nPlan quick reference for planners

Purpose of this document

The purpose of this document is to highlight schedule factors that impact the nPlan forecast outputs within the nPlan insights platform.  These are key to note as this may be different to other systems. 

What is nPlan Insights

nPlan Insights is a risk management platform. It allows planners to review the forecasted of the project as well as identifying the most critical areas to address. The forecasts are generated through machine learning models that extrapolate data from over 500,000 historical projects as well as your organisation’s data if they are provided. The tool produces automatic and unbiased forecasts enabling planners to review alternative scenario pathways increasing confidence in the deliverability of the schedule. 

Schedule factors that are key to analysis are outlined to ensure the nPlan output is unconstrained and ready for your decision making.

Constraints

By default nPlan removes all constraints from the schedule file prior to forecasting in order to allow delay to propagate through the schedule and find the full range of completion dates for the target milestone.

However, it is recognised that this may not be realistic and many constraints are reflective of real-world constraints. Prior to every analysis, we ask planners to select which project constraints to respect in the nPlan forecast.

During the modelling, nPlan typically recommends retaining constraints that are related to pre-booked possession periods, client-dependent handovers, and other dates agreed with external parties. It is highly recommended to relax ‘hard’ constraints (“start on” or “finish on”) to soft constraints (“start-on-or-after” or “finish-on-or-after”). This is crucial to allowing delay to propagate through the schedule and producing a useful forecast. 

Link relationships/logic

Activities not logically linked to the target milestone in evaluation are assumed to have no influence on the end-milestone, thus they are ignored. It is recommended that all activities in the schedule are linked and unconstrained where possible.

Calendars

nPlan forecasts respect the logic of the schedule and calendar working time as defined in the schedule file, meaning that calendars with significant non-working time can cause significant delay to be forecasted when uncertainty is applied to activity durations. 

nPlan recommends reviewing the defined working time in project calendars and avoiding long periods of non-working time to ensure a realistic forecast.

High-level summary activities

In the nPlan default scenario, long duration activities are forecast to be completed on time. This is because long duration tasks are prone to scope changes, leading to noise in end forecasts.

Therefore, where there is sufficient information, we recommend scheduling tasks with duration less than 60 days.

Positive lags

While positive lags are often necessary to ensure a smooth construction process, too many positive lags can add rigidity to the forecast.

nPlan suggests reviewing the schedule and for opportunities to reduce or eliminate positive lags. For example, by accelerating the delivery of materials or overlapping activities that can be completed in parallel. 

TRA/contingency

TRA (Time Risk Allowance) and contingency periods are automatically removed. If alternative naming conventions are used manual removal is required to prevent affecting the end-milestone forecast.

Naming Conventions and FactFile

nPlan recommends using a consistent naming format for these aspects of the plan. Activities that have been removed from the forecast can be reviewed in the ‘Activities and Milestones Assessment’ section of FactFile in nPlan Insights

All the above elements within a particular schedule can be quickly checked and summarised using nPlan Factfile.

Example summary of actions when sharing a file with nPlan

1. Share the latest schedule file with nPlan
2. Share key target milestones
3. Share which constraints need to be held
4. Highlight any unique calendars?

nPlan also offers the schedule Integrity check for free. Automatically identify integrity issues and get actionable data on the composition of your schedule with a new free tool based on our award-winning AI risk management platform. Simply use this link to access the checker: https://schedule.nplan.io/

For further information please refer to the accompanying Zendesk materials or contact [e-mail]