If a schedule’s tasks have been defined and logical relationships assigned in a consistent manner during the development of a project schedule, the activities with a disproportionate number of predecessors or successors will indicate potential pinch points or merge hotspots.

Merge hotspots can indicate an increased probability of delay due to the compound effect of all proceeding or succeeding logic, to put it in way an activity with many predecessors is likely to suffer delay due to the increased probability that at least one predecessor is in turn delayed. Similarly, an activity that has many successors will have a disproportionate impact upon the overall schedule if it’s itself impacted by delay.

The compound effect of a schedule with many merged hotspots can also indicate a reduced likelihood of successful delivery on time.

In this video we will use the dashboard creator to generate a report from which we can determine and review the merge hotpots within a schedule. From the “reports and analysis” menu select “dashboard creator” then from the left-hand menu click to add new item, choose schedule density, here we will look at the activities proceeding logic, but the process is the same for successor logic.

Use the mouse to resize the chart, as you can see from this chart the majority of the tasks in the schedule have three or less proceeding ceding tasks, however, there are a significant number of tasks that have four or more predecessors which may be a cause for concern.

To dive deeper we can raise the chart settings form from the charts menu and select a range to review, here we will select to view the task that’s had five predecessors and then click to export to excel. The toolkit will now generate and download an Excel report each of the tasks that have five predecessors are listed and highlighted in blue, under which the tasks corresponding predecessors are listed with a link type and lag duration.

Although we selected to export the task with five predecessors the workbook produced also includes a worksheet for each range of tasks predecessor account, as well as a summary sheet and a full list of tasks along with their corresponding predecessors.