Avoiding ‘Garbage In – Garbage Out’

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Improving the quality of your P6 plans through a five-step schedule maturity framework

The premise of this presentation is that project failure can be attributed to poor planning and/or poor project execution. However, through the use of a new five-step schedule maturity framework which ensures not only structurally sound, but also more importantly, achievable and realistic project plans, both planning AND execution can be improved.

• Develop sound basis of schedules (e.g. appropriate CPM scheduling techniques)


• Remove redundancy and unnecessary complexity from schedules


• Risk-adjust schedules to account for scope uncertainty and risk events


• Realistically accelerate schedules to achieve more aggressive target completion dates


• Ensure achievability through a project-team review and buy-in process

By developing a project schedule that is of sound basis, has accounted for risk, has been optimized where possible, and has team buy-in with regards to achievability there is a much higher chance of success. Successful execution is largely driven by the project team’s ability, in a timely manner, to identify and correct deviations from the ‘plan’. This presentation will demonstrate methods for not only pinpointing schedule slippages and delays, but also determining their root cause.  By having such knowledge and insight, the project can then quickly apply mitigation steps to get the project back on track. Advanced project intelligence metrics are discussed as well as key pointers as to what to look for when tracking execution performance.

In summary, this schedule maturity model is a pro-active means to ensuring both more realistic plans and a formalized means of tracking execution performance. Successful management of these two moving pieces within the ‘project puzzle’ is a key component to successful project completion,