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As presented at the Project Control Summit, May 18–21, 2022

Tim Mather, COO at PMA Technologies

As COO of PMA Technologies, Tim leads the design and development team and the intellectual property efforts surrounding NetPoint. He is a certified Project Management Professional with extensive project management, software development, and marketing experience. Tim earned his bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and pursued postgraduate study of project management at the University of Chicago.

Why Perform Schedule Simulation?

We are trying to predict the probability of project completion. This simulation produces a predicted project end date for each iteration. Over thousands of iterations, a pattern will emerge. When the pattern stabilizes, the simulation has come to convergence and the probability end dates can be charted (P dates).  P dates are expressed in the percentage probability of meeting that date based on the simulation. Many large capital projects require a certain P-value (P80 for instance would predict an 80 percent chance of project completion by a certain date) before the project will be authorized. A board of directors uses the Monte Carlo results to inform their decision about committing capital to a project. The more accurate the simulation results, the better informed the decision makers will be.  That is why our innovation is so important. CPM is overly optimistic and gives the decision makers bad information.

The Problem: CPM Optimism Bias in Simulation

Every CPM-based Monte Carlo simulation is based on a deterministic schedule model in which every activity starts on the early date. As we apply the Monte Carlo simulation to this model, each iteration will also start with every activity on the early date. The CPM forward and backward pass is a bulk operation that is insensible to intermediate changes to the network as the iteration progresses through the network.

The Solution: Floating and Pacing

In a GPM Monte Carlo simulation, activities can react to what has occurred earlier in their float chain. This means that the schedule model can more closely approximate what happens in a real-world project. GPM can model decision making based on progress on a chain during the simulation.

The post Innovations in Planning and Risk for Construction Project Controls appeared first on PMA Consultants.

Presentation by: Dina Keirouz, Managing Director
Dina Keirouz is a result-oriented professional with 26 years of hands-on experience in operations,  program,  project and construction management, and industry best practices and standards. She has proven success in delivering successful design and construction projects on time and within budget while managing and coordinating amongst several stakeholders with varying interests and focuses. Her project experience includes transportation, airports, and infrastructure capital programs. Ms. Keirouz also has extensive working knowledge of project controls,  including developing and implementing program-wide controls and project management systems for large municipal clients. Ms. Keirouz’s key attributes include leading high-performing teams under tough deadlines to meet the expectations of multiple stakeholders. She is a turn-around expert who ensures stakeholder satisfaction through constant communications and relationship building while producing consistent, quality results and tightening cost and schedule controls.  She has demonstrated success in driving on-time, cost-controlled programs in alignment with time/budget restrictions.

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Presented at:
2020 Western Winter Workshop
Thursday, February 27th to Sunday, March 1st, 2020

The post Why do we Keep Making the Same Mistakes with PMIS? appeared first on PMA Consultants.

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Narges Manoucheri-Jahani

Narges brings extensive experience leading project management systems implementation for the design and construction industry. She has a strong combination of in-depth computer systems knowledge and project management expertise. For the last ten years, she has focused on integrating public and private agency project management, financial, and scheduling systems to efficiently exchange cost and schedule information among multiple data sources utilizing Agile methodologies.

The post UAT and SIT in Successful PMIS Systems Implementation appeared first on PMA Consultants.

PMA and Bruce Stephan leveraged NetPoint to better analyze, understand, and share the delay sources for risk assessment of a complex $1 billion+ transit project that was behind schedule with three years of work remaining.

Bruce presented his experience at the 2016 NetPoint & GPM Conference.

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What made this project unique to others you have managed in the past?

Although not unique, design-build contracts are less common in the industry. This is a mega construction project with a contract value of $1.2B.

During your initial schedule analysis at month 19, a four-month initial delay was predicted in the P6 schedule that later was realized to be an eight-month delay.

When demonstrating the schedule to the client using NetPoint, did visualizing the schedule help convince the client that the eight-month delay was accurate?

Yes, it did. We found the initial delay during discussions, schedule analysis, and document reviews. During the analysis, we found that the contractor had not incorporated known change orders in their schedule. When we incorporated the known change orders, an additional four-month delay became obvious. NetPoint was used to graphically show the delay and communicate it to the project team.

Consolidating a 10K+ activity schedule into a one-page 200-activity NetPoint model is quite a feat!

How long did it take you to create the one-page model and how many other PMAers were involved (if any)?

Was this the most complex one-page schedule you had ever created?

It took about a week or two and it was done by David Weber from the PMA Phoenix office. We do this type of schedule consolidation on a regular basis, but it wasn’t the most complex. The most complex NetPoint one-pager we did was on the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center where we pulled 125 schedules into one NetPoint view.

Having worked on this project, what is the one piece of advice you would share with fellow industry experts?

When running risk workshops on complex projects, it’s best to use a summary schedule like NetPoint to do what-if scenarios live to show the impact of risks and mitigations being analyzed.

Are you still involved in this project?

My role on this project has been completed.

What outcome is expected to get the project back on track now that the client clearly understands the current schedule from the NetPoint demonstration?

As a result of our efforts, the client recently settled a large delay claim with the contractor and re-baselined the project. PMA was recently re-engaged to conduct another risk assessment for the project that will help keep the project moving towards timely completion.

The post Mitigating Schedule Risk Using NetPoint appeared first on PMA Consultants.

2016 NetPoint & GPM Conference Keynote Presentation

Schedules encompassing thousands of activities contain overwhelming amounts of data. Even in the case of Level 1 and 2 schedules, data volume increases greatly as updates and revised baselines are generated. In this Keynote, Dr. Gui introduces new schedule analytics functionality in NetPoint for modeling and recasting attributes and data within a schedule or within two compared schedules. NetPoint schedule analytics provides meaningful schedule metrics and scores schedule reliability through a novel Schedule IQ algorithmic application of Core Traits of a Reliable Schedule.

PRESENTED BY GUI PONCE DE LEON, PHD, PE, PMP, LEED AP

Dr. Gui Ponce de Leon is one of our nation’s foremost planning and scheduling experts. His professional experience includes roles as investor’s developer, construction manager, program manager, and EPC contractor planner/scheduler. Dr. Gui has continually pioneered innovations in project management throughout his 40-year career. With GPM, he is on a quest to transform scheduling from a task performed by specialists using a “black box” to stakeholder-centric processes that promote collaboration, enhance stakeholder interaction, and inherently result in reliable schedules.

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The post In Pursuit of Reliable Schedules: Introducing NetPoint Numerati appeared first on PMA Consultants.

While incremental improvement can make a career, this presentation dares to pursue breakthrough improvement when one recognizes that an entrenched professional practice has lost value or relevance over time. Particularly, this lecture posits that the critical path method of planning and scheduling has outlived its usefulness in that it remains a task performed by specialists using a black-box process in the face of an Internet social revolution that cries out for more collaborative, transparent, “stakeholder-centric” processes. The lecture introduces the graphical path method (GPM) and explains why it is the proper approach to planning and scheduling, and therefore, to project management, in the Internet era. While this lecture focuses on Dr. Ponce de Leon’s experience in our industry, more importantly, it challenges students to recognize that individual driven learning begins at commencement.

How Lifelong Learning Has Shaped My Career

Making 50+ Years of Scheduling Calculus Obsolete

Tishman Distinguished Lecture
Speaker: Gui Ponce de Leon, PhD, PE, PMP, LEED AP
Date: Monday, February 23, 2015

This lecture, which is an integral part of the Tishman Construction Management Program at the University of Michigan, is made possible through a generous gift from Mr. John L. Tishman who served as the Chief Executive Officer at Tishman Realty and Construction Co., Inc. It is intended to promote construction management research, education, and practice among faculty and students. The 2015 speaker will be Dr. Gui Ponce de Leon.

About Dr. Gui

Dr. Gui Ponce de Leon is the founder and CEO of PMA Consultants LLC (PMA), a firm ranked in the top fifty of ENR’s list of Top 100 Construction Management Firms and Top 50 Program Managers since 2005. PMA currently operates 12 offices nationwide. Since 2004, Dr. Ponce de Leon has led the development of PMA’s groundbreaking, patented graphical path method (GPM®) of planning/scheduling and its software embodiments, NetPoint® and NetRisk. Dr. Ponce de Leon’s expertise and leadership in introducing innovative project scheduling methods and techniques will make for a great contribution to the Tishman Distinguished Lecture Series.

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The post How Lifelong Learning Has Shaped My Career appeared first on PMA Consultants.