{"id":92,"date":"2016-09-14T12:06:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-14T11:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/i3works.bluetree.uk\/news\/?p=92"},"modified":"2019-12-08T21:42:22","modified_gmt":"2019-12-08T21:42:22","slug":"lets-hammock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.i3works.co.uk\/news\/2016\/09\/lets-hammock\/","title":{"rendered":"Let’s Hammock"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Insights into how hammocks are used in Project Planning to make your life easier than a sea breeze!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Author: Ben Ames<\/a> Head of Business Development at i3Works<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Hammocks may conjure up images of palm trees, azure oceans and \nmojitos, but their appeal doesn\u2019t just end there, they are also used in \nProject Planning to make your life easier than a sea breeze. In my view a\n hammock should be high up, be able to stretch over any length, and \nshould only be sat in by Project Managers (okay, I\u2019m joking about the \nlast bit).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Hammock\u2019 activities (also known as the \u2018level of effort\u2019 activity \ntype in Primavera) are those that \u2018hang\u2019 between start and end points \n(Activities or Milestones) within a schedule. These are useful for \n\u2018non-deliverable focussed\u2019 activity that last for the duration of a work\n package, phase, project or programme – no matter how that duration \nexpands or contracts. A Project\u2019s management and support effort is \nnormally captured in this way i.e. Project Planning or Risk Management. I\n geekily refer to these sort of activities as being PAU (Project As \nUsual).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my view, hammock activities should not read \u2018Project Planner\u2019 or \n\u2018Risk Manager\u2019 as they should be about the type of work being required \n(Project Planning or Risk Management) not the person required. For \ninstance the Project Manager may be spending a lot of time doing risk \nmanagement and that effort should be reflected within the Risk \nManagement hammock. Likewise if a Project Manager is working on a \n\u2018deliverable focussed\u2019 activity (e.g. signing off a technical drawing) \nrather than something that is PAU, they should be assigned to this \nactivity as well as their usual \u2018Project Management\u2019 hammock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The use of hammocks should add clarity to your project resourcing, \nhowever they should not be \u2018over-used\u2019 and are not a substitute for \nsufficiently resourcing the detailed deliverable activities that should \nmake up the vast majority of the project plan. As with the whole of the \nProject (of which the plan is just a reflection), the \u2018doing\u2019 should \nvastly outweigh the \u2018managing\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is therefore useful to separate hammocks out and apart from the \n\u2018deliverable\u2019 activities so that the two activity types don\u2019t get \nconfused. Placing them in to their own WBS at the top (of the Work \nPackage, Project etc) is a common way to do this. By all means steal my \nPAU acronym for this WBS name but you will often see these referred to \nas something generic such as \u2018Management & Support\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Promoting the use of hammocks can help to move people away from the \n\u2018Project Plan as a Calendar\u2019 mind-set – where recurring meetings are put\n in to the schedule to show effort being spent (a blog for another day) \u2013\n as now they have another place to collect the recurring\/ongoing effort \nof managing and supporting a project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As hammocks hang between start and end points they are (by nature) \nzero float activities for the Work Package, Project etc to which they \nare associated. However, they are not <\/strong>the critical \npath. In Primavera the Level of Effort (LoE) activities will not show as\n Critical but in other software (such as EPM\/MSP) they can. To solve \nthis, just identify the hammocks within your schedule somehow (for \ninstance by marking them in a text field) and filter them out when \nlooking at critical path activities. If this is not applicable (for \ninstance if other people have sight of your project and you don\u2019t want \nto have to provide them with instructions regarding filtering) you can \nalso stop them appearing on the critical path by reducing their duration\n by a unit of time (note that this doesn\u2019t work in the MSP\/EPM hint \ngiven below). For instance, if I want to show a Hammock activity for a \nwork package lasting for 200 working days, I will add the activity with \nthe Start Milestone as its predecessor, the End Milestone as its \nsuccessor and the duration as 199 working days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hints:<\/p>\n\n\n\n