How to assess productivity (plan vs actual)

[dennis_ian_386]

Hi there everyone.. I'm a new planner and my boss is asking me to asses the productivity of our project per activity.. he wants me to identify individually which are delayed and by how much should we increase the resources of those delayed activities to finish the project on time. And he wants me to do it in excel.

Our other planner who made and presently updating our sched is using p3 and that's where my data comes from. He told me that when an activity has a negative float, then it is delayed. However, I noticed that almost all of the on going and unstarted activities have negative floats already so does it mean that I have to increase production of all those activities? Maybe there are just few activities that are really delayed and that might have caused delay on the others as well. If so, then how would i know which of those activities caused it?

I tried to use the dates as well, and the original and actual durations but i'm getting more confused because the dates are moving even for the ones not started. Can anyone advise me on how to best solve my problem? Please help...

Thanks in advance


Dennis

[pmhut]

Hi Dennis,

it seems to me that you need to read a bit more about Earned Value. Here's an earned value management tutorial. Hope you'll find it helpful.

[dennis_ian_386]

Hi... thanks for the reply.. That sure will help..(",)

[cdevera]

Hi Dennis

In order for you to assess the productivity of sets of tasks I suggest that you go to site and have a look around so you get to understand and feel what is happening on your project, also you need to talk to your project/site engineers or the person in-charge on those tasks. Since they are in the frontline they can give you more information that you might need in your assesment, hence you may be able to understand if an increase in resources is really needed or maybe there are other factors affecting the productivity.

On the relation between negative float and delays, what was told to you could be correct, however you need to check in your programme for constraints. This constraints could give you artificial delay, thus a negative float. Evaluate if those constraints are necessary or was it only used to keep a certain date in place. A programme should be logic driven and not by constraint. Also check the Critical Path and evaluate if that is correctly what is happening on your project.

HTH...