Ronald,

I know you would never get into tampering with P3; my point is that probably it would have been easier to do within the software itself, especially when activities competing for resources are "moved" into the path based upon the particular algorithm. Shouldn’t the constraining algorithm tell you about the drivers of your path and about resource critical activities?

About total float reflecting contract requirements here I do not agree, it hides the understanding of the paths and because of this many schedulers remove constraints that tie the backward computations to a constraint. Milestones should reflect contract requirements. P3’s constraints that affect backward computations should never be accepted as a mandatory contractual requirement, is unnecessary, does not make any sense to me.

I could live with a functionality that toggles on and off those constraints that fix dates for backward computations and giving back your constraint dates at a click of the mouse. Until then would avoid using such P3 constraints, obviously unless at gunpoint it is a contractual requirement. I consider P3 handling of must finish constraint self serving to the Owner at the expense of the Contractor needs.

Best regards,
Rafael

About Longest Path:

Although the teory on longest path as defined by Ron Winter might be adapted to take into account constraints it might be that Schedule Analyzer and third party software cannot do so as they can only work only with database values and cannot re-engineer the software because of copyright issues.

Best regards,
Rafael

Dear harzelli,

This is a good size project. The critical activities might be 30-40 pages at the start of the project and it will increase with time as more activities become critical.

You also need to filter the activities with 1, 2, and 3 days of floats, because chances are that few will become critical in the upcoming reporting cycles.

Remember that your analysis is as good as your review, so engage the teams working on the project and let them know what is happening on first hand basis.

With kind regards,

Samer

Year 2012 is nearing, the end of days for Primavera P3 is closing but if you have the resources you can buy Schedule Analyzer for P3, available also for P6.

Because P6 does not fit my needs I would like to have Schedule Analyzer available for Spider Project. The functionality in Spider Project to filter all predecessors to an activity and export to a new job leaves out those activities not linked but that still have or might eventually have an effect on the longest path. Such as, those activities not linked by logic but that still compete for resources.

harzelli,

Keep in mind that some software does fool the CPM computations by setting a Finish-No-Later-Than constraint equal to the late finish in their backward computation; therefore you might have negative slack/float.

http://www.warnercon.com/articles/Article%207%20-%20Use%20of%20Milestone...

It is an invention of someone who occurred this as to satisfy the need of low IQ owners by reminding them that if you they see negative slack the job is falling behind schedule when all they need is to compare milestone activities target dates versus early dates.

Most of the software that fool the backward pass cannot override these unless you erase the constraints to follow the logic and then replace them back to satisfy this ridiculous requirement. Some schedulers resort to all kind of tricks to get back the true late dates as defined under traditional CPM theory, the most common is to use global change to erase the constraints but to get them back is not that easy.

Superior software let you define a Finish-No-Later-Than constraint without fooling the backward pass and still providing the functionality to spot delays. I would not mind if you could toggle between one and the other (Superior and Inferior) but unfortunately none that I know has provided this functionality as of today.

To me, Samer definition should be the only one as negative float is an aberration.

Best regards,
Rafael