Schedule Compliance

Schedule compliance verifies that project schedule and WBS are built upon a foundation of standards that promote the development of sound and well-maintained schedules. The standards used in schedule compliance are based on generally accepted industry standards and best practices, including Sensei’s Proactive Scheduling™ and the Project Management Institute’s Practice Standards for WBS and Scheduling.

How Sensei Task Analyzer Supports Schedule Compliance

Consolidate Compliance Checks

Project management teams have used a variety of tools to identify compliance issue including filters and manual checklists. Sensei Task Analyzer consolidates these methods in a single easy to use tool.

Provide Immediate Feedback

Sensei Task Analyzer defines a number of schedule compliance checks that are performed whenever a task is selected in a Microsoft Project Schedule. Any identified issues for the selected task are display immediately with a title and brief overview of the issue. Once issues have been addressed they are immediately removed from display.

Support Customizations of Checks

Schedule compliance does not mean that standards should always be applied consistently to all project schedules. Recommendations can be ignored if the project management team has reviewed the standard and determined it is not appropriate for a given project.

Sensei Task Analyzer allows compliance checks to be customized. The severity level of a check can be changed to Issue, Warning or Message, if a severity check has been determined to not be valid within an organization or for a particular project the severity check can be turned off.

Allow Exceptions for Individual Tasks

Schedule compliance recommendations may not apply to all tasks in the project schedule. The project management team can decide that it is justified for individual task within the project schedule to ignore a schedule recommendation.

Sensei Task Analyzer allows compliance checks to be ignored for individual tasks.

Verify Schedule Tasks

Use the 'Analyzer' section to examine the selected task for compliance items. Any 'Issues', 'Warnings' and 'Messages' will be displayed with guidance to help determine how to best resolve these items.

Getting Started

When the Sensei Task Analyzer starts an application overview is displayed (see Fig 1.). The overview provides a high level description of how to 'Analyze Tasks' and 'Review Checks'. To prevent this overview from displaying when the Sensei Task Analyzer opens uncheck 'Show overview when starting'. To again show the overview at startup go to the "Help' section and check 'Show overview when starting'.

Verify Tasks

Simply select a task and Sensei Task Analyzer will examine that task against all selected compliance checks. The number of checks performed and number of compliance items found will be display at the bottom of the 'Analyzer' section.

If no compliance items are found a message is displayed indicating that the task is 100% compliant (see Fig 2.). If compliance items are detected the compliance items are displayed. The compliance item includes the item name along with guidance to help with resolution. The item can be an issue, warning or message. The severity of the item is indicated by an icon (see Fig 3.).

Ignoring Compliance Issues, Warnings and Messages

A task may be an exception to the reported compliance item. If the compliance item is should be ignored for the whole project the compliance check should be updated in the 'Checks' section. However, if the exception is only for the selected task the compliance item can be removed by selecting the ignore option. When the ignore option is selected the compliance check will no longer be performed when the task is selected.

Restoring previously ignored Issues, Warnings and Messages

To again perform all checks on a task choose the 'Restore Ignored Items' at the bottom of the 'Analyze' section. This command allow ignored items to be rechecked for the current task, for the entire project or even for all projects on this system (see fig 4.).

Fig 1. Overview displayed on start Close

Fig 2. Selected task is compliant Close

Fig 3. Compliance item detected Close

Reviewing Compliance Checks

Getting Started

Select a 'Checks' category to display compliance checks related to that category. The available 'Checks' categories are 'WBS' (see Fig 1.), 'Resources' (see Fig 2.), 'Links' (see Fig 3.) and 'Schedule' (see Fig 4.). When a category is selected the related compliance checks are displayed with their current severity level.

Updating Severity

The severity level for a compliance check can be changed by selecting the 'Severity Level' drop down associated with the checks. When the 'Severity Level' dropdown is display adjust the severity by selecting from one of the available severities 'Issue', 'Warning', Messages (see Fig 5.). The new severity value will be maintained whenever the 'Sensei Task Analyzer' is used on this system.

Cancelling Severity Updates

To cancel the update that have been made since opening the 'Checks' section select the 'Cancel Updates' option at the bottom of this section.

Severity Updates to Default Values

To severity level for a compliance checks back to the original values select the 'Set to Default' option at the bottom of this section. This will set the severity levels to the values used when the 'Sensei Task Analyzer' was first used.

Ignoring a Compliance Check

You organization may decide not to follow a compliance recommendation used in 'Sensei Task Analyzer'. If after reviewing a compliance recommendation it is determined that it is not to be appropriate for your organization it can be ignored by selecting 'Ignore' in the 'Severity Level' dropdown (see Fig 5.).

Adjusting Check Values

Duration and work checks in the 'Schedule' section include values for the maximum and minimum amount of duration and work allowed. These values can be adjusted to reflect values consistent with your organization's practices.

Fig 1. WBS Checks Close

Fig 2. Resource Checks Close

Fig 3. Links Checks Close

Fig 4. Schedule Checks Close

Fig 5. Severity Levels Close

Guidance

The 'Checks' in the Task Analyzer are based on industry standards and best practices, including Sensei's Proactive Scheduling™ and the Project Management Institute's Practice Standards for WBS and Scheduling.