Do you need to investigate your Start-to-Start (SS) and Finish-to-Finish (FF) relationships? If so, it is possible to highlight in your schedule, all activities that have SS and/or FF relationships.
The Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) 14-Points Assessment, and, in particular, its relationships assessment prefers finish-to-start (FS) relationships. The relationships assessment says that that 90% of all schedule relationships should be FS. One reason for this stipulation is that FS relationships improve schedule transparency, and, therefore, overall schedule quality.
Other relationships, such as SS and FF, are not forbidden; they are limited. Scheduler’s should restrict SS and FF relationship types to not more than 10% of all schedule tasks. Although start-to-finish (SF) relationships are not forbidden they are considered counter-intuitive and should be limited to extremely rare situations. Assuming that SF relationships are completely avoided, the scheduler will want to review each instance of SS and FF relationships in the schedule. The scheduler must inspect each SS and FF relationship occurrence and consider replacing it with a FS relationship.
Primavera P6 SS and FF Relationships
This article demonstrates a quick tip to highlight all SS and FF relationships in the schedule to support schedule relationship review purposes.
We say highlight activities that have SS and FF relationships and not remove them because we want to see how these relationships connect in with the rest of the schedule. Only then is it feasible to consider replacement of these relationships with FS relationships.
Fortunately, Primavera P6 Professional can highlight activities that match the respective filter criteria. In this way the scheduler views the entire project and focuses in on highlighted activities that require review.
We have in Figure 1 our demonstration project.
Figure 1
This is a manufacturing project that has several SS and FF relationships. Let’s say we want to review all activities that have FF relationships. We first want to display predecessor and successor details to support review of the FF relationships. In the columns feature dive into the lists category and select predecessor details and successor details, Figure 2.
Figure 2
Move them over to the selected options, Figure 3.
Figure 3
The schedule with predecessor and successor details is displayed in Figure 4.
Figure 4
Great! If we look closely we can spot each activity that has either a FF predecessor or successor. But to guide our review we would like to additionally highlight all activities that have FF predecessors and/or successors.
To highlight our FF associated activities select the filter feature and create the filter displayed in Figure 5.
Figure 5
The parameter in this filter is either predecessor details or successor details. The equivalency is ‘contains’ and the value is ‘FF’. This filter captures all activities that have predecessor or successor details that contain the abbreviation FF. In the filter dialog select our details FF filter and toggle on ‘highlight activities in current layout which match criteria’, Figure 6.
Figure 6
When we select OK all activities that have either a FF predecessor or successor are highlighted in blue, Figure 7.
Figure 7
Good! Now we can quickly see to inspect each instance of FF relationships in the schedule and consider possible replacement with a FS relationship. In Figure 8 we update our filter to capture and highlight all activities that have predecessor or successor details that contain the abbreviation SS.
Figure 8
When we select OK all activities that have either a SS predecessor or successor are highlighted in blue, Figure 9.
Figure 9
Summary
It is possible to display in the activity table the logical relationships connecting activities in the schedule. This is good, but for a quick review of specific activity relationships in the schedule we want to create a filter that captures and highlights all activities that include the respective relationships. This is feasible using the filter feature highlight capability. In this way the scheduler can quickly focus attention on improving those activities that are likely culprits negatively impacting schedule quality.