Work Front Monitoring and Control

A normal practise in monitoring engineering progress is by assigning a weight that derived from manhours, to each task or deliverable. As the task is performed/ the deliverable is issued, the corresponding manhours are earned.

The earned progress divided by the total number of manhours gives the % progress.

Typically on a weekly or monthly basis, the actual progress of each activity is measured against the planned progress. An actual progress less than the planned progress might show a lack of resources and a need for increased mobilization to get back on plan, following a (re-)forecast progress curve.

Although such progress measurement is commonly in practise, it could be deceiving. It shows rather well the progress of engineering on its own but not how well in term of engineering supporting the Project schedule.

 For instance let's consider that engineering must issue 2 material requisitions for Piping , an urgent one for a Long Lead Item and another one which is required later on. Engineering will earn progress whatever requisition it issues, even at the extend of having the Project in delay by issuing the non urgent requisition first.

The point is that the above measurement focusing on alone is insufficient. It must be complemented by monitoring that important Milestones are met.

 These Milestones are first of all, the ones associated with the issue of the Requisition for the equipment. Long lead items have naturally to be purchased early.

All equipment and packages also need to be purchased as early as their technical definition allows. Indeed, engineering development is highly dependent on information from vendors. The sooner the purchase orders are placed the sooner the vendor information will be available. And that gonna helps in supporting construction whole lot better.

Next come the Milestones associated with Bulk Material Procurement to support construction, such as the Piping MTO and the Structural Steel MTO (for an off-shore Project).

 Then come the Milestones associated with Construction. These are the IFC (Issue for Construction) or AFC (Approved for Construction), a pre-requisite to start any site work, and the IFC or AFC of P&IDs, will set the precedence to the issue of Piping isometrics.

The 50% IFC Piping isometric milestone comes next, which typically falls half way through the Project, as ensuing works, such as pre-fab and erection have a rather incompressible duration, due to site constraints (capacity of pre-fab shop, space constraints for erection limiting the progress).

 Even if engineering deliveries are in sequence, the above engineering progress measure might still be deceiving, as it will only reflect the amount of engineering work completed and not the workfront made available to construction.

 Let’s consider for instance that two foundations are to be cast. The first one is a very large foundation and the second one a small one. Issuing the drawing of either the large or small foundation will earn engineering the same progress, although it will open quite a different workfront to Construction.

One sees the necessity to measure the issued Workfront.

In the case of foundations, for instance, this will be done by monitoring the cumulative quantity of concrete (m3) of all issued IFC foundation drawings.

Producing an S curve, such as the one shown in next slide, showing both planned and actually issued quantities will give a true picture of how well engineering is supporting civil works.

One will similarly monitor, for an On-Shore project, the cumulative quantity of steel (tons) of issued IFC Structural drawings.

The cumulative tons (or dia inch) of IFC or AFC issued Piping isometrics will show the available piping workfront.

Such progress curves, showing the actual versus planned available workfronts are instrumental to monitor engineering progress, identify shortage and take corrective actions (increase mobilisation).

It is not perfect however and can still be deceiving, in case of out-of-sequence issues: engineering may have issued drawings representing significant quantities, but that does not generate construction workfront as such works can not be performed at this time (due to lack of access or pre-requisite for another work to be completed before, for instance).

Progress Calculation for Engineering - Piping

Recently I prepared Engineering Progress Tracking Excel Sheet for an oil and gas company located in Singapore. In that training I guided the team into 2 phases. The 1st phase the teams are required to track their Engineering progress without Primavera P6.

 

The second phases is where they translate the excel sheet tracking into Primavera P6 by using 2 different methods.

 

1) By using "Step" function for Level 4 (Engineering progress for each document)

2) By using Activity method for level (Engineering progress for each document)

 

Let’s find out how a piping drawing progress is calculated. Suppose a tie-in drawing design has been completed 33% of “Approved For Construction” work step. See the details calculation and below figure for easy understanding.

 

Progress for Tie-In plan drawing at the cut-off =

Weight factor for “Study and Design Approval” work step (0.05) x progress for “Study and Design preparation” work step (100%) +

Weight factor for “IFR” (0.15) x progress for “IFR” work step (100%) +

Weight factor for “IFA” (0.20) x progress for “IFC” work step (100%) +

Weight factor for “IFC” (0.25) x progress for “IFR” work step (100%) +

Weight factor for “AFC” (0.35) x progress for “IFR” work step (33%) +

= 76.6%

 

Physical Progress of pump data sheet document = 0.05484 x 76.6% = 4.2%,

 

 

 Progress Calculation for Overall Engineering

Then, Overall Engineering phase/stage progress = the sum of the product of weight factor for each discipline and physical progress for each discipline,
= 0.1897 x 37.8% + 0.1040 x 50% + 0.1897 x 20% + 0.1110 x 30% + 0.1214 x 25% + 0.1387 x 15% + 0.1456 x 13% = 27%

To those who are interested, you can email me at jeshkhan81@gmail.com for the Engineering Progress Tracking Sheet in excel.

I will cover the topic on how to track the Engineering progress in my next post.



Delay analysis flow.

Below is the flow on how to handle the event of activity delay. A structured flow of works is essential for the team to be steered into the right direction.

Just an idea for monitoring and control.

XER Schedule Toolkit

We are in a big time mess as out-of-sudden the big guy want to see the schedule in excel sheet rather than Primavera. Up to now I have no idea why but all I know I need to get it done by end of the day. This is when I came across XER Schedule Toolkit that helped me in great deal. So what is XER Schedule Toolkit anyway.The XER Toolkit is a multi-functional MS Excel Add-in that can read, display, analyse and output Primavera scheduling data within the familiar Excel environment.

The XER Schedule Toolkit is a powerful application devised by Project Control professionals that allows you to connect to your Oracle Primavera P6 database or open Primavera files within Microsoft Excel. The toolkit provides advanced display and analysis tools of Primavera schedules, which operate entirely within Excel. All features are designed to promote schedule visibility, awareness and ultimately help drive and improve the quality of project schedules.

Below are some of the snapshot of what it can help.

1. I can just convert the whole schedule into excel in a click. The best part is that the whole Gantt Chart is well plotted for you.

2. This is another stuff that I like about this software, the Heat Map. As the name goes, it provide visual cues on how healthy is the developed schedule.

3. As PMI recommendations, for an activity to be manageable the duration of an activity is highly recommended not to exceed 5 days. Here I'm able to sort the activity by longest duration. No doubt I can do this with Primavera P6 but this software just provide another idea for presenting.

4. Here comes the total dashboard report on how well our developed schedule. A picture worth a thousand word isn't it. Well my boss definitely gonna like this idea.

5. Here you can filter out the longest lead for an activity.

There are more about this software that I wanted to share but there are just too much good things about it.

For more detail you can check out the website.
http://www.xertoolkit.co.uk/

http://www.xertoolkit.co.uk/datasheet/

How to compress a schedule

You are scheduling a project using Primavera P6 and find, after updating, that the project is going to be late. Instead of rushing to management with the bad news, let’s first look at a few scenarios that would allow the project to be put back on schedule. In Primavera P6, we always have the option of producing “what if” scenarios that allows us to use approaches to shortening the project. Be aware that you should export and save the project plan before making any major changes.

• 1.Use relationships to overlap activities.
• • This method is probably the easiest method but requires the use of more resources to accomplish activities that are now happening simultaneously. More resources means more dollars spent.
  • 
    
  • On a positive note, there is a possibility that some of the simultaneous activities have economies of scale, meaning one resource can perform multiple functions at once such as a backhoe both excavating a pond and simultaneously filling a trench with the spoils. Management may have not taken into account these synergies within all activities when the schedule was first developed.
• 2.Add resources to reduce durations.
  • Adding resources may be infeasible due to the fact that the resources are not available and, as in the previous example, adds to the overall cost of the project.
  • 
    
  • On the plus side, some under-allocated resources from your project or other projects within the company may be utilized which helps your organization’s overall economic health.
• 3.Break down long activities.
  • Breaking down long activities may enable you to overlap new activities that resulted from their parent activity. Again, referring to our first point, more resources are required which means more of the budget spent.
  • 
    
  • As an advantage, shorter activities do give a more detailed picture of the project. Management has the benefit of being able to better analyze the activities and possibly “trim the fat”.
• 4.Changing calendar assignments by either putting critical activities on a longer workweek or adding exceptions to non-work time.
• By changing calendar assignments, you are now working on days that were originally non-working days, therefore adding more resources to the project.
• 
  
• From a positive standpoint, there may be additional room in the budget for these unexpected work days, however management would consider this a “last resort” as profit margin shrinkage would be a result.

• Criteria for Selecting Activities to Crash:

  There are several characteristics that mark or highlight an activity that exists on the Critical Path as a better candidate for crashing.

  
  1. Must be on the Critical Path. Crashing noncritical activities that already have slack only buys more slack and doesn’t shorten the project duration. Only critical path activities drive the project and crashing them will shorten the project duration.

  
  2. Precedes multiple activities. When an activity bottlenecks numerous succeeding activities, it is a great candidate to shorten. Once this activity is shortened, it allows the multiple activities to begin.

  
  3. Long duration. An activity that has a long duration offers more potential time gain from crashing it.

  
  4. Lower cost per period gained. Activities that cost less to crash are preferred. These include those requiring lower paid, lower skilled workers or other resources that are otherwise sitting idle.

  
  5. Early in the project (the Sunshine Rule). If you fail in crashing the activity and it takes longer than planned, it is still early in the project. Thus you still have recovery time. Also, typically demand on resources early in the project is lower than other times, and they should be readily available.

  
  6. Labor-intensive. When an activity is low skill labor intensive, it is easy to add people to help complete the project early. When an activity requires high skills to complete, it may be hard to find qualified individuals who are capable of completing the task.

  
  7. Subject to common problems. Try to pick activities that are subject to higher probability of common problems. Shortening the duration lowers the exposure time and lessens the chances of having a problem.

Delay analysis with CPM

Critical Path Method (CPM) is a method based on subtracting delays from the as-built programme and in order to determines the earliest date that the contractor could have completed.

1. First identify as-built dates for the construction activities in sufficient detail for identification of delays to be made.  

2.These as-built start and finish dates can then be stored in the programme software which allows static bars to be created which reflect the as-built programme but without logic.  

3,The next task is to identify the actual logic relationships to create a logically linked network such that each activity has scheduled start and finish dates that match the as-built durations already identified. 

4, Delays are then added to the programme as separate activities by identifying those parts of the as-built durations that are periods of delay.  This can be seen in the first part of the programme above.  It may be possible and appropriate to identify contractor caused delay as well as Employer’s delay (EOT events) in order to analyse potential concurrency as in the example above.  

5. The delays are then collapsed out of the as-built programme, and there are various approaches to determining the effect of each event. In the example above it can be seen that there is potentially a concurrency situation.  The as-built critical path indicates that the delay to activity 2 (for which the contractor is responsible) is driving the completion date, but say that this was the work to remedy a defect discovered upon completion of the work to activity 2 on 1 February leading to the subsequent completion of the activity on 7 February. 

 Further, say the delay to activity 4 for which the employer was responsible was a variation to work that had been otherwise completed on 25 January leading to procurement of additional materials and completion of the work on 6 February.  It could then be argued that the employer’s delay came first and at that time event 2 was on programme.  

The effect of collapsing the employer and contractor delays out in this situation would result in the conclusion that in fact at the time of the start of the employer delay to activity 4, this delay was critical thus causing a delay to completion of 3 days for which the Contractor should receive an extension of time.  

The subsequent contractor’s default caused a further delay to completion of 1 day.  In order to show this, both delays have been collapsed out to determine the collapsed as-built completion date and the employer event has been added back to demonstrate the effect on the completion date.

The tedious part about this method is to get the as built logic correct. it's better get the record straight upfront rather then penalised by client for the Project delays.

Delay Analysis Methodology: As-Built But-For Variation in P6

Guide on how to complete a variation to the As-Built But-For Delay Analysis technique using Primavera P6.

Delay Analysis Methodology: As-Built But-For Variation in P6 from Adam Garnham

Primavera_Large Energy Case Study

 

Primavera : Building the Burj Dubai

 

Shell Chemicals Seraya Primavera Case Study

 

Engineering Deliverables Issue Purposes

Type of Engineering Deliverables Issue purpose :

FYI	For Your Information
IAB	Issued For As-Built
ICR	Issued For Construction Record
IFA	Issued For Approval
IFB	Issued For Bid
IFC	Issued For Construction
IFD	Issued For Design

IFE	Issued For Estimate
IFH	Issued For Hazop
IFP	Issued For Purchase
IFR	Issued For Review
IFS	Issued For Squad Check
IFU	Issued For Use
IFV	Issued For Void
RLM	Red Line Markup
RTS	Return To Supplier
SFR	Supplier Issued For Review
SFS	Supplier Issued For Squad Check

If Client Acceptance is required prior to Issues as follows:

IBA	Issued Bid Acceptance
ICA	Issued Construction Acceptance
IDA	Issued Design Acceptance
IEA	Issued Estimate Acceptance
IHA	Issued HAZOP Acceptance
IPA	Issued Purchase Acceptance
IRA	Issued Review Acceptance

Driving activities in Longest Path

Recently, the planning team hit the panic button to bespeak the management attention on the schedule delay. This in return lead to project recovery meeting. The meeting was well intended but misguided with the concept of revising to a new schedule date for ALL the delayed activities. Whole team was about to engage with knotty task of devising turnaround strategy,

We stand divided as the planners are displaying the Longest Path and advised the management and the team to perform recovery on the activity that driving to the delay of Project Completion or the Mechanical Completion. Someone from the crowd asked me after the meeting what is Driving Activities  in Longest Path.

Performing the ‘forward pass’ CPM calculations to a logical network of activities tells you the earliest time in which a project can be completed. The date each activity is scheduled to begin is known as the ‘Early Start’ and the date that each activity is scheduled to end is called ‘Early Finish.’

Kenji Hoshino at the 2002 AACE Conference explained the problems with the concept of float and proposed that we Scheduling Engineers stop looking at float and start looking at a newer concept called, ‘Longest Path.’

Just like the CPM, the Longest Path is a process. It finds the last activity in the schedule. It then travels backward using the driving relationships to identify all activities that are related to the last activity via driving relationships. This list comprises the Longest Path.

In his presentation at the AACE Convention in Portland, Mr. Hoshino said that we should look at the Longest Path and not the Critical Path when managing projects or considering the effects of delays. He went on to say that just like the concept of Near-Critical Activities (those activities with a low float value approaching the Critical Path,) we should also consider looking at Near-Longest Path activities as well.

(Source: Longest Path Value (to the Rescue) By Ron Winter Ron Winter Consulting LLC)

What is a ‘Driving Relationship?’ We mean that it has a slack of 0. The relationship exactly fit in between predecessor and successor and there is no room to delay in this particular string of activities.

Task E has three predecessors which are tasks B, C, & D.  As Task B will take longer to complete than the other two below it, the relationship between Task B and Task E has 0 slack. In other words; it is the driving relationship.

How do I identify critical activities, critical relationships, and driving relationships in Primavera P6?

The following visual indicators represent critical activities, critical relationships, and driving relationships:
Activity boxes outlined in red are critical activities; activity boxes outlined in black are not critical activities

Solid red lines represent critical relationships, while solid black lines represent non-critical relationships.

Solid lines represent driving relationships, while dashed lines represent non-driving relationships.

 

Resource Curve and Percentage Completion

In Primavera actual progress is reported by Performance % Complete, both for the Activities and WBS Elements. A performance % Complete of the Activities under the same WBS Element is calculated by one of these six options:

1. By Activity % Complete and with resource curves
2. By Activity % Complete and without resource curves
3. By WBS Milestones
4. By 0/100 method
5. By 50/50 method
6. By x/(100-x) custom method

Option no 1. and .2 are continuous and the remainder of them are for milestone progresses. Go to earned value tab in WBS details pane to set the method.

A recent refinery project of mine doesn't come with resource curve due to the instruction of Project Managers. This is despite the advice of planners the importance of having resource curve rather than having uniform or linear distribution across the activities.

Let me paint the illustration below. (Source : Percent Complete Field by by Nader Khorrami Rad, PMP).

The right graph is a uniform or linear whereas the left one is non-linear.There’s a four day long activity with actual duration of two (the red line shows the Data Date) and with 300$ BAC.

1st Option (left)

(Activity % Complete, without resource curves), with a % Complete Type of Duration, the Duration % Complete would be 50% {=2 days/4 days}.

Activity % Complete would be equal to the Duration % Complete and Performance % Complete would be equal to the Activity % Complete; in other words, Performance % Complete would
also be 50%.

The EV of the Activities in Options 1 would be Performance % Complete * BAC, which makes it 150$ for both cases, regardless of the resource curves. The PV would be simply calculated by the curves, and it would be 240$ for the left case and 150$ for the right case.

As you can see despite the Budget at completion and Earn Value is the same but Plan Value is different for both cases. It is important for project managers and planner to aware of the earn value concept.

PV = BAC * Schedule % Complete
EV = BAC * Performance % Complete

In the 1st case as you can see the Schedule % complete is 80% while the Performance % Complete is 50 % . This will yield delay for about 30%.

In second case, you will see both Schedule % complete is 50% and the Performance % Complete is 50%. This shows your project progress in on track.

Hence, it is important for you to set the resource curve either by Future Bucket Planning or Assign a resource curve.

Critical Activity : Longest Path

Now ,when it comes to your project’s Critical Path monitoring and control, there are few topics more important to your client. The expectation is on the planner to know your project’s Critical Path inside and out.

Critical path definition :

The critical path is defined as the longest logical path through the CPM network and consists of those

activities that determine the shortest time for project completion. Activities within this or list form a series (or sequence) of logically connected activities that is called the critical path. A delay to the start or completion of any activity in this critical path results in a delay to project completion, assuming that this path consists of a continuous sequence of activities without an overriding date constraint or multiple calendars. (Source : AACE International Recommended Practice No. 49R-06)

Let's hear from PMI itself .

The critical path is the sequence of activities that represents the longest path
through a project, which determines the shortest possible project duration. The resulting early and late start and finish dates are not necessarily the project schedule, rather they indicate the time periods within which the activity could be executed, using the parameters entered in the schedule model for activity durations, logical relationships,
leads, lags, and other known constraints. The critical path method is used to calculate the amount of scheduling flexibility on the logical network paths within the schedule model. (Source : PMBOK 5th Edition).

In my experience, it makes sense to focus on a project’s Longest Path as it is definitely the path where deviations from plan will affect the project’s finish date or also known as Mechanical Completion Date. It is also my strong advise to know your project's longest path and monitor it.

What the client wants to see might be something else, but the timely completion of Longest Path activities leads to your project finishing on time.Most software packages in the market let you track both Critical Path and Longest Path. Monitor and control both.

How to monitor Critical path in Primavera P6?

Option 1.
Edit your columns and look for “Critcal” and a “Longest Path”. Add any of this or both to display the activity that satisfy the critical of "Critical" and "Longest path".

Turn on Filter

You can filter out the "Critical" or/and "Longest Path" activity.

Option 2 : (Personally, I often use this for presentation and report submission)

When you schedule a project, you can choose to calculate multiple critical float paths (sequences of activities) that affect the project schedule. By calculating multiple critical float paths, you can determine the most critical path in the project schedule, along with sub-critical paths that affect the completion of the most critical path.

To calculate multiple critical float paths for all open projects from the Projects > Activities page.

1.Open the project or group of projects you want to work with in the Projects section.
2.Click Activities on the Projects toolbar to display the Activities page.
3.On the Activities page, click Schedule on the Activities toolbar.
4.In the Schedule Project dialog box, click Scheduling Options, then click the Advanced tab.

When you set scheduling options from the Activities page, your selections apply to all open projects.
5.Mark the Calculate multiple float paths option.
6.Choose to calculate multiple paths using Total Float or Free Float.
7.In the Display multiple float paths ending with activity field, click Assign to choose the activity you want the float paths to end on. You can choose any activity; however, typically this activity is a milestone or some other major activity in the project schedule.
8.Specify the number of float paths you want to calculate. Type a low number (10 or less) to optimize performance.
9.Click Close.


On the project scheduling options Advanced tab, you can choose to calculate a specific number of critical float paths based on total float or free float. You can also choose the activity you want the float paths to end on. By choosing an activity, you can calculate multiple float paths that affect the entire project schedule, a specific part of the schedule, or a milestone in the schedule.


When you schedule the project, P6 Web Access identifies the most critical float path in the schedule and assigns those activities a Float Path value of 1. Then, depending on the number of paths you choose to calculate, P6 Web Access identifies other float paths (sub-critical float paths) that affect the most critical float path and numbers the paths in ascending order (beginning with 2) based on the criticality of the path.


After you schedule a project, you can display the Float Path and Float Path Order columns in the Activity Table on the Projects > Activities page. Group by Float Path to view the activities in each critical float path, then sort by Float Path Order to view the order in which the activities were processed.

Select your targeted activity. For instance is your project completion date or Mechanical Completion date.

After you schedule your activity, you can group by Float Path.

Later stage, you can sort by Float Path Order.

 As you can see, you will be able to figure out the string of activities that influencing the completion date of our activities that identifies earlier.

The longest path is calculated by first performing a CPM ‘forward pass’ to determine driving relationships and the project’s latest, early finish date. The activity (or activities) with the latest, early finish dates are then identified and all predecessor driving relationships traced back to the project start date. These activities constitute the project’s longest path.

No Nonsense guide in understanding duration type

No Nonsense Guide to Duration Types in P6 from Adam Garnham

Delay analysis technique using reflection and claim digger in Primavera P6

Delay Impact Analysis Utilising Project Reflections in P6 from Adam Garnham

Time Impact Analysis with Primavera P6

Delay Impact Analysis Time Impact Analysis from Adam Garnham

Identifying & Updating “Most Critical” Activities with Progress Spotlight and Float Path Order

spotlight_float_path from Geniustribes Ray

EPC vs EPCm

Epc Vs Epcm  

EPC : Dependencies for electrical and instrumentation engineering

It is important for a project planner to know the activities and dependencies of engineering deliverables. Without knowing the flow it will be hard to come out with an optimise planning.

In oil and gas project, the production sequence of electrical and instrumentation drawings, documents and field materials are logically linked as shown in figure below. ( Source : www.toolboxforplanning .com)

EPC:Process,Mechanical and Piping Workflow

A good planner need to familiarise with the concept of engineering workflow. In the process of planning a planner will need to study the dependencies and required deliverable in engineering. The work network below is shows the links and dependecies among the process, mechanical and piping engineering deliverables ( source : www.toolboxforplanning.com ).

 

 

The diagram shows the input of process/utility engineering flow scheme (PES/UFS) drawing is the process flow scheme or process flow diagram (PFD) and process study. The input of engineering data requisition sheet for mechanical equipment is the process data sheet consist of fluid properties, temperature and pressure rating. The requisition for equipment's can be prepared when the specification and process data sheets are available.

The technical and commercial analysis report to be submitted to client and finalized prior to issue purchase order to equipment suppliers. The equipment loading data which is the inputs for civil and structure would be available after the vendor started working on equipment drawings.

The plot plan is started to prepare when the process flow diagrams includes major equipment tap numbers are confirmed. Piping general arrangement (GA) drawings can be produced when the process and utility engineering scheme and piping routing drawings are available. ISO drawings can be started to prepare after the pipe support data and the latest PFS/UFS drawings are available. Piping material requisition can be prepared after the confirmation of piping specification and standard. The final MTO (material take off) and tie-in list  are finalized once the ISO drawings are issued. Upon confirmation of order, vendor drawings will be started working and issued for approval. The materials would be manufactured if the drawings are approved.