Introduction

Schedule Doctor is a tool which simply uses a collection of Project Scheduling Rules (developed by GBA), to identify issues with your project schedules. Many scheduling packages have different ways of dealing with certain planning scenarios, and the tool attempts to highlight some of those flaws (if there are any) in your own project plans.

Project Scheduling is not just a point and click excercise. Schedulers should understand that the work they put into a schedule will most likely form part of a legally binding document, that is, a plan to which work will be preformed and is agreed upon. Typically the work is executed against a Master Baseline Schedule (MBS) and getting the plan right from the outset is critical.

In our 20+ years of experience, it has become evident that a lack of understanding around project planning and scheduling has emerged. Rather than manually calculating the critical path and anlsying the critical path, we now have software that does it for us. This means that although efficiencies are introduced into planning and scheduling, lack of thinking and analysis of the resultant schedules often leads to lengthy disputes.

Supported Scheduling Packages

For release one, the following packages are supported:

• Microsoft Project 2003, 2007

In released two and future releases, we plan to accomodate the following scheduling packages:

• Open Plan
• Primavera 5, 6
• Artemis
• PertMaster
• MicroPlanner
• Open Project

Services

Using our in-house tool, GBA Projects has the ability to determine the overal “health” of your project schedule. We are able to:

• Run an analaysis on the project plan
• Perform a full technical analysis and program review
• Provide Scheduling Training using the GBA Rules for Scheduling to assist with maintaining a high level of quality planning

Analysis Results

Once the Schedule Doctor analyzes your schedule using our Scheduling Rules, results are published inside the main screen of the tool. These results can be exported into Microsoft Word where they can be interrogated against the project plan, making commenting and review an easier, less time consuming task.

Half of the problem with schedule analysis and interrogation is the “Where to start from” problem. The Schedule Doctor gives you the starting points to work from to ensure that your program meets standards set by years of project planning and scheduling experiences across the world.

What Does it Check For?

A typical analysis of a schedule involves the following procedures:

• Baseline health and slippage; effects on other tasks
• Activity health and relationship validity
• Driving Critical Path analysis
• WBS/Summary/Outline level reporting analysis and problems
• Scheduling Package Specific problems (eg, lag drag, lead pull)
• Progressing Health, has the plan been progressed properly and according to plan?
• Syntax (if applicable to your organisation)
• General plan structure

All of the above procedures are settings which can be turned on or off, depending on what you want to analyse.

The schedule is then scored out of 100% according to the GBA standard points allocation method.

Where Can I get More Information?

Please do not hesitate to contact one of our consultants for more information.

You can also register on our website to get the latest updates about the product.