Strategies for Recovery and Acceleration
Table 6 summarizes common techniques that schedulers and management teams use to recover schedule variances and, in general, accelerate a schedule. Schedule recovery is a managerial effort to recover from the interruption of events on the planned schedule. Acceleration refers to a reduction in the duration of the overall schedule. The focus for schedule recovery or acceleration should be on critical activities and, in particular, on long-duration critical activities. Because critical activities drive key milestone dates, the overall program duration will be reduced only by reducing the critical paths. Some of the strategies described in table 6 may have contractual implications.
Table 6: Strategies for Recovery and Acceleration
| Technique | Description | Side effects |
|---|---|---|
| Crashing | Add resources to time-dependent activities to complete work faster | Requires additional resources and thus increases costs; may also reduce quality if activities are executed faster and with less-experienced labor |
| Fast tracking | Reduce the sequential dependencies between activities to partial dependencies. For example, F<96>S logic is reduced to S<96>S logic to force parallel work | Resources may become overallocated; quality may also be reduced and risk introduced if activities ideally executed in sequence are now executed in parallel |
| Split long activities | Split long activities into shorter activities that can be worked in parallel | Resources may become overallocated |
| Review constraint and lag assumptions | Reassess assumptions related to forcing activities to begin on certain dates | If the original date constraint or lag is justified, removing the constraint or lag may not be realistic |
| Review duration estimates | Revisit duration estimates using progress records as actual effort is recorded | |
| Add overtime and reduce vacations | Review nonworking periods and assign overtime work | Costs will increase over standard labor rates; as overtime increases, morale decreases, eventually affecting the quality of the product negatively |
| Reduce scope | Decrease scope to reduce both duration and costs | Scope is the primary reason for performing the work, and it may not be possible to delete some requirements |
| Schedule contingencies | Allocate contingency to absorb delay in accordance with identified risk mitigation plans | Using contingency too early in a project reduces the likelihood of the program<92>s completing on time, particularly if the reason for a delay was a risk that was not previously identified and quantified |
Source: GAO and NDIA | GAO-16-89G
Regardless of what combination of methods is used for acceleration or recovery of variances, the schedule should be archived before the change. After the schedule is modified, the techniques used should be documented and the critical path recalculated and assessed for reasonableness.