The Activity Count Graph
The Original Duration Graph is an important first-step, but a second-step, Activity Start Graph or an Activity Finish Graph, gives a scheduler some additional valuable insight on anticipated sequential progress for each month of a construction project. Unlike the OD Graph, it is much simpler and faster to do. As always, adhere to the proper parameters for creating a decent schedule. Using a schedule program that will group activities by start date or finish date and have an Activity Count feature is necessary. Otherwise, the graph will not be so easy to do.
1. The schedule column titles: Act ID-Activity Name-Activity Count-Start Date-Finish Date. The start and finish dates and the activity count are the main players; the other data is for background information. Use a Construction Activities Only filter for construction analysis.
2. Group the activities by monthly finish date. Sort is not so important, but sort by finish date for referencing. This could just as well be ?Group by monthly start date.? I prefer the finish date for baseline analysis. Use both start date graphs and finish date graphs for subsequent monthly updates. Use these graphs to compare starts and finishes or use singularly and watch for the tsunami affect as the project goes forward. It is the tsunami affect that will sound the alarms.
3. Collapse the month summary line for finish date grouping. For each month a total number of finish activities will be summarized.
4. Copy/Paste the summarized data to an Excel spreadsheet.
5. Make a table having two columns for Month and Activity Count. The Notice to Proceed month or some other construction start milestone will be the first month in the table. Enter the months and adjacent to each month, enter the summarized total activity count.
6. Select/Insert a Line Graph to observe the y-axis activity count and the x-axis months.
7. The observed graph will have waves that indicate the intensity of activities expected to finish in each month.
That is all there is to making the Activity Count Graph and creating the Tsunami Affect.
Once the Activity Count Graph starts inputting actual monthly update data, unfinished activities will be pushed into the succeeding month. As the project continues, these unfinished activities will start to pile up as more starts than finishes occur. As more and more of the unfinished activities are pushed into succeeding months, a tsunami of unfinished activities begins to build up in the immediate successor month. This huge number of unfinished activities distorts the schedule. Revising the critical path each month to bring it back to zero float does not help, it just exacerbates the condition. As long as the zero float concept is applied, the Look-Ahead schedules have little value, which is the exact opposite of schedule intentions and purpose.
Some activities just seem to never want to get finished on time. These types of activities make for a misleading narrative. To overcome this stalemate situation, consider a non-progressing activity that is 90% complete as 100% complete and create another similar activity as a rolling punchlist item at 0% and not-started; thereby, keeping it in the schedule as unfinished work, but off the graph. Link the new punchlist activity to its predecessor, the hard construction activity, to keep the continuity in the schedule path and keep it out of the way with the construction only filter. The successor link is whatever is deemed appropriate. Punchlist items should not be considered as hard construction activities along with milestones, testing, commissioning, and others. Rolling punchlist activities are typically not critical activities and they get done when they get done. Activities that are not above 90% complete and activities that are scheduled to start, but do not start, will need a second look and realistic schedule adjustments.
NOTE: Not Started; In-progress; Completed
Determine the percentages for Started activities and Finish activities and Not-Started Activities: 1) Started equals Completed plus In-progress activities 2) Finished equals Completed 3) Not Started Activities equals Total activities minus Started activities 4) Total Activities equals In-progress, Completed, and Not-Started. These calculated percentages will provide some measure on progress that can be compared to other physical percents complete percentages. Average Started activities percent with Completed activities percent to determine an approximation of the Physical Percent Complete. Compare the result with some of the other Physical Percent Complete calculation methods.