Assessing Delays in Agile & Distributed Projects

For the last 50 or more years, the internationally recognised approaches to assessing delay and disruption have been based on the forensic assessment of a CPM schedule¹. The premise being there is a well-developed critical path schedule that defines the way the work of the project will be, or has been, accomplished. However, there was no concept of a critical path before the 1957², and in the 21^st century, there are many projects where the critical path method (CPM) is simply not used or does not represent the way the work is accomplished.

The legal concepts of delay, disruption, extensions of time, and liquidated damages (the legal framework), were defined many decades before CPM was developed. In more recent times the advent of agile, lean, and other team-driven approaches to managing projects have been shown to be incompatible with the fundamental concepts of CPM. Earlier papers in this series have also shown distributed projects such as erecting wind farms, or repairing potholes after a flood, are another type of project that has no particular requirement for the work to be undertaken in any pre-defined order, which again makes CPM suboptimal³.

The key management objective in both agile and distributed projects is optimising resource utilisation and consequently the effect of any intervening event must be considered in terms of the delay and disruption caused by the loss of resource efficiency, rather than its effect on a predetermined, arbitrary, sequence of activities.

The focus of this paper is to offer a practical solution to the challenge of assessing delay and disruption in agile and distributed projects where the traditional concept of a critical path that must be followed simply does not exist.