A client working with a ten thousand activity schedule asked how to efficiently exclude groups of these activities from metric analysis in Acumen Fuse. Here we show you how.
Acumen Fuse supports a thorough schedule health check using diagnostics from the 300+ metrics that come standard with Acumen or other metrics developed by the user. When an analyst wants to exclude an individual activity from a respective metric analysis, the analyst can effectively remove it by clicking the exclude toggle.
But toggling to exclude can become a major and laborious task when there are many activities to remove from the metric analysis. This was my student’s situation, who inquired if there was filtering capability in Acumen Fuse to support the exclude activity procedure for numerous activities.
This article demonstrates how to filter activities captured by the metric tripwire formula to isolate groups of these activities, so they can be excluded from a metric analysis using a single click of the mouse.
If we want to exclude certain activities from metric analysis, we could edit that metric’s inclusions by either activity status or type. But we prefer not to modify a metric definition. As mentioned above we can exclude an individual activity in the activity browser. What we want to demonstrate is that you not only can exclude an individual activity in the activity browser but also groups of activities. And that you have many grouping options to choose from.
We have in Figure 1 our demonstration P6 schedule already imported into Deltek Acumen Fuse.
Figure 1
We proceed and click the S2 // Diagnostics tab so we can run metric analyses on our demonstration schedule. Continuing we run a Schedule Quality Fuse analysis for our demonstration.
- Choose Schedule Quality metric group from the playlist and run a Fuse analysis, Figure 2.
Figure 2
- Click the orange score box for the critical metric, Figure 3.
Figure 3
The below Activity Browser lists the activities captured by the Critical metric, Figure 4.
Figure 4
We demonstrate the filter features in the activity browser by grouping all activities in this schedule’s ‘Above Grade’ deliverable, then exclude this group from the Schedule Quality metric group analysis.
- Right click on any activity browser column heading, e.g., Description, and choose Show Column Chooser, Figure 5.
Figure 5
- In the column chooser, left click on WBS Name then drag and drop it between the Project and Original Duration columns, Figure 6.
Figure 6
Note the column chooser is where you select the option you want to group by. When you scroll through the Column chooser you can observe an extensive list of options to group by.
- Right click on WBS Name column heading and choose ‘Filter Editor’, Figure 7.
Figure 7
Note that you must click on the WBS Name column heading for the filter to activate the proper code.
- Click on the ‘<enter value>’ field, Figure 8.
Figure 8
- Enter the deliverable name ‘Above Grade’.
Figure 9
This filter captures all activities whose WBS Name or deliverable name include the words ‘Above Grade’.
- Click Apply and/or OK.
- Only the ‘Above Grade’ deliverable activities appear in the Activity Browser, Figure 10.
Figure 10
- Hoover the mouse over the ‘Exclude All’ icon and click the mouse, Figure 11.
Figure 11
Note that it excludes all the currently displayed activities in the activity browser from the Schedule Quality metric group analysis.
- Confirm the exclusion of all ‘Above Grade’ activities and click ‘Clear Filter’, Figure 12.
Figure 12
Note that only ‘Above Grade’ activities are toggled as excluded from the Schedule Quality metric analysis, Figure 13.
Figure 13
If we return to the Filter Editor click on the And conjunction a menu appears with a list of operators that make for a more complex filter and/or grouping criteria, Figure 14.
Figure 14
As demonstrated the Acumen Fuse activity browser has advanced features for isolating activities into groups to make excluding them a more efficient process.
Summary
Yes, Acumen Fuse has an efficient way to exclude groups of activities from a metric analysis. The bottom activity browser for a respective metric score box has a column chooser, including many different options. Analysts can choose a suitable option and left click then drag and drop to add that option to the table of columns displayed that lists activities captured by the selected metric.
Once the grouping mechanism is in the activity browser table analysts can right click on that column’s header and select the ‘Filter Editor’ tool in the popup menu. Modify the filter as suitable to group by an option subgroup. In this way analysts may isolate all activities in a respective group, e.g., a deliverable, and choose to exclude them from the metric analysis. This helps partly automate the cumbersome process of excluding a potentially very long list of activities from a metric analysis.