There are a few tools out there that will do this. I have used a couple of
them. They are expensive, usually created by a small group of folks with
home grown software that is hard coded, not very flexible and consumes a
bunch of your extra fields in Project. You end up having to remap things if
you use the spare fields for programs like COBRA, Risk+, etc.
All they do is apply some filters and do some task counting and you can
create all this yourself in about a day. For this, they want about
$3000/seat.
In the United States, the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) has a
guideline of tests they use to determine the health of a schedule. Each of
the filters will take you about 5 minutes to create. OK, some took me an
hour.
Here are the general rules. For each task that is not complete, not Level
of effort, not a summary task, or should not otherwise logically be excluded
(that opens a door big enough for a truck):
1. Each task shall have predecessors and succesors
2. Select a Random in progress task and change the duration to 600 days.
Make sure the remaining work moves right. Dumb huh?
3. Each task with predecessors, 90% shall be FS relationship (why 90% is
good, I don't know).
4. Any task with Lag time greater than 20 work days requires investigation
(it usually means there are missing tasks). This one is tricky to create
because Lag is not a readily available field. Just scan with your eyeballs.
5. Lead times shall not have negative lag in predecessors or successors.
6. Unless there is good reason, do not use hard constraints such as Must
Finish On. Specifically MFO, MSO, SNLT, FNLT should be less than 5% of the
tasks evaluated. Exceptions are LOE, Summary, Completed tasks, and other
logically excluded tasks (here's that truck again). IMPORTANT NOTE: SNET and
ALAP are excluded from the counting. Most tasks should be ASAP.
7. Total slack for 95% of tasks shall be lest than 40 days.
8. No task shall have negative total slack.
9. Descrete tasks shall be less than 40 days in duration unless good reason.
(Our rule is 5 days or 40 hours) and here comes that truck again.
10. No unstarted work (%Complete=0) to left of the status date
11. No completed work (%Complete=100) with finish date to the right of the
status date.
12. No actual start dates right of the status date.
13. No task may be less than 100% if finish date is left of status date
14. Resources loaded on all remaining work tasks of duration greater than 0.
No resources on summary tasks. (Note: No predecessors or successors either).
Hopefully some others will post so we can have a more complete set of
schedule metrics to score.
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Jim
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