Verifying Status Updates and Schedule Integrity
Once the schedule has been statused, management should review the inputs to verify the updates and assess the effect on the plan. The schedule should be reviewed to ensure the following:
All activities completed before the status date represent finished work and therefore should have actual start and finish dates. They should be statused as 100 percent complete with actual durations or actual work values.
In-progress activities should have an actual start date and all work scheduled before the status date is expressed as actual duration or actual effort. All remaining work should be scheduled beyond the status date.
Activities beyond the status date represent future activities and therefore should not have actual start or actual finish dates. They also should not have actual duration or work values.
Out-of-sequence activities are addressed purposefully and case by case through either retained logic or progress override.
Schedule recalculations from changes in estimated work, assigned resources, or duration are verified to ensure meaningful and accurate calculations.
Resource assignments are assessed for the coming period, and assignments for delayed or out-of-sequence activities are reevaluated for potential overallocations. In addition, resource calendars should be updated to reflect current availability.
Date constraints are revisited and removed if possible. In particular, soft constraints should be removed if they can no longer affect an activity’s start or finish date.
At least one in-progress activity is critical. If not, it is likely that date constraints or external dependencies are separating successor activities from the in-progress activities.41 Such breaks in the critical or longest path represent weak or incomplete logic, causing a lack of credibility in the identity of the path and the schedule dates.
Schedule integrity should also be assessed as the schedule is updated. Verifying the integrity of the schedule after each update will ensure that the schedule remains reliable after activities are added, removed, broken down into smaller activities, or sequenced differently from the last period. Common schedule health measures are listed in appendix VI.
It is unlikely in a major program that all activities will be fully identified. As a program changes and completes phases, some activities are overtaken by events and others are generated from lessons learned. Changes made to a schedule, whether minor or major, may need to undergo formal change control according to contract requirements or internal process controls.
The current schedule, once management approves it, should be assigned a version number and archived. This ensures that all status updates can be traced and guarantees that all stakeholders are using the same version of the current schedule.
In principle, a critical activity could be scheduled to start the next day after a status update. It would therefore not be in progress at that time, although it would be scheduled to start as soon as possible.↩︎