Audit a schedule

When someone hands you a schedule — a contractor's baseline, a subcontractor's monthly update, a colleague's plan you're about to submit to an owner — you have to decide whether to trust it before you put your name on it. Audit a schedule is a flow on the Scheduling specialist built for exactly that: point it at a schedule you didn't build, tell it what you're worried about, and Owl runs a forensic integrity review the way an experienced scheduler would — then hands you a ranked findings report and a dashboard.

It looks for the things a summary email won't mention: open-ended logic, padded or negative float, hard date constraints propping up the finish, unrealistic durations, progress that doesn't add up, and — when you give it more than one version — the quiet changes between updates.

Note: This is an integrity and manipulation review, not a delay analysis. If you need to measure how much a specific event pushed the finish, use Time Impact Analysis or one of the other delay-analysis flows. Reach for the audit when the question is "can I trust this schedule?"

Before you start

Have the schedule you were given ready — a P6 XER/XML, an MPP, or an Excel file — or open the project if the schedule is already loaded into Owl. If you have earlier versions or the original baseline, have those files too: version-to-version comparison is where the most revealing findings come from. And know, in a sentence, why you don't fully trust it. That one sentence steers where Owl digs hardest.

Step 1: Start the audit

Open the chat panel, click + for a new thread, and type audit. Pick Audit a schedule under Scheduling specialist.

The New thread picker, searched for "audit", showing the Audit a schedule flow under the Scheduling specialist.

121Type to search agents and flows.2Audit a schedule: a contractor's or outside party's schedule, checked and its problems ranked.

The thread opens on the Scheduling specialist with the audit's setup form.

Step 2: Set up the audit

The form asks what you're auditing and what you're worried about.

The Audit a schedule form in a new thread, with the choice between uploading the schedule and auditing this project's current schedule.

11Schedule to audit: upload the file you were handed, or audit the schedule already in this project.

Schedule to audit: Upload the schedule you were handed (P6 XER or XML, MPP, or Excel; several updates at once if you have them), or audit This project's current schedule.
Earlier versions to compare against?: Single file only vets the file on its own merits; Upload earlier versions / baseline compares native files; Use this project's history compares against the versions Owl has stored.
What's the context, and what are you worried about?: a required sentence or two: who produced the schedule, and what you suspect. Owl runs every standard integrity check regardless, but this steers where it digs first.
Anything to emphasize?: optionally point it at logic integrity, float and constraints, progress integrity, version-to-version changes, or durations and granularity. Leave it blank to let Owl decide.

The rest of the form: the file upload, and the three ways to compare against earlier versions.

Click Start.

Heads up: Relationship-type flips (an FS link quietly changed to FF to slide a driver off the critical path), inserted lags, and constraint changes can only be proven from the native file for each version. A project's stored history keeps durations, dates, float and progress per version, but not each version's logic. If all you have is history, Owl still finds drift, and tells you plainly what it can't prove without the original files.

Step 3: Answer its questions and approve the plan

Before it opens the schedule, Owl may ask one or two targeted questions in the thread, such as the contract completion date, or which uploaded file is the latest. Answer what you know and skip what you don't.

Then it proposes an audit plan: the checks it will run, what each one looks for, and why it matters given your concern. This is your steering point. If you want it weighted differently (harder on constraints, a check added or dropped), say so; when the plan reflects what you care about, approve it and Owl runs the audit. This is the longest step: Owl imports the file, runs every check, and builds the report and the charts.

Ask Owl

Focus the audit on the last two updates. I don't care about the original baseline.

Add a check for milestones with hard constraints holding the finish date.

Step 4: Read the findings

Owl produces two things, without touching your live plan: a findings report under Documents and a Schedule Audit dashboard under Dashboards. The audit here was run on the NJ Steam Boiler Replacement schedule, submitted by a mechanical subcontractor as a "baseline."

The report

The report opens with the facts of the file and a plain-language verdict.

The Schedule Audit — Findings report, with the header facts and the plain-language verdict.

121The header: what was audited, activity and relationship counts, the forecast finish against the contract date, and the data date.2The verdict: the network logic is sound, but the file is a progressed working schedule, not a clean baseline.

The audit doesn't just confirm your fears: it clears the ones the data doesn't support. Three of the four things this user worried about (open-ended logic, negative float, long "contingency" activities) were not borne out, and Owl says so. What it caught instead were the real problems: 20% of the "baseline" was already progressed, some of that progress was impossible (11 activities finishing before they start, 67 actual dates after the data date), and the file had no data date set, a 59-day hot start. It also judged the 30% of high-float activities benign: almost all of it sits in parallel governance work, not hidden contingency in the build.

Then comes a severity-ranked findings table: every issue, the numbers behind it, and why it matters.

The severity-ranked findings table. Three High, one Medium and two Low findings, then four concerns marked Cleared or Cannot verify.

121Findings are ranked: three High, one Medium, two Low.2The concerns the data cleared, and the one it can't verify from what the file carries.

The report goes on with the detail by dimension (logic, float and constraints, durations, baseline sanity), a version-to-version comparison across all 17 stored versions (no duration or scope changes, only progress re-statusing), and a list of what to ask the author to fix or explain.

The dashboard

The Schedule Audit dashboard puts the integrity metrics where you can come back to them: the headline counts with their trend since the last update, relationship types, activities by duration, median float by WBS, and the open activities with the least float.

The Schedule Audit dashboard. Quality-check counts, relationships by type, activities by duration and median float by WBS.

12341Schedule quality checks: activities, high float, negative float, long durations, high float %, each with its change since the last update.2Relationships by type: FS, SS and FF, with their shares.3Activities by duration, in ranges.4Median float by WBS: where the float sits.

It's a live dashboard: the charts follow the schedule, so after the author re-issues the file, the same dashboard shows whether the numbers improved.

Ask Owl

Turn the high-severity findings into a list of questions I can send back to the subcontractor.

Which activities are driving the finish, and how many of them are open-ended?

Add a guardrail for each finding so the next update is checked automatically.

What to do next

Send it back — export the findings report and attach it to your review comments, or turn the high-severity findings into questions for the author.
Fix what you own — if it's your schedule, Fix issues with your schedule walks through clearing the failures.
Watch it over time — turn the findings into guardrails so every future update is checked automatically, and use Schedule history to compare any two versions yourself.