What's your foundation?

[pmkb]

This should serve as an interesting informal poll. All votes are completely anonymous. No one (including pmkb.com staff) can see your vote.

[Bernard]

I find it interesting that so far everyone has had some form of training/education before learning to use a scheduling program. In my experience within the refining/petrochem space (at least with plant maintenance departments), I think the majority of turnaround schedulers do not have CPM training/education.

[mattbowen]

I constantly keep an eye out for Intuitive interfaces and tools that put off any requirement for prior training before getting ROI.

[pmkb]

Matt, there are some who argue that easily accessible software has diminished the quality of scheduling as a discipline. PMI is currently working towards publishing a Practice Standard for Scheduling. Is critical path scheduling in danger of becoming a "lost art"?

[mattbowen]

pmkb said "Is critical path scheduling in danger of becoming a "lost art"?"

HA, you bet, and it is just one of many "arts" that are being lost.... You can put a child behind the wheel of a car... and they could maneuver and navigate from point A>B, that doesn't mean they should be out driving around with the rest of us.

I'm far from any pro here; lost/not lost arts... BUT...

When I look for an intuitive product to interface myself (the customer) with the tool, I don't mean that I've any business operating the tool.

[Bernard]

Looks like the poll results are evening out a bit. This is more in line with my experience.

pmkb, I have seen some clients present "schedules" devoid of any task to task dependencies (hard logic). There were only date constraints. CPM scheduling may not be a lost art yet - there are plenty of professionals still around - but you have to wonder sometimes about the economic drivers in place for companies to situate folks in scheduling positions for multi-million dollar projects when it's obvious they don't know what they are doing.

[harrywaldron]

I had formal training in advance, as I had American Management Association's Project Management training in the 1980s. I even studied about CPM and Network diagrams during College courses in the mid-1970s, before starting to work with MS Project about 10 years ago

[pmkb]

Oh goodness, I see someone voted the "what does ADM, PDM & CPM stand for?" answer. These are acronyms for some basic scheduling concepts/methods:

ADM = Arrow Diagramming Method
PDM = Precedence Diagramming Method
CPM = Critical Path Method

ADM & PDM may be considered as (children/derivatives?) forms for implementing CPM.

[Tony Bolstad]

I started using a product called Timeline 1.0 around 1988 or '89 when I started planning turnaround work for Shell Oil in Wilmington, CA. I had no training at all and had to figure out what was meant by tasks being ASAP or ALAP. I figured out relationships and resource loading as I went.

When I did finally get some schooling I understood all of the concepts and could make a schedule but I did not understand any of the standard scheduling terminology or theory. I was stumped on the first test that asked me to define CPM, forward pass, backward pass, TF, RD, etc... My first attempt at hand calculating a logic diagram was a disaster. Amazing what some real education can do for a person.

[Jim Ivie]

I started out in the Air Force with a DOS based system called CSNAS. It stood for Computer Supported Network Analysis System. I used that in 1985 and 1986. Part of the training provided include basic scheduling theory and definitions (two days).

Jim Ivie
EVMS Consultant
jivie@dc.rr.com