then I can run this report next time he gives me a file and I can again put another column in there for his latest update and see which items he actually fixed versus the ones he didn't gotcha so it's not just here looking at this you're sharing this with people who maybe don't even have acumen some of your subcontractors so that they can address some of the things that you're seeing that's right okay cool I am going to I'm going to put my screen back up for just a couple minutes because we've got acumen over here on the customer side as well and what we want to do we know you've got acumen risk and we know that it's very flexible on we want to show you what our expectation is from how you'll be managing risk and how you'll be communicating of the risks by the way for those out milk and the wider audience this would also be a good opportunity if you've had any questions along the way or you have any questions you'd like us to try to address at the end time permitting use that go to webinar control panel questions box and dan dan beck is going to be reviewing the questions and he might throw a few our way at the very end so I just wanted to put in a plug for that let me pull up acumen on my side here and and I pulled up one screen in particular and Daryl just to make sure are you seeing that okay or you see in my ribbon tornado chart I see okay um I'm glad you're seeing it because although I don't impose too many requirements on how to manage and what information I want you looking at that's up to you I don't expect you as risks occur to use this exact chart out of the acumen software so for the broader engineering audience in our project review today let me talk a little bit about this and what it is and why I expect to see this I expect to see a ranking of your top risk risk now the software makes this easy to do once you put in the risk register address probability and impact of the risks and most importantly once you've mapped these risks over to the schedule that's on the left hand side as you know Darryl Coe what acumen is going to do is it's going to run the risk simulation and give you back a list of the risks that jump out as literally the longest bars on the chart or the long poles on the test those are the ones that are going to make us all late if we all don't do something about them I've got reserves I've got ways that I can help I've even got resources if needed that can help with certain risks we can't help with all the risks we just don't have enough time money or resources but if there ones that will make us late if left unchecked we're all interested in doing our part to make sure those risks are mitigated to the extent that they can be so what I'll want from you and I want this live in the software because when you show this to me I don't want it on a PowerPoint slide because I'm going to want you to hover the mouse in acumen overtop of the different bars so that when it says risk for t2 is infecting site clearance for 43 days when you hover the mouse then I know it's site clearance if it's just a PowerPoint slide I need to look down at the legend and I don't have time for that I just wanted to pop up in real time because I might I might be able to help out or if you need additional funding we can talk about it right then and there and then go on to the next one I won't bother you about these last two that's about a week or two a total risk but in this example that I'm using here we'd have to basically stay on the line until we figured out how we could eradicate the 43 day and the likely 27 day delay from the second risk so are you on board with that or do you think you'll have the time energy and motivation to produce this information on a weekly or monthly basis I'll do it no problem that's what I thought you might say it seems like you're really good with the software from what you showed me on the diagnostic side and as I think I pointed out we're here in the same software so you were over here I've got one of my old projects over here up here but you were here on the diagnostic screen earlier and frankly I don't think it's going to break the budget for you to click on s3 risk put in the appropriate risk factors that the system needs to do its thing and then produce the kind of chart I mean you'll be moving these sliders around you'll be mapping the risks into the different areas of the WBS and then you're just about a minute away from having the information here so I didn't think this was going to be a real big stressor for you but I did want to emphasize my companies allopathy that risk isn't a four-letter word you would be looking at it at the same time as your updating schedule as the same time as your improving and optimizing that schedule you would update the risk factors you would look at the reports and that I'm all asking all I'm asking for is that we briefed this collaboratively because we both own the risks because we both own the execution of the project they're not my wrists or your wrists there are risks so we'll just look at them together we'll look at them transparently and we'll see what we can do about it yes now Tom I will say to the the if you go back to that screen just real quick so the the duration uncertainty as the project progresses I will review the remaining activities for duration uncertainty and I might modify that uncertainty based on what is actually happening in the field and so if I have a particular issue with one of my construction subs and the durations that are in those activities I may find out that they're blowing it every one of those activities that they're doing is taking longer than they told me it was going to take I may make adjustments to that subs uncertainty range such that I try to capture what's really going on in the field and so what I try to do is is true-- up what's going on I don't necessarily want to go back in and make changes to the to my actual plan but from a risk standpoint I may make modifications to the ranging of those activities to try to capture some of that but performance may be its performance it may actually be something other unrelated it could be something that's weather-related they may have we may have had multiple inches of rain when we plan we would have for half an inch of rain while they're doing site clearance and find out that everything we have out there is stuck in the mud and we have to wait till it dries out before we can get it out so those type things the risk register itself is something also that's reviewed on a regular basis there could be risk that have actually fallen off the table that I thought were going to be big big problems and then I want to eliminate that from being considered if it's gone if it's in the past it's gone no reason to keep keeping in there could also be additional risk come into play that we had been considered when we built this risk register from the get-go as well so I want to try to capture those things both as they leave my as they leave in the past of my schedule as well as things that may be in the future if the project slides longer than we anticipated we may actually get into a different weather season then we then we anticipated we will be finished by in which case maybe or my maybe my productivity rates actually decrease maybe and I'm thinking of if I get in toward the end of the year when I get closer to the holidays or cold colder climate weather and I've not sealed up yet with that house if a guys are still working outside and it's you know it's in the 30s they're not gonna be very productive until they get that house closed in and get heat in there so I'm gonna expect a lower productivity rate which may be either a risk event itself or it could be actually modeled into the uncertainty ranges depends on how how big an issue it might be gotcha good well it sounds like you're being proactive and very pre-emptive about addressing risk not shying away from it but really thinking of it as part of the plan because that's how we view it your your wrists and your forecast are are the same thing one should be baked into the other so that you truly understand where you're going to end up let's just bring it home from a power point perspective here and then Dan I'll calling you to see if any questions have come in our final agenda item was was winning you know what you've done to me Darrell today is you demonstrated a stellar planning process this is a real leading indicator to me a success on the project maybe I haven't worked with you before and maybe you'll under the liver in construction I don't know but are you really demonstrated ability and ability to plan and forecast in a very thorough and comprehensive fashion looks like they're really going to deliver out your promises those who do those who plan and then execute Darryl you know well as as I do when you become equal parts contractor and trusted advisor as as we say here depending on the industry some industries regulated ones are bound a competitive bidding process but what have you seen Darryl in terms of loyalty to companies to contractors who can deliver plan well and then deliver on those plans over and over again chance to me like they'd be more likely to win work in the future both those same customers what have you seen definitely yeah yeah and in in some cases particularly in some of the government contracting they require some of these tools as part of their contracting language so in some cases you don't have you don't have any other choice right you have to provide some some way of management or oversight to these projects yeah yeah you know the the old expression we use is you know thou shalt manage well and then you've got to demonstrate how both on the government contracting side which is my background and really every customers expectation let's see Dan back any questions come in on the Q&A line while Darryl was running his brilliant project review yeah there were there were a few that were submitted and I'll go through those and I'll let you guys kind of fight over who must answer them the first question that was submitted in acumen 4ms project schedules how do you see if actual dates are after the day-to-day or activities prior to the day to date without actuals I'll answer that one real quick we've got a metric called wrong status and it will pull those right out we know that the consequence of how Microsoft Project does calculations and we have a check right for that all right there was another question that came in is what's this came in when Darryl was on what scoring method are you hmm from Russia at the activity-based or the or the metric based did a foot if you didn't change it you're on the activity-based because that's the default that tends to be a little bit more punitive versus the metric based scoring method which gives you partial credit justjust for the wider audience that score if you remember Darrell's was 68 percent that's Kim there's configurable parameters behind that we set it up nice as the default in the software and by nice I don't mean generous I mean we set it up robustly where it's it's very non accepting of problems in the schedule but what that means is when you have a 68% score like Darryl did on this work in progress it means that's a really good accomplishment Darryl I suspect yours was set for activity-based yeah I don't I don't remember actually even looking in and to be honest that Delta kak the the options now the screen and the in the newest version has completely changed it looks lovely different yeah different yeah yeah gotcha rapid fire damn will be about two minutes any other questions you want to lift up right now we got a code we got two more the next one is risk events tied to specific activities in acumen are they independent or they do or do they have the ability to do either or all of the above you can have independent risk events you can tie them to activity and let me add a third wrinkle you can tie them to broader level breakdown structures like WBS or you could assign a risk carp Lodge to all activities that fall under a certain code like location engineering discipline and any other of those code fields that you're using in the software as well they can be higher-level like what a weather risk that affects the whole project or it could be a very granular risk that would just affect a single ten day and everywhere in between so let me let me throw in the the concept and actually I didn't read through the questions damn but I could imagine someone maybe asking about the risk register itself and where it starts or initiates you can actually build or start that in acumen you do have the ability to import an excel file the challenge that I have found in that is the formatting has to be pretty spot-on and it doesn't take much effort but it does it does need to be in a in a format that the acumen tool will actually represent picks up on so that's the only caveat I would say on the the the risk register itself but it does once it comes in it's great typically what I do is I may export out just a format and actually populate my my risk register out and in Excel and then re-import it back into into acumen and then it does stay I didn't mention this at all but I can save workbooks and so I could have multiple updates I have one client that I have a weekly update back to February in all of those updates are contained in more than one workbook and then I can bounce or look at from a forensic standpoint say one of each of the months month ends and compare them and show you exactly in a report format what's changed basically at the end of each one of those months yeah there's two questions that came in that were pretty similar one was where does the risk register come from is it from the schedule submitted and summarized in acumen or developed in acumen and the second part of that was does acumen risk model pull in use or work with the risk register information from p6 we we don't do a direct risk register from p6 it would either need to be developed in acumen or it would be it need to be pushed through Excel from p6 to Excel than in document that's all the questions that were submitted all right well thanks everybody thanks thanks Terrell I know we're at the end here Dan I'm going to turn it to you to wrap up and talk about some of these upcoming events and then the newsletter as well so back over to you Dan back sure no problem for anybody that's going to be in the Houston woodlands area this coming weekend is the second annual Region five AAC symposium it's going to be about a day and a half of insight presentations meet and greet I actually Darrell will be there presenting Tom unfortunately won't be but we will have representatives from dull tech there and then coming up in a couple months in February the 56 57th annual Western winter workshop in Wells California I've actually been there last couple years it's a great place to meet a lot of people some really really good presentations probably about three to four hundred people but that's that's what we have coming up and times you want to go the next slide if you want to stay in tune with anything up to date with latest news and webinars software releases you can go to our website and sign up for the loop we put one newsletter out every month with everything to try and keep everybody up to date on what's going on in the project controls world but I'd like to take a moment just to thank everybody for attending today Darryl Tom thank you for the presentation I thought it was very informative myself and you know if he stay in touch and we will be putting out probably a couple more presentations in the future on doll talk

Channel: DRMcNattyAssociates

Views: 84

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Keywords: Deltek, Deltek Acumen, Risk, Resources, Project scope

Id: HxyjwlL5CAw

Length: 61min 51sec (3711 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 03 2017