Acumen Touchstone 8.2.1 Online Help

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Acceptance Criteria

The ability to score project schedule submittals on schedule quality, execution performance, use of logic and more is a key feature of Touchstone and allows project teams to determine how best to assess their portfolio or schedule health.

The acceptance criteria template determines the metrics to use when calculating the overall score of the recently uploaded schedule file. Touchstone also uses it to determine whether the uploaded schedule file is Accepted or Rejected based on the minimum score specified in the template. You must specify at least one metric in the template.

You can specify whether you want Touchstone to use metric-based or submittal-based scoring to evaluate metrics used for calculating the score. You set the scoring method on the Acceptance Criteria Tab. Submittal-based scoring is the default setting.

  • Average of Metrics: Metric-based scoring allows incremental improvements to tasks to be reflected in the overall score. Touchstone calculates the score using an average of the metric scores. The metric-based method typically produces higher scores, as a single task needs to fail in multiple areas simultaneously in order to receive a very low score.
  • Submittal Fails if One Metric Fails (default): This method calculates the score on a per-submittal basis and the final score is an average of the per-submittal scores. This places a premium on absolute compliance with the assigned metrics. The breach of any single metric on a task prevents those tasks from receiving a "passing grade."

After you import a metric file, you can add any of the imported metrics to your acceptance criteria on the Acceptance Criteria tab. Use sliders to adjust the influence value of each metric within a range of -10 to 10.

The acceptance criteria operate at the project level; that is, each project is associated with an acceptance criteria template that includes the metrics used to evaluate the submittals. This makes it easy to use different metrics on different types of projects or projects in different phases. Projects in different phases may use different metrics or metric variables for scoring. For example, a long duration during the building phase may be 44 days whereas a long duration during the design phase might be 66 days. You select the Acceptance Criteria template on the Projects Configuration tab.

Touchstone compares the uploaded schedule to the acceptance criteria metrics and scores the schedule based on the metric influence selector values. For each condition that the schedule meets, it accumulates a point value, whether the point value is negative or positive. The score is then normalized on a scale of 0 to 100 and compared to the Minimum Acceptance Score on the Acceptance Criteria tab.

If the score is equal to or greater than the Minimum Acceptance Score, the schedule passes and Touchstone displays Accepted in the Submittals view Status column. If the score is less than the Minimum Acceptance Score, Touchstone displays Rejected in the Submittals Status column and the submitter can view a report of the issues that caused the schedule to fail.

Whenever a new metric file is imported into a specific metric folder, any metrics on the Acceptance Criteria tab that are found in a folder with the same name as those imported are overwritten, but their influence values for the acceptance criteria are retained.

Default Acceptance Criteria

Touchstone includes the following default acceptance criteria templates that are based on the Acumen metric groups of the same name:

  • FUSE Schedule Quality: This template includes the same metrics and influence as Acumen has for the same group.
  • FUSE Schedule Quality plus Baseline Compliance: This template has the same metrics and influence that Acumen has for the Schedule Quality and Advanced/Baseline Compliance groups.
  • DCMA 14 Point: This template has the same metrics and influence that Acumen has for the same group. The template includes metrics for evaluating a schedule against the DCMA's 14 Points