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Has anyone used the buffer consumption chart to track the project timelines?

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Ornkleaw Zepp Trevose, Pa, United States
How do you use the buffer consumption chart?

Is it necessary to track only the activities on the critical path?
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Kiron Bondale Retired | Mentor| Retired Welland, Ontario, Canada
Ornkleaw -

Buffer monitoring is a good practice but it should go beyond the critical path to consider feeder paths and near critical paths. Remember that the critical path is dynamic and it can change to a different network path if the activities on that path get sufficiently delayed.

Kiron
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1 reply by Ornkleaw Zepp
Mar 23, 2021 11:56 AM
Ornkleaw Zepp
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Thank you for your reply, I am new to the buffer monitoring.

I am not sure how to calculate the buffer consumption using the fever chart.

For example,
Task A on the critical path used 10 days of buffer.
Task B on the feeder path used 7 days of buffer.
If both tasks finished on the same week.
Should I simply add up the buffer used for that week 17 days?

And continue to use this same pattern of calculation each week to the end of the project?

Originally, I thought to track only the tasks on the critical path, however, the project has many feeder paths. It seems inaccurate if I track only the critical path. And I would like to confirm with experts here.
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Sergio Luis Conte Helping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based Organizations Buenos Aires, Argentina
In my case, I use something close to Eliyahu Goldratt "Critical Chain" way of work which by the way is not something new because you can find the basement in the operative investigation theory.
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Abolfazl Yousefi Darestani Manager, Quality and Continuous Improvement| Hörmann-TNR Industrial Doors Newmarket, Ontario, Canada
I do agree with Kiron.
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Ornkleaw Zepp Trevose, Pa, United States
Mar 22, 2021 3:25 PM
Replying to Kiron Bondale
...
Ornkleaw -

Buffer monitoring is a good practice but it should go beyond the critical path to consider feeder paths and near critical paths. Remember that the critical path is dynamic and it can change to a different network path if the activities on that path get sufficiently delayed.

Kiron
Thank you for your reply, I am new to the buffer monitoring.

I am not sure how to calculate the buffer consumption using the fever chart.

For example,
Task A on the critical path used 10 days of buffer.
Task B on the feeder path used 7 days of buffer.
If both tasks finished on the same week.
Should I simply add up the buffer used for that week 17 days?

And continue to use this same pattern of calculation each week to the end of the project?

Originally, I thought to track only the tasks on the critical path, however, the project has many feeder paths. It seems inaccurate if I track only the critical path. And I would like to confirm with experts here.
avatar
Keith Novak Tukwila, Wa, United States
It looks to me like you're mixing critical path and critical chain together. Buffer penetration (fever) charts show each task as an individual point showing how much of the task is completed, vs. how much buffer has been consumed. That shows you how buffer for each task of the entire project is being consumed in one view.
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Kiron Bondale Retired | Mentor| Retired Welland, Ontario, Canada
In general, you'd pay more attention to buffer consumption on the critical path, but if you are in a situation where feeder path buffer consumption is accelerating and you don't have much buffer left on the critical path then you do want to jump on addressing the feeder path delays because those will end up cascading down and impacting your deadline otherwise.

The main point of buffer monitoring is to enable a PM to raise their monitoring focus away from individual tasks to sequences of tasks - critical and non-critical.

Kiron

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