Dear France,
your website is good for any planner.
Level of planning depend of organisation & project size.
for normal case planning level is following items.
1- Strategic Planning
2- Business Planning
3- Budgeting
4- Action

Best Regards
Mehdi

the lower levels should support the higher levels

they are just a more detailed breakdown of the same element

Vladimir,

I think it could be either way. For a project there could be many levels of programme that are all within one database, so all of the levels are electronically linked, or the different levels for that project could indeed be different databases.

Some people would prefer one way, whilst other people would prefer another. In my experience, the top levels which are normally produced by a contractor are all linked and in one database, but the lower levels are often produced by sub-contractors and in most cases are in different databases (and even sometimes in different software).

I don’t think there is a right or a wrong way.

Andy, glad you like the idea. Let us know what you think when you have read the paper.

Gary

Gary,

Can I just say that I am overjoyed that this topic is being discussed and even more so that there is a concious effort to try to standardise. I have just left a company in shear frustration as they just couldn’t/wouldn’t grasp the concept of the levels (amongst a few other gripes).

One main frustration for me was countless times I would see low-level Milestones/tasks included in what was labelled as level 1 when the only purpose they served was people perceived them to be very important to the project. I argued that they may well be important but they still belong at the lower level where they fit in with the logic. They would often have no predecessors/successors because there was nothing else of the lower level to link with so would just ’hang’ there. My real argument was that these activities were not included in lower-levels at all anyway where they should have actually been managed.

Another difficulty I came across is that Level 1 was also used as the ’Integrated’ plan. Now because it was integrated the tendancy was to produce a plan that identified all of the dependancies between the different organisations involved. Therefore, I have actually seen the level 1 grow to more than 500 activities! Surely not right!

They suffered greatly from this problem in my opinion and it was a very large/complex project too!

As part of a Post-Grad course I took with the Open University, there was a superb diagram illustrating the hierarchy of schedules. This showed level 1 and each level 1 activity had an associated level 2 network and then each level 2 activity had an associated level 3 network etc to level 4. Have you come across this kind of arrangement when considering your standardisation document?

I have often thought that it may be a good discipline to call Level 1 the ’Integrated schedule’ and Level 2 the ’Integration schedule’. This in my opinion would show activities in level 1 that are effectively a ’shared’ measure of progress across stakeholders and even organisations. Then the Level 2 would hold Key dependancies across stakeholders/organisations along with the Work Package type activities. Just a thought really, what do you think?

I have yet to read the document but will do so with great interest and will also try to comment.

Sorry to ramble.
Regards

Andy Cadman

Interesting question, I would begin by saying that there is no one correct answer.
Project schedules are a report. When preparing reports you need to consider who the target reader is going to be, and what do they need/want to see.

The only level of detail that is standard for all projects is level 1, where the project delivery appears as one line. This is useful for showing preceding activities such as feasibility studies and engineering investigations as well as succeeding activities such as production ramp up and decommissioning of facilities made redundant by the project deliverables.

Further breakdown of the project will be governed by the type of project, goals of the project (stages), the size and complexity, cost, risk etc.

one point to remember tho is that when people refer to schedule levels they are usually refering to level of detail not organisation levels.

Level 3 may have activity duration in weeks where as level 5 in hours, but again this will be goverened by the project.

This is a very interesting subject and one that is very dear to my heart.

I am currently going through the process of completing a paper on this subject. The paper has been written and is currently going through a staged consultation process and we are at the end of the stage 1 consultations. Stage 2 will commence shortly and stage 3 will involve obtaining comments from planners and schedulers from across the world.

When we are at stage 3 (hopefully in 2 weeks time), I will provide a link in this forum to the paper, so that any PP’ers can comment.

Gary France
Chairman
Planning Engineers Organisation

One typical definition of the levels

Level 1 – Management (Summary) Schedule:

This will be a single page (A4 or A3) bar chart schedule rolled up from the Level 2 schedule. It will show Contract milestones, key milestones and summary bars based on the WBS to the agreed level of details. The schedule will reflect the critical path.



Level 2 – Overall Contract Schedule:

Level 2 schedule, in bar chart format, will show the relationship between all the activities in major work areas. This will also cover important elements like mobilisation, sub-subcontracts, LLIs, critical activities and high risk activities. At initial stage this schedule will set up the framework for detailed Level 3 schedules. During the updates this schedule will rollup the progress and the forecasts from the Level 3 schedule.

Level 3 – Detailed Contract schedule:

Level 3 schedule will be a bar chart based on a Critical Path Method (CPM) network. The activities will be broken to the small level so that these can be clearly identified, measured, resourced and linked in ‘start-to-finish’ relationship. Start-to-start and finish-to-finish relations will be omitted (or kept to absolute minimum) to ensure meaningful time analysis.

Level 3 schedule will be the ‘live’ model of the contract and will be the tool for schedule analysis for identification of critical path and resource bottlenecks. This schedule will include activities of subcontractors as well.

Level 3 schedule will provide the schedule windows for the Level 4 schedules. Level 3 schedule updates will reflect level 4 status.

Level 4 – Detailed schedules and control documents:

Requirement of the Level 4 schedules will be covered in the ITBs and will be finalised upon award of the contracts.
These schedules identify each deliverable and show the schedule (plan, actual, forecast) for every step for completing the deliverable. The schedules provide the basis for day to day implementation of the work as well for progress calculation.
Common Level 4 schedules are Engineering document register, Procurement Log, Piling status, Equipment foundation status, Spool fabrication status, Testing schedule etc.

Its based on common sense something that planners should use

Forget the package software

Planning is getting a concept across to the person who is receiving it in the time available

A programme manages a project not satisfies a contract

And yes thats my experience however i will stand corrected by somebody with a PRACTICAL solution ie not from a text book written by a person who the closest he got to a site was visiting his sandwich training students.

Oscar

Raja

No it does not

Simplisticly level 1 no more than 50 activities all hammocks except milestones or key dates should provide an executive summary of the project

level 2 the sort of detail you would review at monthly site meetings about 250 activities again all hammocks

Level 3 a programme of about 500 activities which ends up at the end of the Project as a hammock programme as you develop the level 4 and 5 programmes.

Often used as the basis of 2 monthly rolling programmes


If you want to add a WBS or other codeing to sort the levels thats an entirely different matter

The level of a programme should be a reflection for the target receipient

Hope this helps.