How to Run Health Checks On The Quality of Your Plan with AI

00:01 Hi, I’m Greg, the CEO of Nodes and Links. You’re about to learn how to check the quality of your plan using the Nodes and Links AI platform. By the end of this course, you’ll know how to run logic checks, review the build strategy, analyze the forward wave, and calculate the predictive accuracy of your plan. Please enjoy, like, and comment.

00:01 Before we start anything, we need to make sure that we’re analyzing the right plan. If we go into the home screen on the Nodes and Links AI platform, we can go to this icon saying schedule information here. If we click on this, it will tell us what the current baseline is and the selected scheduler in it will tell us the file name of which we can copy the upload date the upload individual and the last edit date which is the day to day. We need to be able to check that we’re analyzing the right plans; this is how we do it.

00:02 So first things first, we want to find the logic checks. When you enter your project, you will land on your home screen. On your home screen here, you have got a tab called “How good is my plan?” This details your DCMA and additional check scores. By clicking on “View health” here or by clicking on health to the left on the tab, it will take you to the health screen where we’ll have those checks. The screen looks like this. At this point, we can start to analyze the logic of our schedule.

00:01 Before we start analyzing the activities and interdependencies within our schedule we need to set our thresholds and this can be done on the top right where it says configure so if we click here it brings up the configurations of every single check in the system now we can do a few things we can enable or disable checks because for example i might not want to track missing logic going through a program i can turn on different filters and i can set threshold levels for activities that have a numerical value associated with them for example

00:39 high flow i can set whether or not i’m using absolute or relative values and i can set days and times to save these i just click save in the bottom right

00:02 once i’ve set my thresholds now i can go in and start doing my checks and we’ll start with the dcma fourteen point analysis which we can find here now what we can see is every single check and whether or not the result is a pass or a fail based on our criteria if we click into one for example missing logic it will tell us all of the activities that break this check and why they break this check in this case it will be predecessors or success accounts there’s two unique things about the health screen in the nodes and link system

00:39 the first is this element where we can isolate exactly what is at fault and why so for example if i go to high float here it will give us the high float values the second is that we are actually able to segment it by various means so in this case we’re able to segment all the way down into the WBS structure and were also able to filter and add columns to the table so for example i can say i’m only interested in high float activities that break the check within construction within the independent retail unit which

01:18 of these that start and finish between these dates so i can do a search or here i can say is equals great to then less than or within a range what i can also then do is i can download this table by clicking on the export button so that i have a record of it what this enables me to do is to send out information to multiple team members so multiple people can be working on the schedule at one point in time

00:02 in addition to the DCMA fourteen point checks we also have sixteen additional checks which are here below now these additional checks have been ones that have been asked for by core customers all around the world to understand what these checks are we can simply click on them and then if we go into configure it will describe what these are up here so for example if i go down to isolated networks this is the fraction in terms of a percentage of activities that are neither isolated nor members of the largest component of the activity

00:34 network so we can do a number of additional checks here go to our schedule quality my personal favorites are isolated networks because then what i can do is click on visual and see the entire project as a network so we can see here that there’s elements of this project which are around project period and possessions that aren’t connected to any major milestone in the project at all such as mobilize project team or plan completion which are the largest interconnected milestones my other favorite ones are circular

01:11 logical dependencies because i’m a fan of doctor who and if that’s true then we can blow back in time and as late as possible constraints finally writing day to day the reason i like riding day to date as much as i do is because as updated plans come in i want to see if we’re just pressing F nine and rescheduling things forward as opposed to actually planning them in sequence

00:02 so now we’ve got our DCMA fourteen point checks and our sixteen additional checks we’ve also checked that this is the right schedule now what we can do is start to go into the thinking behind the schedule and check its structure and we can check its structure in two ways the first way is to check the coding behind the schedule so to do this we go into progress and we’re going to track and within this in the top right we are able to select any hierarchy of the program so this program has a main WBS and four

00:36 activity code structures and activity code WB and obs and a possession within this WBS we have the breakdown here so for example within construction the breakdown goes to these components we’ve got highways set up demobilization retail unit etcetera now this is the WBS ABS CBS and obs structures what we could also do is check the activity ID codes which are here O for example within independent retail unit we can go in and see what is the coding convention that is being used in here we can see it’s all gigs

01:21 and CES what we can do by this is to build out an understanding of how the coding structure has been broken down from top level down and how the matrix has been formed

00:01 once we understand the structure of the plan we need to understand how the elements flow and interconnect which is at the physical manifestation of our build strategy the simplest way we do this today is via the gantt chart so you can go into the aiqsra into risk and it has an active gantt chart where you can turn on links so that interdependencies and turn them off here for simplicity and you can navigate the different WBS components at all levels but we can take it further than this we want it simpler by going on schedule and on paths

00:43 we can find the top five paths to any activity or milestone in the entire program and all you have to do is type in the name or find it here i’ve just done it to M four zero four eight which is a delivery milestone we can if we wish also set past two activities so we can say how do we get to activity a going through activity B we can analyze these by flat or tree structures and by hovering over here we can see how many activities and how many days of free floater in this path so for example this one has sixty

01:22 activities and five days of free flow we can export these here and it is a smart export where we can select what we want to export and if it’s PDF or PNG but we can go even further than that by clicking on visualize and road map there’s a very unique feature here that can help us tell a story and it looks like this what this is is an automatic diagram generator it doesn’t go down to the activity level it’s not supposed to it shows how the different WBS ‘s flow and connect with each other over time and i’ll give you an

02:05 example by clicking this button i can hide WBS now what i’m interested to do is to see how construction and commissioning relate to each other so i’m going to remove all of these different elements so we’ve only got these two i’m then going to expand construction here then i’m going to go on my hand and i’m going to start moving it around now i’ve got my timeline here that i can align things to but what i can very easily see is that it’s only station extension that connects to commissioning

02:46 and handover and you’ve got five links going into commissioning and handover and one link coming back out back into station extension so let’s dive down even deeper and then again i’ll expand station extension here so we can actually see that it is phase four construction and fit out that is going into commissioning and handover now again if i go down even further and i expand out phase four we’re getting in all the different works now i can see this is where the complexity comes from so there’s a bridge lift

03:31 some gates and a new station interchange which leads to commissioning and handover and i can see how all of these are profiled over time and by clicking here i can export this chart there will be another video linked to this which explains how to use these three screens in much greater detail but what we use this to do is to explain strategy to senior leadership and you can too

00:02 one additional thing that we need to check to ensure that the schedule is of quality is how extreme the forward wave is so we’ve all been there where we can put detailed planning into the most recent period of time but things near the back end of the program are at a much higher level just because for example design has not been completed we can check that in the system so if we go into progress and into track and go to activities per day we can see what the plan versus actual is for activities per day so for example the baseline of this program

00:44 was to have a large amount of activity early on and then going down into lower levels of activity what has actually happened is this level and the current plan so the forecast from the update is saying that this will be the profile now obviously we can do that at any level so if i click on construction it will show me the activities per day for the construction WBS and any of these bars can be manipulated so i can just say i’m interested in this component here and i’m interested in these components there it is your

01:21 choice now for the data scientist in you there is an additional screen you can go to visualize and to connections and what this does is it gives you an area where you can go down into more detail what i’d be looking at here is active tasks so i can see the profile of active tasks at any one point in time this program does not have a forward wave i know this because i’ve examined the program in more detail so i’ve confirmed it but here we can see that actually the active task limit is generally consistent across time and creates

02:01 a nice S curve throughout it obviously commissioning and handover at the end has a lower element of activity but in general the bulk of the program is consistent

00:01 if we have multiple versions of a schedule either because we’re getting updates or because we’re in the bidding phase and we’re doing multiple iterations of the schedule we need to understand how the scope is changing because scope changing is a key indicator of the quality of a plan we can very easily do that in the nodes and links AI platform firstly we can go to progress and track and go to the list of activities what this does is it shows all the activities in the current program and it compares them against the baseline

00:36 so in version thirteen i am comparing against version three the baseline if i wanted to change that i simply click these three dots and click change the baseline now what we can see is here for this active this milestone M four zero one four the delivery was a hundred and three days later than the baseline it’s been actualised and it’s been completed but we can see for these activities here that they don’t exist in the baseline what the system does here is it compares the unique activity ID codes

01:09 between the two schedules to be able to compare them we can isolate obviously by different coding structures we can go down as deep as we want into those coding structures and if we want to run some numbers and analysis on it we can download the activity file that we’re currently looking at and analyze it in excel or power BI but if we want to take it even further we can go on compare on the left hand side of the screen and run an exhaustive comparison so i’m comparing version thirteen to version ten all i have to do is select it and

01:47 click compare there will be another video that goes into the exhaustive comparison that this does but for the sake of scope change here what i can see is there’s forty five new activities and two new milestones i can dive into these if i wish by clicking here i could also see that there’s forty eight deleted activities and four deleted milestones now i know this program has about fifteen hundred activities so with an addition let’s say around fifty for ease of math and a removal of around fifty

02:21 i can get a general ratio of how scope is changing between these two programmes so it’ll be fifty divided by fifteen hundred is the addition and the same with the removal and from that we can start to understand how the quality of our program in terms of scope change might drive in the future

00:01 to round off checking the quality of the plan we can look at its predictability now this won’t this won’t be something you’d want to look at if it is a baseline schedule because you’ve got no actuals in the data but if you’ve got a schedule with actuals in the data a reflection of the quality of the plan is number one if scope has changed in the plan so the original plan is not reflective of the scope of work being done in the future and number two is the durations that have been associated so the predictability

00:35 and what when tasks are being done so we said we’re going to do these five tasks on monday have they been done and have they been done to the correct durations resources et cetera we can very easily analyze that in the nodes and links AI platform to start with we can go to the home screen and we can go down to the bottom to how many activities have been delayed and we can start to analyze this so we can see that in this schedule we can see that six point two percent have been delayed by more than five days

01:10 four point eight have been delayed by more than ten days and two point three have been delayed by more than twenty but we can go down further if we go into progress and track we can go to the list of activities we just analyzed and start looking here so what i would do is i would filter on all the ones that have been completed i’m ordering by start date just by clicking here but you can do it any which way you want and i can see for example that all of these have been delivered on time this one has been delivered late

01:46 these have been delivered late these are scope creep and i’m sure if we find down these i’m sure we could probably find one that’s been delivered early yes yeah this has been delivered early we can obviously isolate it just like we’ve done before by coding structure or by the depth of the coding structure so for example in construction there’s a lot of late activities here and a lot of scope creep if you wanted to do a more detailed analysis we can download this data if we didn’t want to do the analysis ourselves what

02:20 we could do is click on the AI predict and go to the overview screen O there will be a longer video on how the prediction works and how to leverage the AI prediction screen but the key thing here is if we go to the top right and say how prediction works it gives us data on this schedule so here we can actually say here that thirty five percent of all activities today have been delayed and the average delay of these activities is twenty two days so we can start to get an understanding of whether or not we’re being pessimistic or optimistic

03:08 with regards when we’re going to do specific activities and how long they’re going to take if you combine that with the health checks that we looked at previously especially the riding day to date health check you’ve got a very good view of whether or not the plan is reflective of what’s happening in reality.

00:00 A very wise man once said to me, “for creation there is freedom, but for repetition, there’s process.” So I’ll talk you through my process that I’ve just gone through in this set of videos. First of all, I checked I was looking at the right plan by going to the home screen and clicking on the information within the schedule. Then, I performed my health checks. I did my DCMA checks, setting everything up with thresholds beforehand, and I did my additional checks. From my additional checks, I wanted to understand

00:31 the coding of the plan. I wanted to understand how the WBS, ABS, CBS, and OBS had been coded and how the activity IDs have been coded because then I could correlate that with the documentation that the organization would have. From this, what I care about is build strategy, so I want to know how things have been constructed to flow into and out of each other. Then, I wanted to know how much detail had been put in the near term compared to the end term, which is forward wave, and then I analyzed the scope accuracy. So, given that I was

01:07 getting updates, I wanted to know how much change was happening to the underlying plan that was happening over time, and then, lastly, predictability. So, you see how I went from a check that I’m looking at the right plan, check the data quality, understand the underlying data structure, so the WBS and the activity coding into the strategy in the forward wave because forward wave is an element of strategy. Into when I’m getting updates, I’m looking at scope change and predictability. What I would highly

01:41 advise is that you have a look at the processes set out in your organization, and if you don’t have a process set out in your organization, maybe take this one as a template and use it as the very simple step flows going through because again with repetition we need process, and process creates simplicity.