Deltek Acumen Fuse

What is Deltek Acumen Fuse? And how can it support my project scheduling efforts? Let’s take a look.

The name Acumen is relevant to the software’s intended purpose. When we look up the word Acumen in the dictionary, we find a concise and pertinent definition. Acumen is the ability to make 1) quick decisions and 2) good judgments. The primary purpose of Acumen Fuse is to highlight or reveal areas of the schedule that require quality improvement. Acumen Fuse supports:

• Schedule quality – It inspects the health of the schedule.
• Schedule maturity – Confirms schedule is complete.
• Compliance – Many government agencies have guidelines for a satisfactory schedule.

One compliance guideline is the Defense Contract Management Agencies (DCMA) 14-Point Assessment, an industry standard for measuring and confirming schedule quality. Schedules judged high quality by the 14-Point Assessment have a significantly higher probability of success.

In Acumen Fuse, you can compare your schedule’s attributes to the DCMA 14-Point metrics group and others, and in this way, efficiently measure your schedule’s health. Then, adjust the schedule in the originating software program, e.g., P6 Professional, or directly within the Acumen S1 // Projects tab to improve it.

Maturity Framework

Acumen has three modules: Fuse, Risk, and 360, and taken together; these modules comprise Acumen’s maturity framework, a trademarked process that provides a quality, risk-adjusted, and optimized schedule that has team member buy-in. The maturity framework trademarked as S1 > S5 is the basic structure undergirding all of Acumen. This is all three modules taken together.

Each module has its function. The Acumen Fuse module inspects schedule quality and has over 300+ metrics and many logic diagnostics tools for measuring and improving schedule quality. The risk module helps bring realism into the schedule. Acumen 360 or acceleration module provides a way to investigate schedule shortening or compression.

Fuse Module

We introduce Acumen Fuse’s core features to facilitate an efficient and thorough review of schedule health. Again, Acumen Fuse comes standard with over 300+ metrics you can use to inspect the health of your project. These 300+ metrics should be sufficient for all your analysis requirements.

However, if not, you may create additional metrics using Deltek Acumen’s Metric Developer’s Guide, which will direct you through the Acumen Fuse metric creation process. Download a PDF of the Metric Developers Guide.

Acumen Fuse aims to certify well-built practical schedules that adhere to appropriate critical path method (CPM) scheduling criteria. The CPM builds a critical path by combining activity duration estimates with activity predecessor and successor relationships. The critical path is important information, as no task along this path can be delayed without postponing the project’s end date. The critical path is the longest through the schedule’s network logic and determines the project’s completion date.

Figure 1 displays a screenshot of Acumen when first accessing the software.

Figure 1

The figure shows Acumen’s S1 > S5 tabbed ribbon layout.  The core features for Acumen Fuse are in the tabs: S1 // Projects, S2 // Diagnostics, S2 // Logic, and S2 // Benchmarking. Figure 1 highlights the S1 // Projects review and edit tab and the S2 schedule health check tabs which are S2 // Diagnostics, S2 // Logic, and S2 // Benchmarking.

S1 // Projects

The primary function of the S1 //Project is to review the schedule details; however, you can also make minor edits to the schedule. Figure 2 shows the landscape of the S1 // Projects tab for a P6 schedule imported to the workbook “Workbook1 Wellmont”.

Figure 2

The import process initially links the schedule to a Workbook and then imports it; Figure 2 shows an imported schedule named Wellmont01 in the navigator pane. Adjust the display level to the number of hierarchies you want to show in the work breakdown structure (WBS).

The top left is a table of WBS elements, i.e., deliverables and the tasks required to produce them. On the top right is the Gantt chart. The red bars are on the critical path. The blue bars are task efforts that can delay an amount in days (equal to its total float) without a setback to the project’s end date.

The bottom details section shows information related to whatever task is currently selected in the task table. In Figure 2, the Grading task is currently selected, and in the bottom details relationships tab, its predecessor and successor tasks are listed. This bottom details information is read-only. Acumen will not allow you to modify the original project schedule to prevent overwriting your originals. You must create a scenario copy of your project, which you can edit.

S2 // Diagnostics

The core features of Acumen Fuse are in the S2 // Diagnostics tab. Figure 3 displays the S2 // Diagnostics tab tools in their ribbon groups.

Figure 3

The Fuse analyses S2 // Diagnostics screen layout consists of a bottom playlist, an upper-right ribbon analyzer, a bottom-left phase analyzer, and a top-left intersection analyzer. At the bottom of Figure 3 is the playlist with all the currently available metric groups you can choose for analyses.

Figure 4

The active metric group has a red x next to its name. Currently, the active metric group is Schedule Quality. The Schedule Quality metric group comprises all the metrics Acumen’s developers consider the most important for a healthy schedule. When the Fuse button in Figure 3 is clicked, Acumen computes metric group analyses and displays them in the following analyzers:

1. Ribbon Analyzer – Each metric’s performance for the whole project.
2. Phase Analyzer – Metric group performance tabulated by specified intervals.
3. Intersections Analyzer – Single metric performance compartmentalized

The results for each Ribbon Analyzer, Phase Analyzer, and Intersection Analyzer can be displayed in tabular form, as seen in Figure 4, as well as graphical line and bar charts (not shown).

Ribbon Analyzer

Figure 5 is a closeup of the Wellmont01 Ribbon Analyzer Schedule Quality metric group results.

Figure 5

The following metrics are included in the Schedule Quality metric group:

1. Missing Logic—Each task except the first and last should have at least one predecessor and successor.
2. Logic Density – This is the average number of logic links between tasks, which should be at least two. Four and greater indicates redundant logic.
3. Critical – The number of critical tasks in the schedule.
4. Hard Constraints – Constraints are discouraged, as they tend to interfere with the critical path and force tasks to dates they would not naturally fall at based on the network logic.
5. Negative Float— Here, the schedule is behind. Technically, the late date is somewhere in the network earlier than the early date.
6. Insufficient Detail – These are tasks longer than 10% of the project’s total duration. You may want to break these tasks into shorter ones to provide more details about the efforts.
7. Number of Lags—These are positive waiting periods, which are acceptable but discouraged. Short lags are agreeable, but long lags, say 365 days, are problematic.
8. Number of Leads – These negative waiting periods are confusing and prohibited by the DCMA 14-Point Assessment.
9. Merge Hotspots—These are tasks with many predecessor links. They flag because many efforts must be completed on time for them to commence on schedule, which puts them at risk for delays.

In Figure 4, the number listed in the Missing Logic (yellow) score box is the number of tasks captured by the missing logic metric and listed in the browser below. The percentage in each scoring box is the number of tasks captured by the respective metric divided by the total inclusions, and that value is represented as a percentage.

The overall percentage score of the metric group is displayed in the Ribbon Analyzer on the far right. There are two ways to compute this value:

1. Average of metrics and
2. Record fails if 1 Metric Fails.

The “Average of Metrics” allows for partial credit. For example, a task, i.e., record, that scores 70% in one metric and 90% in another metric computes the average 80% score for that record (assuming only two metrics in the group). The default and most conservative is “Record Fails if on Metric Fails.” This means if a task fails any one metric, then that task is flagged as a failed record.

Schedulers typically use the “Average of Metrics” setting when investigating incremental improvements to their schedule. However, final analyses and reports are submitted using “Record Fails if 1 Metric Fails,” as that is the most conservative report on schedule health. It also places a premium on absolute compliance with the respective metrics, which is what you want.

Phase Analyzer

The Phase Analyzer, shown in Figure 4, presents the same metrics as the Ribbon Analyzer but allows you to see the data in a time-phased grid. The phase options are Days, Weeks, Months, Quarters, Years, or Single, which packs everything into one period. For the single phase, you can add phases on any date you want to report metrics, e.g., the fourth Friday of each month. The phase analyzer helps investigate metric trends.

Intersection Analyzer

Acumen’s third analyzer, the intersection analyzer, displayed in Figure 4 for Logic Density, provides further insight into schedule health. It aims to help you focus on a single metric and compartmentalize its performance. It provides analysis for a single metric at each phase of the project. So, you can look at one metric within a specific ribbon and phase, i.e., the intersection of the ribbon and phase analyzers.

Metric Group Gate Keepers

S2 // Diagnostics has metrics and groups of metrics for inspecting schedule health. Just as a doctor may begin your physical by checking blood pressure, two metric groups most often begin the schedule health inspection process. These metric groups are often referred to as the gatekeepers.

• Schedule Quality: First, the schedule quality metric group consists of all the metrics that Deltek Acumen developers, in their wisdom, consider the most important attributes for confirming a healthy project.
• DCMA 14-Point: Second, the Defense Contract Management Agency’s 14-point assessment is an industry-standard. The DCMA developed this 14-point assessment to improve scheduling practices. Schedules judged highly by the assessment have a significantly greater probability of success. The 14-point assessment seal of approval ensures a well-built and, therefore, practical schedule.

After passing through the gatekeeper metric groups, you may want to move on to the Logic, Lags, or Float metric groups.

S2 // Logic

Logic is important as the backbone or structure of a healthy, quality project schedule. As listed above, Acumen Fuse has a Logic metric group and other logic-related metric groups in S2 // Diagnostics. Because logic is critical, Acumen Fuse also devotes an entire  S2 // Logic tab solely to logic diagnostics tools. An extensive article about Inspecting schedule logic using Deltek Acumen Fuse is at the following link:

https://tensix.com/deltek-acumen-fuse-inspecting-schedule-logic/

S2 // Benchmarking

Benchmarking lets you compare your project to a wealth of historical schedules in the Deltek cloud database. You can check your schedule against similar projects in your industry or the whole database. This way, you can examine your schedule’s probability of success based on a comparison with a wealth of historical project data.

Summary

Deltek Acumen Fuse software is designed to provide pertinent information on project health and foster quick decisions and sound judgments. Its three analyzers provide tabulated data and graphical plots to confirm the schedule’s health or expose areas requiring improvement. You can also investigate metric trends in line graphs to predict future performance. The Acumen Fuse module is one of three in Acumen. It confirms a complete and mature schedule, a project with a high probability of success.

The following Acumen Risk article discusses at length the Acumen Risk module for risk adjusting a schedule according to duration, cost uncertainty estimates, and other threats and opportunities.

Also, the below Acumen Risk article is relevant:

Preparing a Schedule for Acumen Risk Analysis

Further, the article on the Acumen Fuse Baseline Compliance Metric Group is helpful.

Several articles about the DCMA 14-Point Assessment and Acumen Fuse have been written.

What is the DCMA 14-Point Assessment

Deltek Acumen Fuse and the DCMA’s 14-Point Assessment

Acumen Fuse 8.9 Updates to the Critical Path Length Index Metric

Deltek Acumen Fuse and the Baseline Execution Index

Lastly, an article describing Deltek Acumen 360.