Better Schedule Performance Assessments Derived from Integrated Master Plan-Referenced Schedule Metrics.

摘要

Since 2005, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has been tasked under the Base Realignment and Closure Act to consolidate all Washington, DC, metropolitan area facilities to a standalone campus currently called NGA Campus East (NCE) by September 11, 2011. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is currently managing the construction of NCE at the Fort Belvoir, Virginia, Engineering Proving Grounds (NGA, 2010). In addition to the NCE facilities, NGA has awarded additional contracts for the installation of communication, hardware, and software systems necessary to support the NGA mission at the new facility. This article examines the schedule performance reported from one of these contracts. The contract included full earned value management (EVM) implementation, and the reported data came from an Electronic Industries Alliance (EIA)-748B-compliant earned value management system (EVMS) (Government Electronics and Information Technology Association GEIA), (2007). The integrated master plan (IMP) provides a better structure than either the work breakdown structure (WBS) or organizational breakdown structure for measuring actual integrated master schedule (IMS) progress. The author posits that improved understanding of schedule performance and better identification of program risks result when an IMP structure is evaluated in addition to the earned value management-mandated IMS WBS structure. The article examines how the 'Hit-Miss' index, baseline execution index (BEI), and critical path length index (CPLI) were used to evaluate the life-cycle performance of this 12-month, 900-task IMP program event. CPLI, the author concludes, is subject to interpretation and must be evaluated against four caveats: duration remaining, total float including schedule margin, schedule compression, and schedule avoidance.