Introduction to schedule quality checking

You can use schedule quality checks to identify whether a project has been planned well. A schedule quality check contains a set of user-definable quality metrics that you can use to monitor the quality of a schedule. You can choose which quality metrics to include in each quality check, and for each metric you can define what constitutes a pass or a fail - with the exception of a few metrics which result in a simple pass or fail. For example, you could include the Link logic metric, which checks that tasks have at least one incoming and outgoing link, and specify that the schedule should pass if 95% of tasks or more are linked and that it should fail if less than 85% of tasks are linked. If the proportion of incompletely linked tasks falls between the two percentages, the result is neither a pass nor a fail, but somewhere in between. A schedule quality check can include a single quality metric, or any number of them.

For each quality metric, you can specify a "weighting" value. The weighting is the factor by which the quality metric should be multiplied to affect its impact on the weighted total result of the quality check - an indication of whether the quality check as a whole has passed or failed. For example, enter 2.00 to double a metric's impact, or 0.50 to halve it; a weighting of zero would mean that the metric had no effect on the weighted total result. Giving those metrics in which you are most concerned a higher weighting than other metrics increases their impact on the weighted total result.

For each schedule quality check, you specify a scope that defines which part of the schedule to examine. You may want to include all of the data in a project, one or more individual branches of the hierarchy, or one or more individual charts or summary groups. You can also choose whether or not to include milestones and fully completed tasks in the check.

When you execute a schedule quality check, the project is examined for each of the metrics that is included. Depending on the metrics you have included, the project may need to be rescheduled as part of the check. When the quality check is complete, the Quality Check Results dialog appears. The dialog displays a weighted total result at the top, giving an overall indication of whether the project has passed or failed the schedule quality check, taking the weighted results of all the quality metrics into account. This is followed by the results for each individual quality metric, optionally grouped by chart or summary group - depending on how you have configured the schedule quality check. You can use the buttons on this dialog to copy the results to the Clipboard - or to Microsoft Excel®, if Excel is installed on your computer - and to view the tasks that have failed a quality metric.

Once you have set up a quality check, you can export its metric settings then import them as a new quality check - in the same project or in other projects - which saves you from having to set up metrics for each of your quality checks individually if you want to use the same or similar metrics in more than one quality check. If you export a quality check's metric settings in this way, you can then create a corresponding quality check in Asta Vision.

Published recommendations for quality checks

While you can construct your own schedule quality checks, there are also a few published recommendations.

The established quality check is the US Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) 14-point test. This Help details which settings and values to use. There is a DCMA quality check included in the sample template files that are installed with Asta Powerproject. These tests are comprehensive, but some consider they have a low tolerance for links other than Finish to Start and an over-emphasis on resource or cost values being assigned.

A more recent and UK-focussed quality check is the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) Planning Protocol 2021 (CIOB PP21). This Help details which settings and values to use. There is a CIOB quality check included in the sample template files that are installed with Asta Powerproject. These tests are comprehensive but are more tolerant of links other than Finish to Start and have no reliance on resource or cost values being assigned. Some tests (10, 11 & 12) are subjective and it is not possible to include these in a calculated process.