How to Analyze a Schedule Update with AI

00:01 As we know, reviewing an update or reviewing a change is one of the core tasks that we have to do on a daily basis, but it takes a lot of time. What this course will show you is how to cut that time down to almost nothing. What we want to do here is to give you so much time back that you can actually sit and have that nice cup of tea or cup of coffee and just enjoy thinking about the day. Enjoy.

00:02 Now it’s time to look at how we review an update or analyze a change, and this is one of the most powerful use cases for the Nodes & Links AI platform. Now, before we can start diving into the analytics, what we need to do is upload schedules to compare. So, all we do is click on this plus button in the top left of the project that we want to update. If we do that, we’ll be able to say that it’s a new version. I can name it, for example, version fourteen, and all I have to do is drag and drop the XER or MPP file here and
00:39 click create. And after that, it’s all automated for me. Then, when I want to be able to compare two schedules, all I need to do is go to the schedule that I want to compare with, let’s say version six, and I’ll set that to baseline because the system always compares the schedule versus the last one versus the baseline. The two that we can choose are the schedule of the baseline. So, if I click change to baseline here and OK, this is a very easy and temporary switch. It will recalculate all of the calculations to compare
01:15 against version six now, and we’ll analyze from that point on.

00:01 Now we’ve uploaded our schedules that we want to compare and set our baseline to compare against. We want to analyze our S-curves, our progress, and for this, we go to the progress track screen, and then here on the top right, we go to progress. Clicking on this generates our S-curve. Now, we can generate this curve on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. We can zoom in by analyzing these sections or unlocking them again. We can download using this button in the top right, and we can analyze at any level of the WBS or
00:43 whatever segmentation we’ve got in the program. And by hovering over, we get all of the results, and it’s as simple as that. Everything is interactive, so I can take off all of the actualized data, and I can give a narrative here. I can get rid of the early and late data, so I’ve just got simple comparisons. It is entirely up to you.

00:01 Now that we’ve analyzed our S curve, we want to analyze the project KPIs, and for that, we’ve got four automatically calculated for us in the Nodes & Links AI platform. The first is the SPI indices, the schedule performance index here, and if we click on that, it will give us the performance index over time. So, we can see right now that the project is at 0.73. Now, what that means is that we’re achieving seventy-three days of progress for every calendar day that occurs in real time, and this is on
00:35 a basis of measured by duration. In addition to the performance index, we can look at trending. So, we can see that this project has got progressively later every single day from the current update, which is the twenty-eighth of April, all the way back since May. In addition to this, we can also see the compression of the schedule. Now, this is a very interesting one. What a compression of the schedule is, is if you’ve got a milestone fixed in time and activities before it, and these activities are being delayed, but that you’re holding the milestone consistent,
01:15 either at some point, you have to produce negative flow, or you erode the float between those activities. This is a measure of the float between those activities. So, if the plan is below the actual, what that means is the milestones are moving out faster than the delay is happening in the project, if there is a delay. If it’s the other way round, where the blue line is below the yellow line, it means the milestones are being held constant, and the delay is crushing towards those milestones. That is indicative of a problem. This is a great sense
01:56 to see if the schedule is being manipulated. If, for example, a team is saying we will hit those dates yet are delayed in everything they do, this would give you an instantaneous view of that. The fourth KPI is activities per day, which is a proxy for productivity. So, for example, if I took this range here and I remove the actuals, we can see that the average number of activities is roughly thirty. The actuals have been less than that. Here it was around twenty, here it is around thirty-two. So, we can just get a sense of, on any
02:35 day in the program, how many activities were supposed to be delivered and how many were actually delivered. Now, given that for most of the days in this section, the plan was more than what actually happened, I’m not surprised that the progress is behind.00:41 measures. So, you input the data yourself, and if you do not want to use the artificial intelligence, the choice is yours.

00:01 Now we’ve looked at our S curves in our project KPIs, we can start to look at individual activities, and we can do this by going to the list of activities element of the screen here. Now this gives us a tabular format for us to analyze whatever we want to analyze and it allows us to download and manipulate the data in a far easier way than the scheduling programs do. So, for example, what I could do here is say I only want to look at progress, sorry, completed activities, and what I can do on here is I’ve got two options.

00:38 I’ve got a select so a filter within here, and I can insert columns to this table. So, any of these columns if I click on them, I can order these columns and what I can also do is I can filter. So if it is a date format like this or a number format, I can actually do a filter here and look at, for example, between certain dates. Now if I order by current start date within the program for activities that have been completed, I can start doing for example a predictability analysis where I see that all of these have been actualized.

01:15 They were delivered on time, which is the green underneath, and I can follow down and I can start seeing scope creep and I can start seeing delays both to start, finish, and duration. This opens up a wealth of possibilities. So, for example, one thing I have seen customers do is to insert a coding structure which is specific to each contractor or subcontractor. Below, they will pull up the progress data and they will analyze the average start accuracy, finish accuracy, and duration accuracy of those customers. So they can say things like,

01:52 You, on average, start activities a week late, they take a week longer, and end because of that two weeks later. Why should I believe, given that you don’t have this much float in your program, that you are going to deliver on time? We need a proactive conversation about how we can either increase your productivity or put buffer into the program so that we’re not delayed.

00:01 Next in our analysis is to look at how key activities and milestones have trended over time across different versions of this project. For that, we go to progress and we go to trend analysis. Here, if we click on trend analysis, it comes up with this. Now, at the top where it says “search for an activity,” if we click on that, we can type anything we want. So, for example, if I do procurement and issue, click on this one, if it wasn’t in the table, it would profile it over time. Let me find another. If I do this one, we can see it profiles
00:37 it over time. It shows us the variance compared to the baseline that we set before. It shows us the first schedule, the planned finish, and now the planned finish, and it shows how that moves across every single version of this program. Remember, we’ve got thirteen versions here. So, for plan completion, we can see here that it was originally the first of May or first of March, then it jumped here to the sixth of April and jumped again, then jumped again, and now we’re looking at the twenty-third of August. If I want to download this and put it in a presentation,
01:13 I just click this download button here, and that will save it as a picture that I can insert as a JPEG.00:35 This blue arrow means that this has been customized. I can also change the distribution, so I can change it, for example, to a uniform distribution. What you can additionally do as well is, if you want to set the settings of a bulk of activities, you can click this “inherit from WBS” button. So, what that would mean is, if you go to the level above, for example, in this case, it would be preliminaries, then anything below that has this button clicked, and we can bulk click these buttons, we’ll automatically have all of their settings adjusted. You see
01:11 here how this one’s flicking this way. You can do thousands of activities at a time. Finally, there is a way to filter, and this is a personal favorite of mine because what I would like to do is do a bulk template for the majority of activities, but for the activities that are within, let’s say, twenty days of total float of the critical path, I just put twenty in here, press enter, it will show me all of these, and I go into those, and that is what I personally run my risk workshops against. Now, if we click on “clear filters” here,
01:49 you can see that the number of filters that you can play with, and these are for both uncertainty and risk events. You can do task information like ID, name, start, duration; you can start searching the webs; you can look at flow, and you can isolate it by risk events. To clear settings, you just click on “clear filters” here, and if you want this panel to go away, you simply click close.

00:01 Next, we’re going to do an exhaustive comparison of the entire schedule and looking at the usage data of our platform. This is by far the most popular feature of the AI platform. So, if we go on the left and go down to compare, it gives us this screen. Now, what we’re able to do here is to select a schedule to compare it against. So, I’ve selected version ten and we simply click compare. Now, what this system does is three things: it compares all of the KPIs that we were looking at across the top here, it does an exhaustive comparison of activities, milestones, and relationships and visualizes them here, and it enables us to dive deeper. So, we can dive deeper into the critical path, and we can dive deeper onto individual activities.

00:39 Now, if we want to, if we find an element that we want to export, we can literally click export here. And again, it’s a smart export where we can select the ones we want and do it as a PNG or a PDF. And let me walk you through this. So, as part of this schedule here, I can see there’s a number of activities being modified.

01:10 I can see that this has been modified. If I click on it, we can see that the name has been changed, the start date has been pulled back, which is this blue line here. That’s the original. This is the new. It’s been pulled back by seven days. The end date has been pulled back by eleven, so the duration has been compressed by four. We can see that there’s forty-five new activities here. And if I click on them, it gives me them, and I’m able to just click this down arrow and quickly scroll through, and you can see.

01:38 It says added. We could also look at deleted. So, if I want to look at the ones that have been removed, it shows us here. And if there’s changed, we can see there’s a lot of changed activities here. If I click on that, it tells me how they’ve changed. They’ve changed in name, start date, end dates, finish dates, etc. We can even see ones that have changed in calendar. We can also do a smart search here. If I want to analyze the critical path, I just click on critical path, and it will show me what has been added.

02:13 Modified or removed from the critical path. Again, I’ll just export this. I’ll export it as a PDF. It will pull it out, and it’s pulled it out here in my downloads. If I open that, I immediately get my change analysis. This enables us to very, very quickly see what has changed and actually, this is the first step in the workflow of doing a delay analysis or a claim because what we can see, what we can do is very quickly detail exactly what has been changed on an activity level, a relationship level, and a milestone level.

00:01 Now that we’ve done an exhaustive comparison and looked at how the critical path has changed, and equally we could go into the path screen and see how the different paths there have changed, it’s time to look at risk. To do that, we go to the risk screen, and we can input the analysis as in the other course. I recommend going how to run a QSRA there, but I’m going to jump straight to risk drivers. Now, within risk drivers, we can compare P curves and we can compare tornado graphs. So, if I, for example, select plan completion for
00:37 AP eighty position for just duration uncertainty, I can click this button here and go compare with previous update. If I click view results, it shows me how different activities have changed based on their impact to the schedule. So, manufacture steelwork did have 8.55 percent contribution, now it has 7.25. If we go to the QRA output, we can see the delay probability in terms of a histogram, and the curves. So, we can see here that previous to about AP sixty position, the previous curve was actually
01:21 earlier, but then was later later on. So, if we are contracting at AP eighty, then actually the new curve has been accelerated, it is sooner, but the risk profile has shifted. This obviously is a very in-depth piece of analysis, and we would need to be very very familiar with QSRA to be able to do this in detail, but all of the capabilities are available on the Nodes & Links AI platform.00:36 This can create your score. You can give it a description, you can give an owner of this risk, and you can actually give a reoccurrence, and whether or not the risk is independent or not. You can import your risk register into here for your schedule. If you want to get rid of a risk, you simply click on this button here to remove a risk event. And with that, you’ve created your risk register; it’s very simple.

00:01 So there we have it, it’s a very simple workflow that I’ve just taken through to review a schedule. And of course, you’re more better than me on your own process. My personal process is to add the schedules and make sure I’m configuring so that I know what I’m comparing against. It’s to look up progress and to analyze the project KPIs. I’m assuming that I’ve done health checks and everything before this, and I’m assuming that I’ve run a Monte Carlo risk simulation. After this, I will dive deep on specific
00:31 activities, I will trend milestones over time, I will do an exhaustive comparison, I will look at paths, and then ultimately, I will look at how the risk has changed. And if I have done all of that, that actually sets me up very well, if in case I am asked whether or not we need to submit a claim or an extension of time, or you know, someone’s asking it of me. All I’d say is, make sure it’s documented, and then you can arrange these kinds of screens and analysis around your own workflow.00:41 Now, just like before, we have “inherit” here, so it’s passed all of those risks down the schedule. If you don’t have a risk assigned to a specific activity or WBS, it will say “map risk events” here. All you have to do is click on that, and it will take you to the same screen, and based on the settings that you did in your risk register and what you have applied, you will get a specific risk score, and it is as simple as that. Now, of course, just like we talked about before, you can filter, you can navigate your schedule,
01:14 in however which way you want, and you can assign the risks in whatever way one.

00:01 Now that that’s all done, we need to have a look at what we’re going to do with this analysis. Specifically, are we going to analyze a delay in much greater detail, are we going to submit a claim, or look to analyze or accept or reject a claim, and how are we going to look forward? So, are we going to involve this kind of information to do a forecast of the future? These will be the three courses coming up.

00:01 As we know, reviewing an update or reviewing a change is one of the core tasks that we have to do on a daily basis, but it takes a lot of time. What this course will show you is how to cut that time down to almost nothing. What we want to do here is to give you so much time back that you can actually sit and have that nice cup of tea or cup of coffee and just enjoy thinking about the day. Enjoy. Now it’s time to look at how we review an update or analyze a change, and this is one of the most powerful use cases for the Nodes and Links AI platform. Now, before we can start diving into the analytics, what we need to do is upload schedules to compare. So all we do is click on this plus button in the top left of the project that we want to update. If we do that, we’ll be able to say that it’s a new version. I can name it, for example, version 14, and all I have to do is drag and drop the XER, PP, or MPP file here and click create. And after that, it’s all automated for me. Then when I want to be able to compare two schedules, all I need to do is go to the schedule that I want to compare with, let’s say version six, and I’ll set that to baseline because the system always compares the schedule versus the last one versus the baseline. The two that we can choose are the schedule of the baseline. So, if I click change to baseline here and OK, this is a very easy and temporary switch. It will recalculate all of the calculations to compare against version six now, and we’ll analyze from that point on. Now we’ve uploaded our schedules that we want to compare and set our baseline to compare against. We want to analyze our S-curves, our progress, and for this, we go to the progress track screen, and then here on the top right, we go to progress. Clicking on this generates our S-curve. Now we can generate this S-curve on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. We can zoom in by analyzing these sections or unlocking them again. We can download using this button in the top right, and we can analyze at any level of WBS, OBS, or whatever segmentation we’ve got in the program. And by hovering over, we get all of the results, and it’s as simple as that. Everything is interactive, so I can take off all of the actualized data, and I can give a narrative here. I can get rid of the early and late data, so I’ve just got simple comparisons. It is entirely up to you. Now that we’ve analyzed our S-curve, we want to analyze the project KPIs, and for that, we’ve got four automatically calculated for us in the Nodes and Links AI platform. The first is the SPI indices, the schedule performance index here, and if we click on that, it’ll give us the performance index over time. So we can see right now that the project is at 0.73. Now, what that means is that we’re achieving 73 days of progress for every calendar day that occurs in real time, and this is on a basis of measured by duration. In addition to the performance index, we can look at trending. So we can see that this project has got progressively later every single day from the current update, which is the 28th of April, all the way back since May. In addition to this, we can also see the compression of the schedule. Now, this is a very interesting one. What a compression of the schedule is, is if you’ve got a milestone fixed in time and activities before it, and these activities are being delayed but that you’re holding the milestone consistent, either at some point, you have to produce negative float or you erode the float between those activities. This is a measure of the float between those activities. So, if the plan is below the actual, what that means is the milestones are moving out faster than the delay is happening in the project if there is a delay. If it’s the other way around, where the blue line is below the yellow line, it means the milestones are being held constant, and the delay is crushing towards those milestones. That is indicative of a problem. This is a great sense to see if the schedule is being manipulated. If, for example, a team is saying we will hit those dates yet are delayed in everything they do, this would give you an instantaneous view of that. The fourth KPI is activities per day, which is a proxy for productivity. So, for example, if I took this range here and I remove the actuals, we can see that the average number of activities is roughly 30. The actuals have been less than that, here it was around 20, here it is around 32. So, we can just get a sense

of on any day in the program, how many activities were supposed to be delivered and how many were actually delivered. Now, given that for most of the days in this section, the plan was more than what actually happened, I’m not surprised that the progress is behind. Next in our analysis is to look at how key activities and milestones have trended over time across different versions of this project. For that, we go to progress and we go to trend analysis. Here, if we click on trend analysis, it comes up with this. Now, at the top where it says search for an activity, if we click on that, we can type anything we want. So, for example, if I do procurement and issue, click on this one. If it wasn’t in the table, it would profile it over time. Let me find another. If I do this one, we can see it profiles it over time. It shows us the variance compared to the baseline that we set before. It shows us the first schedule, the planned finish, and now the planned finish, and it shows how that moves across every single version of this program. Remember, we’ve got 13 versions here. So, for plan completion, we can see here that it was originally the 1st of May or 1st of March, then it jumped here to the 6th of April, then jumped again, then jumped again, and now we’re looking at the 23rd of August. If I want to download this and put it in a presentation, I just click this download button here, and that will save it as a picture that I can insert as a JPEG. Now that we’ve done an exhaustive comparison and looked at how the critical path has changed, and equally, we could go into the path screen and see how the different paths there have changed, it’s time to look at risk. To do that, we go to the risk screen, and we can input the analysis as in the other course. I recommend going how to run a QSRA there, but I’m going to jump straight to risk drivers. Now, within risk drivers, we can compare P curves and we can compare tornado graphs. So, if I, for example, select plan completion for an AP80 position for just duration uncertainty, I can click this button here and go compare with the previous update. If I click view results, it shows me how different activities have changed based on their impact on the schedule. So, manufacture steelwork did have an 8.55% contribution, now it has 7.25. If we go to the QRA output, we can see the delay probability in terms of a histogram and the curves. So, we can see here that previous to about an AP60 position, the previous curve was actually earlier, but then was later later on. So, if we are contracting at an AP80, then actually the new curve has been accelerated, it is sooner, but the risk profile has shifted. This obviously is a very in-depth piece of analysis, and we would need to be very familiar with QSRA to be able to do this in detail, but all of the capabilities are available on the Nodes and Links AI platform. So, there we have it. It’s a very simple workflow that I’ve just taken through to review a schedule, and of course, you’ll know better than me on your own process. My personal process is to add the schedules and make sure I’m configuring so that I know what I’m comparing against. It’s to look up progress and to analyze the project KPIs. I’m assuming that I’ve done health checks and everything before this, and I’m assuming that I’ve run a Monte Carlo risk simulation. After this, I will dive deep on specific activities. I will trend milestones over time, I will do an exhaustive comparison, I will look at paths, and then ultimately, I will look at how the risk has changed. And if I’ve done all of that, that actually sets me up very well if in case I’m asked whether or not we need to submit a claim or an extension of time, or you know, someone’s asking it of me. All I’d say is, make sure it’s documented, and then you can arrange these kinds of screens and analysis around your workflow. Now that that’s all done, we need to have a look at what we’re going to do with this analysis. Specifically, are we going to analyze a delay in much greater detail, are we going to submit a claim, or look to analyze or accept or reject a claim, and how are we going to look forward? So, are we going to involve this kind of information to do a forecast of the future? These will be the three courses coming up.