Several hidden indicators can distort the reliability and accuracy of what your schedule is telling you once construction starts. If these mishaps are not caught during your schedule update reviews, the results can lead to data integrity issues and schedules with erroneous critical paths.
What do we mean by data integrity as it relates to scheduling? Well, data integrity means maintaining the accuracy, consistency, and reliability of project data throughout its lifecycle. It involves ensuring that all schedule-related information is accurate, up-to-date, and consistently entered and managed within your project management system.
Why is data integrity critical to project success?
- Accurate forecasting
- Reliable reporting
- Stakeholder confidence
Reliable data enables all of these things to happen. It allows for the right resources to be available at the right time. It helps manage expectations and plan for the future of your project. With accurate data, progress can be tracked reliably, clearly showing where your project stands at any given time, especially during your schedule update reviews.
Schedule Update Reviews Need More Than Just the DCMA
From an industry standpoint, schedule quality has defaulted to using the DCMA methodology as the standard in many ways. Furthermore, schedule quality is typically viewed as more of a static analysis, focusing on the planning side of the schedule and looking at things like missing logic, high durations, and too many constraints.
However, when a schedule is updated, and there are discrepancies in actual progress updating and not the planned side of the schedule, the story of the past is changed. This blog will explore the 8 commonly hidden errors that can distort the accuracy of your schedule if not caught during your schedule update review.
1. Backdated Activities
Backdated activities are when the initial start date for an activity falls before the previous schedule’s data date. For example, in schedule number one, there is a planned activity in the future. Then, in schedule number two, that same activity gets actual start and actual finish progress before schedule number one.
This practice can distort the project’s timeline, affect data integrity, and lead to misleading conclusions about the project’s progress and performance.
Core Risk: Misrepresentation of Project Progress
Backdating actual dates creates a false impression of project status, leading to misinformed decisions. This typically results in inaccurate progress reports, complicating the identification of real issues. Furthermore, delays may not be accurately reflected, preventing timely mitigation strategies.
- Inaccurate Progress Reporting: If actual dates in progress reports don’t align with previous curves, the previous progress and performance analyses are rendered invalid.
- Misaligned Payment Applications: If you are marking activities as completed and in need of reimbursement and payment, but there is an inaccurate status update, you now risk having unexpected costs later on.
- Out of Sequence Work: Certain schedule specifications restrict out-of-sequence work. Not having those actual start and finish dates where they should have been in previous schedules can cause out-of-sequence work to pop up.
2. Changed Actual Dates
Changed actual dates refer to modifying the start or finish dates of activities that have already been recorded as having started or completed.
For example, a scheduler may mark something as having actually started on July 30th. But, in an update down the road, the July 30th date gets changed to July 25th. Doing so changes the reporting on when an activity actually started or actually finished. As a result, unseen delays can happen.
Let’s say you are doing a forensic analysis, studying the historical-critical path. Not having the correct date in place at the time changes the result of any analysis you are trying to do. You also might have to pay for a couple of extra billable hours to try and figure out which date was actually correct. This also leads to manipulation risk: not being able to change the story back in time to fit a narrative that’s developing on the project.
Core Risk: Unseen Delays and Manipulation Risk
Changed actual dates can result in unseen delays and manipulation risks because they hide the true project progress. This makes it difficult to identify true delays and opens the door to intentionally misrepresenting the project’s status.
Changing actual dates can also alter your resource allocation models, or efficiency models, if you will, by changing the understanding of what it takes to get an activity finished. So, if you are pull planning or readjusting durations based on actual progress, it becomes more difficult to make your schedule more reflective of how the work is going.
Pick a simple electrical roughing activity. If you planned for each floor of a building to take seven days, but it’s actually taking five days, you should reflect the actual progress for the remaining electrical activities. However, if you are changing durations in the past, it just adds a layer of complexity when studying the historical dates because you don’t know if what you’re looking at is correct from update to update.
3. Decreased Percent Completes
Decreased Percent Completes refer to instances where the reported progress percentage of an activity is reduced after being initially recorded. Changes to an activity’s percent complete often indicate the schedule is not being properly maintained, thereby bringing the reliability of progress data into question.
For example, if you have an activity marked 50% complete in schedule one and then 30% complete in schedule two, it raises many questions. Was the 50% complete in the first schedule accurate? Is the 30% complete accurate?
Now, you typically don’t see percentages go down on activities because, unless you’re taking things out of the project, you don’t expect that to go down. In P6, what ends up happening to duration-based activities is they create fragments or time-impact activities because the duration is going to extend back out, alter your float values, and possibly jump onto the critical path.
During your schedule update review, be sure you are double-checking that the remaining duration is properly reflected in the schedule because it is effectively no different from adding delay or impact activities to the plan.
Core Risk: Unseen Delays and Misrepresented Progress
However, if you misreported a percent complete in an earlier schedule and it was not as complete as you originally thought, ask yourself if you should give it more duration because it won’t happen automatically.
And, at a higher level, decreasing a percent complete is just a flag for delay. It’s a delay that you might not have known was happening during the previous schedule update review. Or, it’s a delay for some cause that has happened in your new update, where maybe additional scope was added.
4. Remaining Duration Increases
Remaining duration increases refer to the extension of the expected time required to complete an activity that is already in progress. Changing remaining durations should be thought of as similar to decreased percent completes because they go hand in hand. If you are increasing the remaining duration on one activity, it is decreasing the percent complete – extending your timeline and effectively creating an impact or fragnet.
This can occur for various reasons, such as unforeseen issues, resource shortages, or scope changes. When this happens, you need to understand how these risks are being reflected in your reporting. How can you rely on your remaining duration estimates? Was there a reason behind doing it?
Risks of Changing Percent Completes in Schedule Updates
Whether you find activities have increases or decreases in their percent completes, the core risks of this practice are similar and can be broken down into three main categories.
- First, changing percent completes creates doubt in progress reports. Frequent changes in percent completes can signal inconsistent reporting, leading to mistrust in the accuracy of progress updates.
- Second, duration-based activities act as a “fragnet” or “impact activity.” Changes can disrupt the flow of the schedule, creating mini-networks (fragnets) that impact the overall timeline.
- Third, if the remaining duration isn’t updated correctly to reflect lesser progress, it can indicate the previous period’s remaining duration was inaccurate, causing future scheduling issues.
5. Activities Riding the Data Date
Activities that are riding the data date are those activities that can start based on their current logic but are being pushed out due to the data date, this can be indicative of missing or erroneous logic. If the activity has not started because of another activity later in the schedule, then the appropriate relationship should be added to represent this dependency.
Best Practices
- Build Adequate Float: Ensure there is sufficient float in the schedule so activities aren’t planned to start exactly on the data date. Allow some margin to manage unexpected challenges and delays.
- Realistic Scheduling: Create detailed and realistic schedules with well-defined start and finish dates based on accurate data. Use historical data to inform realistic activity durations and start/finish dates.
- Data Integrity Protocols: Maintain a consistent schedule update review process, ensuring the data date is moved regularly and logically, and all activity progress is accurately captured.
- Scenario Planning: Conduct what-if scenarios to understand the impact of different scheduling decisions and adjustments.
Core Risk: Float Erosion and Hidden Compression
As an activity rides and pushes the data date, its float number, if everything remains equal, collapses. That is a compression risk. That’s where we start to see things stack, compile on top of each other, and create compression where you may be stretched thin on resources.
This is a hidden version of compression because when we think about compression, we usually do it on purpose, overtly changing the schedule to cause compression, acceleration, delay mitigation, or whatever you want to call it.
In this case, when activities ride the data date, they are unintentionally compressing the schedule because things are naturally stacking as long as that end date is in the way. Picking up on activities riding the data date is an early indicator that compression is happening – you need to review the logic and make sure there is no predecessor work holding the activity up. This also gives you the opportunity to study the sequencing in the schedule and correct any necessary logic.
6. Future Actual Dates
Future actual dates occur when actual start or finish dates of activities are recorded to be in the future, beyond the current data date. This practice tends to be based on approximations instead of what has actually happened, resulting in a non-responsive plan. This includes completed activities.
Sometimes, planners and schedulers will put actual starts and actual finishes into the plan side of the schedule. Theoretically, these activities have not even happened yet at the time of reporting, but they are being marked as actually started and actually finished.
So why does that happen? For example, let’s say you did your site walk on January 1st but didn’t update the schedule until January 5th. Since there were a few days in between these two things, you assume that an activity was completed during this time and mark it as such. What ends up happening is, that all information in the update included in reports is inaccurate.
More importantly, changing future actual dates ignores the methodology behind CPM. By setting future dates, you create constraints in the schedule, force activities to appear in certain spots and wash away the best parts of CPM. CPM does the math for you, letting you know how and when work should be executed rather than you telling it when the work should be executed.
7. Started with 0% Complete
“Started with 0% Complete” refers to activities marked as started but showing 0% progress. Logically, this is inconsistent—how can an activity start without any progress?
This can occur for two main reasons:
- Lack of Progress Information: Progress data is unavailable, so it defaults to zero.
- Circumventing Sequence Checks: An actual start date might be added without real progress to avoid sequence reporting issues. For example, starting an activity with lag may lead to entering an actual start date to bypass out-of-sequence reporting.
Unseen delays can also arise because remaining durations can be manipulated when the percent complete remains at zero, leaving no red flag to signal the issue during your schedule update reviews.
8. Low Float Activities
Low float activities are activities in a CPM schedule with minimal slack time, making the project schedule overly rigid and inflexible. Oftentimes, every schedule quality check investigates high float, i.e., how many activities have a float of over 60 days.
It might sound crazy to say that you can have too much float, but you can kind of flip that on its head and study the percentage of the remaining schedule that has low float – i.e., how many activities on your schedule have a float of less than 10 days?
Examining low float during your schedule update reviews is important because the higher the percentage of low float activities, the more volatile my critical path will be. This increases the likelihood of the critical path changing in the next schedule update, disrupting your planned sequence. Additionally, a high number of low-float activities can lead to critical path delays. The more activities hovering around the critical path, the more things that could go wrong that could cause the end-date to kick out.
Finally, too many low-float activities create resource constraints. High-profile, high-risk tasks require urgent attention, whether it’s completing the work, responding to RFIs, or handling design changes. This urgency can strain resources and impact overall project efficiency.
How to Catch Hidden Risks During Schedule Update Reviews
The best thing you can do to avoid these risks from appearing is to have a quicker update cycle. That way, they can be caught easier during your schedule update reviews. While most schedules are contractually updated once a month, shortening this down to two weeks, even if it is not officially published, is so important. Create interim updates. That way, you will have far fewer activities to status—and by having less time between updates, you are more accurate with them because they are fresher in your memories.
Additionally, empower your schedulers to create accurate updates by providing necessary training and establishing robust scheduling processes and procedures. Understanding the potential impacts of errors is crucial to prevent them from going unnoticed. Implementing internal checks and balances, along with utilizing tools that support these checks, offers significant benefits.
Maintaining Data Integrity with SmartPM
While most people check schedule quality by looking at the single schedule being updated, true analysis isn’t complete until the next schedule shows up. At the end of the day, schedule update reviews create a snapshot of your project at any given moment so that you can continue to manage efficiently and get the job done. Ultimately, what is best for any organization is finding a sweet spot that maximizes time savings and minimizes risk.
“We also use SmartPM to ensure schedules are updated correctly – we have a mandatory requirement of twice monthly. If I see a huge variance from one update to the next, I will check in with the project director to see what’s going on there. At my level, it really helps track everything in one spot.”
– Kerry Lorts, Director of Operations at S.M. Wilson“
With SmartPM’s customizable approach to schedule quality, you can decide the metrics you want your schedules to be graded on, ensuring these metrics, and all the others relevant to your business, are accounted for throughout your project’s lifecycle. If you’d like to start your journey towards achieving data integrity on your projects, request a demo, and we’d be happy to show you how we can help you accomplish just that.
