FEATURED PAPER

Does Better Scheduling Drive Execution Success?

By Dr Dan Patterson, PMP
CEO, Acumen

With assistance from Jin Ouk Choi
Research Intern, Acumen

Austin, Texas, USA

Introduction

Both the failure and cost/schedule overruns of major CapEx projects receive a high degree of public and stakeholder scrutiny and publicity.  However, rarely is the corresponding planning quality and project management maturity given the same level of detailed investigation.   Arguably, focus is generally given to the result of failure without also considering the root cause.

As such, this white paper is the result of a research project that was carried out during the summer of 2011 to investigate the relationship, if any, between project planning quality and project execution success. In other words, this project set out to determine if poor planning results in project cost and schedule overruns and conversely, does sound planning help ensure on time and successful project completion?

Hypothesis

The null hypothesis for this research exercise is that there is no measurable relationship between quality of planning and quality of execution. Instead, the success of execution is driven largely by the contractor’s ability to execute to a plan irrespective of its realism or achievability.

The alternate hypothesis is that there is indeed a positive correlation between sound project scheduling and successful on-time project execution completion, or, the better the plan, the higher the chance of on-time or early completion and the lesser quality of the plan, the higher the chance of a project overrun.

Approach

In order to prove or disprove the hypothesis, a quantitative analysis approach was adopted. So as to establish true quantitative measures for the analysis, the objective of the modeling was to quantify two primary attributes of a project:

• Quality of the plan

• Quality of the execution

If these two core entities can be successfully quantified, then any correlations between them can be determined easily using standard statistical correlation techniques. To describe this in a more qualitative manner: objectively determine the quality of the plan and compare against the quality of the execution to determine any relationship between the two…

More…

To read entire paper (click here)

About the Author Dr. Dan Patterson, PMP Author Dr. Dan Patterson PMP is the founder of Acumen and is a recognized thought leader and visionary within the project management industry. Prior to starting Acumen, Dan was Executive VP at Pertmaster, leading the Americas business unit from inception through to acquisition by Primavera. Dan is also responsible for developing a now widely accepted integrated qualitative/quantitative approach to risk analysis through facilitated risk workshops. His depth of knowledge extends well beyond risk into schedule analytics and project optimization.   Dan has a proven track record across multiple industries including A&D, government, energy and EPC. As CEO of Acumen, Dan now places focus on Acumen Fuse, the most advanced & comprehensive project analytics tool available for MS Project, Primavera, Deltek, MS Excel and more.