United States Federal Agency

OVERVIEW

A United States Federal Agency operating within the Department of Defense was nearing the end of a mission-critical project, which after being delayed for over a year, was likely headed for dispute. Prior to this, the Contractor had repeatedly assured the government that the project was on schedule – but then the planned end date came and went with all sorts of arguments and excuses as to who caused what.

Unfortunately, the only options available to the project team for conducting a thorough Schedule Analysis were 1) hiring consultants for hundreds of thousands of dollars or 2) conducting their own manual analysis, which would take several months. Then they learned of SmartPM’s Automated Project Analytics platform and decided to find out what results they could obtain with it.  The analysis was completed in minutes. The result was a more conclusive, straightforward, and accurate analysis than any consultant could provide by conducting the traditional manual process. The agency was so pleased with the results they have decided to use SmartPM™ as a proactive analytics tool on virtually every project going forward – and will likely never hire an external, Forensic Delay Analyst again.

THE CHALLENGE

A federal agency was working tirelessly on a project to deepen Savannah ports. Members of the agency had questioned the contractor’s schedule progress and performance for a long time, however they were always assured that the project was on schedule. The team was using Acumen Fuse to manage the project, but the product could not identify which of the thousands of activities that took place were causing the delay, who was responsible, or what to do about it. So, they really couldn’t prove anything. Eventually, the contract completion date came and went, and the project was still delayed for over a year. To add insult to injury, the agency was blamed for all the delays. They needed to identify the specific activities impacting the critical path and causing delay, so that they could uncover the truth (and be good stewards of the American taxpayers’ money).

THE SMART & FINDINGS

The agency chose SmartPM™ to solve their delay issue because they were looking for a better way to analyze projects without hiring consultants. Just minutes after uploading their Savannah project schedules and updates into the SmartPM™ tool, the team quickly determined that:

1. 1. The schedules utilized to manage the project were of poor quality and lacked very important crew logic.

1. 2. Delays had been ongoing for years, yet the contractor continued to make changes to the schedule file to aggressively compress it and keep the end date “on track”.

1. 3. The team could now plan around a more reliable completion date for the project based on the SmartPM™ analysis and the platform’s ability to forecast feasible end dates.

THE SMART OUTCOME

The agency was so pleased with their results, they decided to use SmartPM™ on all of their projects over $5M.  The organization soon realized that they could continuously run analytics on 10x more projects with the same number of employees, significantly reducing the overall risk of delays, overruns and disputes across their entire project portfolio.

Federal agencies are notoriously a target of claims for money and time, but they can now set the record straight with SmartPM™, which will save them tens of millions of taxpayer dollars in unsubstantiated claims every year.

ABOUT AGENCY

This U.S. Federal Agency within the Department of Defense made up of approximately 37,000 civilian and military personnel, making it one of the world’s largest public engineering, design, and construction management agencies.