Introducing our new Portfolio Schedule Integrity Checker

New ways of doing schedule integrity

As a risk practitioner and a project manager, I’ve had to spend a fair amount of my time assessing schedules for their validity, a term often described as ‘schedule integrity’. And it’s important; the schedule is a contractual document, but also the basis for assessing the impact of delay - or efficiency - in projects.

Thing is, it’s not terribly interesting (in my humble opinion). When you’re looking at large quantities of projects, it’s laborious, too. It’s difficult to pick out trends, and there’s a lot of data handling going on which gives rise to user error when compiling these insights.

This is something we heard from users of our Portfolio product: it’s great to be able to see the individual project insights, but there’s added value when these can be combined to give a ‘portfolio level’ view that enables owners of portfolios to identify trends - whether that is risk, resource loading or, in this case, schedule quality. It’s also a good indicator of compliance with any schedule management standards an organisation has.

So I’ve had great fun with our engineering team and our users in building a multi-project schedule integrity tool that looks at trends across a portfolio. I really enjoy building solutions that I’ve not seen elsewhere, and that I’m sure our users will love.

For example, we’ve got a couple of views. You can see a summary of what the challenges are, sorted by some of the key metrics that go into schedule checking, and you can see where the big challenges lie but also, importantly, what the portfolio is good at! I think in infrastructure we are too eager to focus on our problems without celebrating what we are doing well.

From this view, you can go on to look at specific metrics for each project. And, should you wish, you can then drill into that specific project, find out which activities are impacted, download the data, and then share it with colleagues so you can take action on them. So I think it’s a cool blend of a high-level view, with the option to drill down as necessary, which I think is a key component of Portfolio Management Life.

As we look for new features to build into Portfolio, this principle guides a lot of the thinking - where is there a greater total value in looking at projects as a whole? As humans, we like trends, and using the right software can get us there quickly and smartly. For me, that’s what Portfolio Schedule Integrity is all about.

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