How to Run Automated Delay Analysis

00:01 When I talk to senior leaders in project controls from around the world, their biggest daily gripe is that there’s too much work to do, but their biggest worry is that they’re going to be taken to court. And every single one of them expresses to me, “I wish we were more proactive at this. I wish we could get ahead of claims like we never have done before. I wish we could have a real rigorous process around this.” But it’s very difficult because when they’re resourcing their teams, they resource for the general work,
00:31 and claims and delay analysis is a spike in activity. It’s very hard to forecast that level of activity, so the team normally hasn’t got the capacity built within it to do it. So what happens is that they either outsource it, or they wait for the project to go bad, and then have to hire a very expensive claimed consultant at the end of the project. But what if it didn’t have to be this way? What if we could do two things? What if we could make the process of understanding a delay, and therefore the responsibility or ownership of a
01:08 claim, two button clicks? And what if we could democratize that so even the project managers at the base of the project could run their analysis and present any findings that are worthy to the controls team? Democratization essentially makes it very easy and quick to do the analysis and give that analysis to the people responsible for delivering those areas of the project. The project controls team being the funnel. That is the power of this feature. Like never before, you are able to run delay analysis quickly, easily, and you’re able
01:49 to democratize that power to your teams. So with that, enjoy.

00:01 In this course, we’re going to learn how to analyze delay. Now, before we can start to analyze delay, we need to understand what the schedules are that we’re analyzing. And here, it is very important that you select the schedule you want to analyze and you set as the baseline the one that you want to compare against. Again, to set as a baseline, all you do is click on the three dots and click change to baseline. Once we’ve done that, we’re ready to do the analysis.

00:01 Beginning analyzing in the Nodes and Links AI platform for delay is very simple. We can either come up the top here to find activity and click on that, or we can go here to find activity and click on that. I’m going to select M2000, which is something that I analyzed previously. Now, this gives us a diagram that we can manipulate here and zoom in and move across and zoom out. For concurrent delay, concurrent delay essentially means that there can be multiple causes of a delay going throughout. So, we can see that fourteen percent comes from this activity,
00:38 forty-four from this, forty-two from this. Now, even though this was delayed, the delay from this overtook it, so this has a zero percent delay contribution. If we want to look into how these calculations are being done, we can click on this “How delay analysis works” in the top right. This will allow you to explore and understand all of the equations that are being used and to get examples. Once you’re happy, you can navigate or fit to screen, and you can download as you see fit. If your project file has an OBS coding structure,
01:17 you can click here on activity codes, and it will highlight different activity codes. This allows you to assign blame or cause for specific activities over time. And it is as simple as that. What this does is it puts the power of delay analysis into your hands, so that you can get started on what is a very complex process, very simply, and in very little time.

00:01 If we don’t want to analyze for concurrent delay, we can analyze for non-concurrent delay, and we do that by clicking “Check Dates” in the top right. What this does is it changes the contribution from a percentage to the actual dates where things were planned and things actually occurred. So, what this is, is just a pure automation of pulling out the data and putting it in a very simple flow diagram, so we can see when things happened and who was at fault. Now, what you can do is you can download this, print it off, or put it
00:38 into a presentation and annotate it with the story that you want to tell.

00:01 So now that you understand concurrent and non-concurrent delay, let me just give you some workflow tips to help it put it into your monthly or weekly flow. What I would highly advise is that you run a delay analysis for every major milestone on your project every reporting period and whenever a change comes in. This allows you to get ahead of the problems. What I’d also do is I’d write it into whatever processes you have that it is the project managers who are responsible for monitoring and controlling their elements of the deliverable, so either the key dates or the level below the key dates, and they have to report to you any findings that they find. With those two very simple steps, what it means is you are able to capture whatever impact a delay has very quickly, which means that you’re able to respond with either a collaborative workshop or a claim.