Understand Your Schedule

Large projects require complex schedules that affect the plans of many people—not just project resources, but finance, management and a host of interdependent departments and entities.

It’s critically important that the schedule be as accurate as possible so companies can save effort, reduce budget and enable teams to deliver on time.

Unfortunately, complex schedules in complicated scheduling software (like Microsoft Project and Primavera) are prone to errors in the critical path. This makes it difficult to trust the forecast—which undermines confidence in the program.

Brings confidence to the schedule.

As the first and most powerful commercial software application in the “schedule quality” space, Steelray Project Analyzer (Project Analyzer, for short) continues to set the standard as the best solution to uncover issues in—and improve the accuracy of—the critical path. Here’s why:

• Project Analyzer is the only solution to use statistically validated measures.
• Project Analyzer offers the most comprehensive repository of best scheduling practices, gathered from a large community of project managers across diverse industries.
• Project Analyzer can tackle larger and more complex project schedules than any other solution (which is why some of our best customers are actual rocket scientists).
• Project Analyzer’s simple, frictionless interface makes it the easiest solution to use, resulting in shorter time-to-results and greater cost savings.
• Project Analyzer makes better schedulers with its built-in encyclopedia of schedule quality.
• Project Analyzer uncovers issues far beyond the DCMA 14-point assessment, so you’re more likely to pass an audit and you’ll save the headaches of schedule hold-ups and lost revenue.
• As the number one schedule quality tool, Project Analyzer is frequently a skill listed on schedule analyst job descriptions and resumes.
• Project Analyzer is a product made and supported by passionate, highly skilled US-based developers, dedicated to great service.

What is Steelray Project Analyzer?

Steelray Project Analyzer is software that takes the pain out of creating, maintaining and delivering quality schedules. With Project Analyzer, you can evaluate your project schedule for quality and performance in minutes and produce understandable results. Schedules can be analyzed against project management best practices, internally defined best practices and government best practices.

Project Analyzer supports Microsoft Project .mpp files as well as Project Server and Project Online schedules.

Common Mistakes Can Skew the Critical Path

Scheduling software makes it relatively easy to create schedules and calculate a critical path, but it doesn’t do much to prevent common mistakes that result in an incorrect critical path.

Based on the thousands of schedules we’ve seen in the past 15 years, we can say with certainty that almost every medium-to-large schedule contains serious mistakes, including:

• Overuse of hardcoded start and finish dates, instead of letting the scheduling software calculate them.
• Neglecting to sequence tasks with other tasks they depend on (or that depend on them).
• Improperly using features of the scheduling tool (EX: adding “lag” to tasks to manipulate start dates).

Think about it: the purpose of scheduling software is to produce a good critical path, and almost all medium-to-large schedules contain mistakes that make the critical path incorrect.

The Impact of Using Project Analyzer

Suppose a company brought you in to consult on a large project they were launching. On your first day, they give you project schedule with a finish date of December 15th that year. You load the schedule into Project Analyzer, run a scorecard report, and Project Analyzer flags six crucial problems with the schedule.

So you meet with the scheduler and stakeholders, modify the schedule and run it through Project Analyzer again. Now there are no longer any problems, but the finish date is February 15th, two months later than the original forecast!

The impact? You now have valuable, up-front information about the truth of the schedule—and can do something about it—several months before misinformation would have lead to the headaches of time and cost overruns.