Breaking through to Collaborative Scheduling: Approaches and Obstacles
RT-362 categorized 23 collaborative scheduling practices into five pillars, which are the foundation for its maturity model. The team identified these model components through focus group discussions with SMEs and by developing affinity diagrams to organize the clusters into pillars and lanes (FR-362, p.10).
The team established scoring criteria cut-offs for each level of implementation maturity, based on the results of projects provided by survey respondents. The researchers analyzed each project by using the k-means clustering algorithm. This analysis used a total of 241 valid responses (FR-362, p.10).
RT-362 evaluated the five pillars and identified two as the most important to enable organizations to achieve gold status on CS: Goal Alignment with Owner and Scheduling Significance. The team then evaluated the attributes within each pillar and ranked them by using Multi-Objective Decision Analysis (MODA, a utility-based analysis technique) and the Delphi Method. Within the Goal Alignment with Owner pillar, Expectations bears the most weight in the process of achieving Gold. In the Scheduling Significance pillar, Culture is most important. The figure shows the weights for each pillar and attribute that the team identified (FR-362, p.11).
A chain of CS practices can be used in sequence to improve project performance. The figure illustrates how practices can be aligned to improve the performance of the five KPIs defined in the project, an analysis that resulted from using Chow-Lee trees (FR-362, 98).
The figure illustrates the most effective lanes for each pillar, relative to that pillar’s influence on the KPIs. For instance, the team identified having a Planning Mindset in the project as the most important lane in the Planners and Schedulers pillar because it is one of the top five lanes overall and affects both the Safety and Teamwork KPIs (FR-362, in press).
The three most effective practices were grouped under two pillars: Goal Alignment with Owner (green in the figure) and Scheduling Significance (purple). The Expectations and Interaction lanes under Goal Alignment with Owner were in the top three positions for the KPIs, while Scheduling Significance’s Visibility lane affected every KPI but Safety within the top three levels, and its Culture lane affected the Teamwork KPI at the top level (FR-362, in press).
As the figure shows, the 241 survey respondents perceived nine CS practices as consistently implemented, 21 as not consistently implemented, and two as consistently not implemented. They also rated each practice as having a high or low impact (FR-362, p. 51).
Final Report 362 explains how the team identified which CS drivers were most frequently mentioned in the interviews by applying qualitative analyses that used coding schemes. The report discusses these drivers in greater detail, showing how they support the model recommendations and augment the findings obtained from the team’s quantitative analysis of the survey results (FR-362, in press).
