This video will guide you through and help you understand the Schedule Quality Report.
The SmartPM Schedule Quality Report
-The SmartPM Schedule Quality Report provides you with the tools to create high quality schedules and fix poor quality schedules. Schedule quality is a reliability metric. The higher the schedule quality grade, the more reliable that schedule is going to be as a management tool in the field, the more likely your critical path is going to be correct, the more likely the dates are going to be correct, the more likely that the sequencing has been thought through.
-The lower the schedule quality, the more likely your critical path will be incorrect, the more likely that your schedule is unreliable. The lower the schedule quality, the more at risk the project will be, and the metrics may not make sense. There's a garbage in garbage out factor. If you analyze a poor quality schedule, the results will not make sense.
-The SmartPM schedule quality grade only takes into account uncompleted activities. If there's an actual finish date on any of your activities, those activities are not incorporated in the schedule quality metrics.
Steps to Understand Schedule Quality
- Click on the Schedule Quality Grade: When you log into SmartPM, you can see the schedule quality grades on the company dashboard. To take a deeper look at the schedule quality of one of your projects, you can click on the grade in SmartPM which will take you right into the Schedule Quality tool in that project.
- Select Your Schedule: You can click on the “Select Schedule” drop down menu (located near the “Print Quality Report” and “Export ” buttons), and select any schedule in history.
What is in the Schedule Quality Report:
The first part of the Quality Report shows the relationship ratios, and you can see what types of logic ties are comprising your schedule.
- Red metrics highlight critical issues leading to a low quality grade marked in red at the top of the report.
- Yellow metrics are issues that need some work.
- Green metrics indicate high quality metrics in the schedule and will be towards the bottom of the report.
- Black text metrics are important metrics which don't affect the quality grade.
Printing or Creating a PDF of the Schedule Quality Report
You can create a PDF or print the Quality Report by selecting the “Print Quality Report” button and clicking the "Print" option or "Save" to save as PDF.
Exporting the Quality Report to an Excel File
You can export a detailed report which includes tabs for every section of the areas that need attention in detail.
Select the “Export” button which will download an Excel file that you can use to go diagnose the metrics in a different fashion.
If you click on the missing Logic tab at the bottom of the Excel file, you will see the comprehensive list of activities with missing logic. You can see the activities that have a high duration. This is a great way to understand what you need to do to fix the schedule quality.
If you log in and see that some of these metrics don't really pertain to your project, please talk with your company administrator. You could create a new schedule quality profile that makes more sense for your project. Different projects may require different schedule quality rubrics, depending on how they need to be constructed.