Deltek Open Plan Help

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Schedule Driver Analysis

Schedule Driver Analysis determines the most critical paths to any point in a project. It identifies activities that are driving the dates for a target activity as well as other potential controlling chains.

It can recognize multiple paths through the activities preceding the target activity and groups the activities based on their total float.

When the process runs, Schedule Driver Analysis looks at the float and status of the selected activity's predecessors. The most critical predecessor is determined and the process repeats with that activity. A path is finished when there are no more activities to follow, Time Now is reached, or if there is a change in float. Open Plan does not alter your time analysis results. It stores the results in special fields to preserve standard time analysis results.

After the process runs, Open Plan displays the data in a default Schedule Driver Analysis Barchart view, which is a sub-sectioned barchart that is grouped by category. The green highlighted row is the field you selected as the target activity, and the red highlighted row is the immediate predecessor. You can use the Grouping tab of the Spreadsheet Preferences dialog box to view or change the breaks/groups.

Attention: For more information about barchart grouping, see Grouping in the Barchart View.

Another view that is helpful for viewing the data is a zoned network view. You can open a standard Network view and add the Schedule Driver Analysis calculated field as a Zone attribute. Zoning groups activities into horizontal bands based on one or more criteria that you specify. You use the Zone Attributes dialog box to define how Open Plan displays zones in a network view.

Shared Mode

You can run Schedule Driver Analysis in Shared mode. When you run in Shared Mode, the results of the path analysis are not stored; they are available while the project is still open.

Custom Reports

If you have the Milestones Professional® (MP) application installed, you can generate custom reports that take full advantage of its graphic display ability. You can use the three included report templates to create the following reports:

  • A Barchart report that documents all critical paths
  • A Path Details report for each critical path you instruct the tool to identify
  • A Summary Path report that summarizes the current activities on each path

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