Is LinkedIn Premium necessary?

April 20, 2020

LinkedIn Premium plans aren’t cheap. This is why I took the most affordable one that fits my immediate professional objectives.

Although I have always felt that I’m paying more than it was worth, I’ve used it for about two years. With the economic downturn that COVID-19 has brought to the fore, work and profitability have become more uncertain. I’m not so sure anymore. It looked pricier than before. It has become less attractive, a good candidate to cutting corners. After all, three hundred sixty dollars a year can be used for something else. It will be like stopping subscription to certain applications and plugins that’s used only once in a while. It’s a form of housekeeping. What do you think?

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MY DELTEK ACUMEN FUSE STORY

January 28, 2020

I’ve found Acumen fuse becoming more important and pivotal to the project as the scope and estimate mature. This becomes especially true when accompanied by increasing details and complexity of the schedule. It can perform a repeatable and consistent analytical review of the project schedule, a much-needed handle during gate reviews, cold eyes evaluation, interactive planning, strategic sessions, risk assessments, quantitative analysis, schedule cleansing, and more.

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Questions About Project Cost Reconciliation

September 22, 2019

Some cost management professionals said it’s a waste of time chasing, say, USD0.25, spending hours to reconcile. The cost of the effort involved translates to maybe more than tens of thousand times the amount being reconciled.

My question to you all. 1) Do you think that this reconciliation exercise down to the cents value is really needed and why? 2) Is there a better approach?… a faster way of reconciliation? Rufran hashtag#pmsolutionpro hashtag#rufranfrago hashtag#projectmanagement Picture credit: blog paytraq.com, 2019.

Read more and express your professional take.

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Typical Attributes of a Phantom Schedule

July 31, 2019

Some of the typical attributes of a Phantom Schedule are as follow:

1) Secret (unknown to the other contracting party)

2) It is a simplified version of the contract schedule

3) Considered more reliable and accurate

4) Viewed as a validation schedule that provides better forecasts5.

5) Updated in the background by sponsoring party

6) Decision-making tool by sponsoring party. Management decisions are no longer based on the forecast of the current contract schedule.

Read more… know more!

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What is the Purpose of a Phantom Schedule?

A client or contractor may develop it individually with each one, believing that it is more reliable than the current official schedule and/or the existing baseline.

Construction contractor can come up with a more aggressive version of the contractual schedule to create some form of relief time zones. It creates some form of time buffer zones by using earlier schedule plan dates. The sub-contractor then sign on a more optimistic schedule with the contractor.

The contractor hides the already optimistic phantom schedule for background update. At this point, and just on the contractor-subcontractor side alone, there are already four schedules at play and being maintained separately; i.e. 1) subcontract schedule, 2) subcontract phantom schedule, 3) contractor phantom schedule, and 4) contract schedule.

A recent technical article rightly stated the same thing, that one of the reasons why a phantom schedule is developed is “when the client no longer has any faith that the contractor’s contract schedule submittals are realistic (Beisler, S. & Zack, J., 2016.Cost Engineering. May\Jun 2016. p21).

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