How to perform Schedule Quality analysis & set RAG thresholds

The XER Schedule toolkit provides a tool for interrogating the integrity of a schedule’s structure, based on industry-standard metrics such as the DCMA 14-point check.

Drill down to analyse deficient elements of the schedule directly from the intuitive dashboard.

This tutorial will also demonstrate the process for setting Red Amber Green (RAG) thresholds and save this as a scheme.

Learn more about schedule quality

Introduction

The schedule quality analysis function is accessed via the “reports and analysis” menu. The toolkit employs industry standard metrics to assess the structure of schedules and operates on a red, amber, green or rag system, whereby green indicates that the overall number of issues identified falls within the threshold tolerance set for each check, and red indicates a call for concern and further evaluation.

Although each quality check on its own has an element of subjectivity, provided the rag thresholds have been set according to the nature of the specific project, the quality dashboard consisted of as a whole provides a reasonable view as to how well the schedule has been put together.

Quality dashboard

To view the description and help understand the relevance of each quality check, click the information button on the check tile. To access the detailed results of a specific quality check, click on the relevant tile and a new window will open displaying the activities or relationships that have been identified as deficient.

Quality checks

Each quality check has its own specific settings that can be adjusted by clicking the options button. It can be useful to remove WBS summaries and level of effort bars from some checks such as missing predecessors or successors, since they cannot impact upon the schedule’s logic network.

Removing checks

Depending on the nature of the project schedule being interrogated some of the quality checks may not be relevant, such as checks relating to resources for schedules that do not have resources, in this instance click the close button to remove the check from the dashboard.

We can reveal all hidden tiles by clicking the reveal button on the left menu. Similarly, we can reset all default settings including thresholds and check settings by clicking the reset default button.

Managing RAG thresholds

To manage the rag thresholds, click the manage thresholds button. Thresholds can be set for a single quality check or by checking the boxes multiple checks can be updated simultaneously. Thresholds can be triggered by a percentage of results or by a definitive quantity of failing instances so in this case the threshold is set to be triggered by a percentage, whereby anything lower than 5 of all cases will trigger green, and anything over 10 will trigger red, with amber for anywhere in between. For checks such as missing logic, it might be that anything more than one activity without a predecessor or successor triggers red. Click apply and once thresholds have been updated click save.

Output report

We can save any combination of thresholds and settings as a scheme through the manage schemes process. Give the scheme a name which could link to an industry sector or specific client and click save as with all toolkit reports and functions a detailed output report can be exported to Microsoft excel, the output spreadsheet contains a summary worksheet along with sheets detailing a list of all tasks and relationships within the project analyser. There is also a separate worksheet listing the deficient items for each quality check.