Flaw #5 Out-of-Sequence - OoS  (mike vergis - 02/23 23:35:17)

Flaw #5 Out of Sequence Activities
While working on a renovation job, the CM forbade me to correct Out-of-Sequence activities. A couple of months later, the schedule was blown apart with excessive negative float. That is what happens when someone disregards the scheduling constitutional process, which seemed ironically appropriate for this project, because the project was a renovation job for the US Supreme Court.

The old version schedule program that I used back then, provided a list with an explanation for the OoS. This made discovering OoS activities easy to correct. Current programs may or may not offer a complete list. Whatever the situation, the scheduler needs to locate the OoS in the schedule and set them right. Finding the OoS can be difficult at times especially when these are buried in predecessors? relationships in previous updates, but not correcting the OoS will distort a schedule, which is the flaw. Not correcting OoS activities will push successor activities beyond their appropriate start date at the expense of positive float. Even if the OoS-activity is not affecting the Critical (Longest) Path, other paths with OoS activities in them will be affected, which may include the near-critical activities.

Knowing where to find the OoS is easy enough. Completed activities are a done deal and Not Started activities have no progress to become OoS; therefore, activities with In-progress is where to look. OoS can be identified by searching for progressed activities that have a progress gap between the Data Date line and the remaining Not-progressed portion of the activities. The predecessors? relationships are the culprits where the successor is started before the predecessor is started and/or finished; therefore, Out-of-Sequence.

   
   

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