Many Projects are doomed right at the beginning due to failure of the Project control system. In order to set up a supportive and efficient project control system, practitioners must have enough knowledge and experience regarding the components of the Planning system and their relationships. Having an activity list in a scheduling software or having few Excel files that are almost independent of each other do not called Planning System.
A Project and its Consultant
On a major EPC project, a consultant was hired to implement a planning system. After weeks of work, they presented a detailed schedule and S-Curves. However, the client noticed something critical: the contractual weight values for Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (E, P, C) were completely missing from the calculations.
The Consultant's "Shortcut" Basis:
- Assigned a DUMMY resource to all activities to bypass real resource loading.
- Developed S-Curves for E,P and C, then extracted overall "budgeted units" to develop the overall S-Curve.
- Ignored contractual weightings in favor of software-calculated totals.
The image below illustrates how the budgeted units get calculated when Dummy resource, or anything that uses the duration of activity as volume of work:
The client askes how the contractual weight values have been used in the development of the overall S-Curve and how they will be used for progress reporting? The consultant tries to answer the questions but during the meeting they mention that they used a DUMMY resource for resource loading.
What Went Wrong?
The consultant eventually faced termination when the client requested for number of man-power and resource leveling for skill sets like welders and cranes. The "Dummy" system couldn't provide this data.
The "Dummy" Concept is Fundamentally Flawed:
An S-Curve represents cumulative work or cost. By using dummy resources, you change the definition to "Cumulative Duration over Duration." Because an activity's duration rarely represents its true work value, the resulting progress reports are entirely misleading.
The Correct Practice
To set up a planning system that survives project execution, follow these 6 steps:
![Correct Planning System Diagram](/image/Dummy3.png")
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