pm-lotus by Howard Vaughan

Posts Tagged ‘Scheduling’

PMI gives only scant coverage to interfaces (inter-project or external dependencies) in its Standard for Program Management. However, mis-managed interfaces have the potential to cause days or even weeks of delays and consequently wreak havoc with schedules – and often do.

Effective interface management involves full and complete interface definition. A good list of defining attributes would include the following:

Outputs don't always match input requirements

• Interface name
  (unique naming and identification)
• Interface description
  (nature and purpose of the interface)
• Output source
  (which sub-project supplies the output)
• Output owner
  (who is accountable for the output)
• Input receiver
  (which sub-project is the ‘customer’ for the output)
• Input owner
  (who is accountable for receiving the input)
• Completion criteria
  (what the interface ‘looks like’ when its done)
• Date constraints
  (if applicable)

The completion criteria should be defined as a checklist of requirements from the input owner. He/she will then use these as the basis for full acceptance of the interface as ‘done’ or ‘not done’.

A hammock task can be defined as either a summary task that aggregates a related set of activities, or an actual ongoing activity whose start and finish is driven by other tasks or milestones that may or may not be related. In the first case, summary tasks are easily created using the outline feature in Project of course but the second case can present more of a challenge.

In the simple example below, two non-summary hammock tasks are shown.

Both hammocks reflect ongoing activity from the start to the finish of the project. To create Hammock A:

• Click in the Start cell for the project “Start” milestone and choose the Copy command
• Click the Start cell for “Hammock A” and choose Edit, Paste Special, Paste Link, and click OK
• Click in the Finish cell for the project “Finish” milestone and choose Copy
• Click in the Finish cell for “Hammock A” and paste as a link again

A problem with hammocks is that they may show up as critical items (as here with Hammock A) whereas in reality they do not actually drive the project schedule. Hammock B shows how we can avoid this by linking the finish date to a ‘dummy’ milestone “Finish -1″ that we set to finish just before the project finish (predecessor is Finish milestone SF-1).

Using either approach above will allow the hammock to ‘stretch’ or ‘shrink’ as the durations of the other tasks change, during plan updates for example. If necessary, a manual click on the F9 key will force a correct recalculation of the hammock’s duration.