Projects + Management = Project-Management

 

Braimah, Nuhu; Ndekugri, Issaka: Factors influencing the selection of delay analysis methodologies; in: International Journal of Project Management, in press (2008).

Delay analysis. What a great tool. Whoever fought a claim with a vendor, might appreciate this. Braimah & Ndekugri analysed the factors influencing the decision which delay-analysis to use. Their study was done in the construction industry where delay analysis is a common tool in claims handling. [On the other side, I have not seen a delay analysis done for a fight with a vendor on an IT project. There is so many things we can learn.]

The authors identify 5 different types of delay analysis.
(1) Time-impact analysis – the critical event technique – modelling the critical path before and after each event
(2) As-planned vs. as-built comparison – the shortcut – compare these two projections, don’t change the critical path, might skew the impact of the event if work wasn’t going to plan previously
(3) Impacted vs. as-built comparison  – the bottom-line – analyse the new date of completion, but no changes to critical path
(4) Collapsed vs. as-built comparison – the cumbersome – first an as-built critical path is calculated retrospectively (this is tricky and cumbersome), secondly all delays are set to zero = collapsing. The difference between these two completion dates is the total delay.
(5) Window analysis – the best of all worlds – the critical path is split into timeframes and only partial as-built critical paths are modelled. The total delay is the total delay of windows impacted by the event in question. Good way to break-down complexity and dynamics into manageable chunks.

In the second part [which I found less interessting, but on the other hand I never touched this interesting analytical subject of delay-analysis before] the authors explore the factors influencing the delay analysis used. The factors found are

• Project characteristics
• Requirements of the contract
• Characteristics of the baseline programme
• Cost proportionality
• Timing of analysis
• Record availability

This entry was posted on Montag, September 22nd, 2008 at 09:25 and is filed under Scheduling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.