Scheduling Dashboard Offers New Ways to Track Projects
- Jun 12, 2015
Our Virtual Building Group developed a Scheduling Dashboard to allows us to monitor and track the health of every project’s schedule, ensure that our people know and use proper scheduling techniques, and hold people accountable to company standards.
How does it work?
The Dashboard is a web application where schedules created in P6, Synchro, or even Microsoft Project can be uploaded for project managers to self-audit their schedules and for VBG schedulers and operational leadership to review project status. The application shows the schedule health of all Beck projects from a very high level all the way down to individual tasks. The scheduling data is tracked over time, so users can view changes in contract completion dates, days gained/lost, number of scheduled activities, and maintain baselines, duration changes and proper logic. This helps Beck be proactive in keeping any individual job on schedule and helps us manage our projects across the company.
The main Dashboard page displays a list of projects with each project’s most recent schedule health score and a timeline of calendar days elapsed and remaining in the contract period. Clicking the score’s details link takes users to a table of schedules with basic date/milestone/task information and the final score for each schedule uploaded.
Users can dive down to a page containing further details to look at specific audit areas where their schedule might not adhere to company policy. The Dashboard checks things such as
- Checking of task-to-task sequential logic.
- Inclusion/exclusion of holidays
- Task duration
- Lag between tasks
- Task constraints
Users are able to compare a revised schedule to a baseline schedule. Rows and cells of the table are color-coded to indicate tasks which differ by appearing only in one schedule and not the other, or by appearing in both and having date or percentage completion differences.
The Beck VBG team won the AGC (Washington DC chapter) Innovation in Technology Award sponsored by the Washington Business Journal, given for the “best use of technology as a solution to an AEC industry issue or problem.”
The team is working to improve and expand the use of the tool in 2015. Enhancements in the pipeline include:
- Auto-generating schedule templates based on project type, expected project phases, etc. selected by the user.
- Cross-referencing job cost information
- Weather delay analysis
- Machine learning/statistical analysis of what constitutes a “good” schedule