4 Easy Ways to Show the Critical Path in P6

1. Check the Gantt Chart

By default, the P6 Gantt chart will show your project’s Critical Path activities in bright red. This makes it easy to have a quick glance at the Gantt Chart et voila!, your Critical Path stands-out like a safety vest.

Hey! It’s not working! I don’t see any red Critical Path activities on my project. What gives?

Glad you asked.   Maybe your Gantt chart looks like this instead.

Primavera P6, by default, uses Total Float to decide if an Activity is Critical or not. Activities with a Total Float value of 0 (or less) usually show red on the Gantt. If you have no red Activities, you may have a Must Finish By date set on your project. If your project is finishing earlier than the Must Finish By deadline, then you may not have any activities with 0 or less Float values which means there are no Critical activities.

If that’s the case, tell P6 to show Critical Path by the Longest Path rather than by Total Float.

1. Press F9, and then click the Options button.

2. Find the setting “Define Critical Activities as”. Choose Longest Path.

3. Reschedule your Project.

4. Notice the Gantt chart now. You should see a red Critical Path now.

You can always read more about the Critical Path vs Longest Path.

2. Use the Critical Path / Longest Path Columns

Edit your columns and go digging for one called “Critcal” and another called “Longest Path”. Add one or both of these nifty columns to your Activity Layout to show clearly which activities are Critical.

3. Turn On a Filter

Using a Filter can also be a quick and effective way to manifest your Critical Path. Click the Filters button to turn on the Critical Path filter. This will show only the Critical Activities. There’s also a filter for the Longest Path.

4. Check the Schedule Log

Lastly, you can always check the P6 Schedule Log.  The Schedule Log is a log file that gets updated every time your project is scheduled. Press F9 and make sure the box labeled “Log to File” is checked on. Then, click the “View Log”button to open the Schedule Log.

Once you have the log file open in Notepad, you’ll have to scroll down to the section labeled “Exceptions”. But you should see in the log a list of your project’s Critical Activities.

See in Plannertuts.

Scheduling Best Practice Conundrums

by TheCobraGuy

The following are top tips from professional schedulers that will help keep your project on track:

There are some common mistakes made during the creation of project schedules, particularly by folks who are new to the art. In this article I’ll be pointing out a few of the most frequent scheduling faux pas that we encounter out in the field, and talk about common best practice guidelines and the dilemmas that these can throw at schedulers working in the real world.

I’m focusing on following guidelines that are common to many publications including Unified Facilities Guide Specifications (UFGS) and the PMI’s Project Management Body of knowledge (PMBOK).

1. Avoid Open-ended Logic.

2. Use as few constraints as possible.

3. Keep activity durations below 45 days unless they are Level of Effort (LOE) type tasks.

One problem I’m always wrestling with when it comes to using best practice guideline, is that they often seem to be contradictory. Following one guideline seems to cause you to have to ignore another. The following is an example of a best practice guideline that will get you into a dilemma.

Open-ended Logic

Various guidelines say to avoid open-ended logic activities that have no successors. This seems to be the most common issue I see in schedules, whereby an activity that has no successor and is just left dangling at the end of a chain of predecessors. If I ask the scheduler about it, the answer is invariably the same: “There are no other activities dependent on that activity, so there’s no successor”. In real-world terms, that actually makes a lot of sense; if there’s nothing dependent upon its completion, then there’s no dependency to illustrate.

However, best practice is to not have such dangling activities in the network. Doing so drops the activity out of the critical path and generates an unusually large Total Float value. Arguably you could say that if it’s in the scope of the project, at some point it’s going to impact the completion of the project, so if nothing else, make the project finish milestone its successor.

However on longer projects, this could really push the boundaries of acceptable Total Float limits; especially if the activity is early in the project life-cycle. And here’s where we start running into some guideline conundrums. The obvious solution is to add a constraint date to the end of the dangling activity. However, this can appear to be in conflict with the following general guideline:

Limit the use of Activity Constraints

Generally speaking the term “Constraint” doesn’t necessarily refer to the special Start or Finish date attributes that can be added to activities in most scheduling software tools. The term “constraint” can mean a relationship between two activities, the constraint being physical: i.e. the roof cannot be built until the walls are completed. It can also refer to a condition in a contract where a crucial delivery date is specified. This is referred to as an external constraint. However for our purposes, I am referring to constraints that can be added as special date attributes to activities in a software tool; dates that will influence the calculation of the critical path.

Many of the published guidelines recommend very limited use of activity constraints in a project schedule, that is: hard dates that are added to activities that will lock down the early and/or late dates.

If the dangling activity (or chain of dangling activities) delivers a major contract milestone, then the use of a hard constraint date is appropriate. This will reduce the overall float of the dangling activity. For greater schedule clarity, a Milestone should be added as a successor to the dangling activity and the constraint applied to it. Depending on how close the constraint date is to the current scheduled dates, this option will reduce or remove the Total Float for the open-ended chain. And if the scheduled date is already later than the constraint date, negative Float will be calculated indicating that you already can’t meet that contractual date and changes to the plan are required.

In the following example, we’ve added a contract deliverable milestone to the back of activity “G’ and then applied a hard Finish On constraint date. The constraint date is 3 days past the scheduled finish date for the activity, so we have 3 days of Total Float, rather than the 21 days we had before introducing the constraint.  We could still link the Contract Complete Milestone date to the Finish milestone, but if I slipped that badly as to push out the project end date, we’re in trouble anyway.  We could add a long lag between the new milestone and Finish milestone, but some guidelines also discourage the use of long lags and leads.  What you finally do will be a judgment call in the end, based upon the particulars of the actual work being modeled.

The guidelines that discourage the use of constraints are sound because too many constraints will mask the true critical path. It makes it harder to differentiate between activities on the critical path and constrained activities. I’ve seen schedules littered with constraints and it was nearly impossible to see the true critical path. Also it can potentially create bucket-loads of negative float, never a good thing. If the customer is schedule savvy, they will think that the dates cannot be met and constraints have been used to artificially paint a happy, but horribly unrealistic picture of workflow; underpinned by an inability to meet the goals of the project.

In short, only use constraints when you have a very good reason to do so. And even then use constraint types such as Start on or After or Finish On or Before type (soft constraints), that will still allow the schedule to shift in at least one direction if needs be.

Keep activity durations below ‘n’ days

I’ve seen this guideline in various publications with differing duration limits depending on the types of projects being scheduled. Of course such ongoing activities as Management, Safety, Security and so on may run the entire length of the project, but these are normally created as some kind of hammock: that is a task whose duration is dependent on activities to which it is linked.

Above: activity A1005 is a Level of Effort activity

Any activity that doesn’t create a deliverable can be of virtually any length; however discrete work packages that describe a particular package of work should be kept to a reasonable length. A common maximum length is to keep activity durations below three months. When the activity is longer than this, it suggests it’s functioning as more of a summary activity, and it probably represents many operations that could be broken down to smaller packets of work.

Figuring out the right level at which to break out the work and estimating the durations for activities can be a conundrum all of its own. There are various guidelines that discuss formal methods for doing this, such as Expert Judgment, Analogous Estimating and Parametric Estimating. Nevertheless, because the work can always be performed in more than one way, getting the activities at just the right level and duration for your particular project is always a challenge.

When creating your activity list, one tip is to keep in mind how the work’s status will be recorded. If the activity’s description covers more than one discrete step of the work, it will be difficult to track and apply status. For example you may have an activity named “Build Foundations”. For a small project, this makes sense as a single task because the entire operation may only take a couple of days. However if this is a larger building where the foundation takes a few weeks to complete, then it will need to be broken out into more discrete packages, such as “Dig footings”, “Wire Rebar”, “Build and Set Forms”, “Pour Concrete” and so on. With each of the activities being a few days long, status will be more discrete. The footings have been dug so that task is 100% done. If the activity was just called “Build Foundation”, and was 5 weeks long, what percentage of the activity is complete when the footings are done? So think about the need for accurate updating of status when you are considering the level of detail at which to create the activity as this often helps in estimating the durations too.

Summary

In the end, all guidelines are designed to give you the optimum way of achieving a viable schedule. They are guidelines and not hard and fast rules precisely because every schedule has unique challenges to overcome. As schedulers, dealing with the day-to-day challenges of putting together a viable schedule, being given guidelines can be a prickly subject, particularly when you know you’ll have to ignore some of them in order to make the schedule reflect the reality it is attempting to model. When challenged about scheduling guidelines I simply say this; “if you can defend it, and there was no better way to do it, then just do it”, even if you’ve had to ignore a guideline or two to make it happen.

Primavera P6: Critical, or not so Critical?

by TenSix

Many scheduling guidelines including the PMI’s PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) use the term “near critical’ to describe activities in a schedule that are within a few days of joining the critical path; that is to say they only have a few days of Total Float.

Because Primavera P6 Professional has such a flexible method for defining how activity bars appear in a Gantt chart, you can create extra bars whose appearance can be controlled by the amount of Total Float they have. This allows you to easily see near critical activities in a Gantt chart.

This blog shows you how to create activity bars that appear different to standard red, blue and green bars when the activity is near critical.

The process of creating a near critical bar starts with the creation of a Filter. This filter is then used by an additional bar that you define in the Bars dialog of Primavera P6 Professional.

Create a Near Critical Filter

Open the Filters dialog and click on the New button.

Create the following filter:

This will show any activity whose Total Float falls within 0.1 days and up to 10.0 days. You should test this filter on your schedule before proceeding to the next step.

Create a Near Critical Activity Bar

The next step is to create a new activity bar style in using the Bars dialog.

Right-click in the Gantt chart area of the Activities view to open the Bars dialog.

In the Bars dialog, scroll down to and select the current Critical Remaining bar in the table area. This will cause a new bar to appear below the selected bar when you click the Add button.

Upon clicking the New button, a new default bar appears on below the selected row. You then need to name this new Bar in the Name column; we suggest “Near Critical”.

In the Timescale column, set the value to “Remain Bar”, and then set the Filter column by selecting both the Normal and Near Critical filters.

Finally set the Bar Style colors and patterns that you want for your near critical bar. In the following example we’ve simply set the bar to an orange color.

Once you apply the new bar to your layout, you can see any near critical activities showing as orange in the Gantt chart.

You can take this a lot further than just near critical. Using the same techniques, you could create filters for ‘Potential Critical’ whereby the activity has between 10 and 30 days total float, or perhaps even super-critical where there is negative float making a darker red bar appear. Of course the different bars we can create based upon some condition are only limited by our imaginations. One of our customers uses different bar colors to indicate a particular activity code setting, to give just one example. Perhaps you have already made use of this capability? If so, drop us a line – we’d love to hear about it.

Variance Reporting in Primavera P6 Professional

Variance Overview

Variance reporting in Primavera P6 requires that the project has a baseline and it is assigned as either a Project Baseline or a Primary Baseline.

Before attempting variance reporting, you should check the baseline being used for the project. To do this take a look at the information bar at the bottom of the Primavera P6 window.

Baselines are assigned using the Project | Assign Baselines… menu option. The resulting dialog allows existing baselines to be assigned as a Project Baseline or Primary, Secondary or Tertiary baseline.

With a baseline in place it is possible to report any activity that has moved away from its baseline date in the current project schedule.

Variance Reports are typically created using filters that look for values other than zero in the Variance fields available in P6.

You can see the available variance fields using the Columns dialog in P6 as shown in the following figure:

Variance Fields Prefix Explanation

Fields prefixed with Variance – BL Project contain variance values based upon the baseline project assigned as a Project Baseline.

Fields prefixed with Variance – BL1 contain variance values based upon the baseline assigned as the Primary Project.

Fields prefixed with Variance – BL2 and Variance – BL3 contain values based upon the secondary and tertiary baseline assignments for the project respectively.

Therefore, if you want to find out how the current project is performing compared to the Project Baseline, you would look for non-zero values in the Variance – BL Project fields.

Common Variance Filter Options

To find out which activities are no longer scheduled to start or finish on their original baseline dates according to the baseline assigned as Project Baseline, you would create the following filter using the Filter dialog:

If an activity has slipped from its baseline start or baseline finish date, the Variance – BL Project Start Date and Variance – BL Project Finish Datefields will contain a value other than zero and the activity will be displayed in the Gantt chart.

If the Bars dialog is configured to show the Project Baseline bars, you will see the slippage visually on the schedule. You can also display the Variance – BL Project fields you’re filtering on in the activity table to see by what amount the activities vary from the baseline.

More Variance Filter Examples

Exclude Completed Activities

The following filter will show all activities that have a variance and do not have an Activity Status of Completed.

Only Show Activities Starting Late

In this example the filter has been changed to only show values of less than zero variance. In other words, the variance is negative which will only show activities that will start late. If the activity is starting earlier than the baseline, it will not appear in the Gantt chart using this filter.

Once the Gantt chart is displaying the required fields and activity data, the File | Print Preview menu option can be used to run a variance report.

Note: Filters can be saved with the named layout and will be activated whenever the layout is opened.

From Ten Six

Primavera P6: Time Distributed Reporting and Microsoft Excel

by TheP6Pro

It’s common practice to use Primavera P6 Professional’s Time Distributed reports feature to create time-phased tables of data that are then exported to Microsoft Excel. However, if you’ve ever done this you may have noticed that in many cases the Subtotals row can be one column too far to the left.

This misalignment invariably requires you to go through the entire spreadsheet deleing cells to bring the data back into alignment.

However there’s a better way to permanently solve this problem and good old Ten Six Consulting will show you how right now.

In the Reports view, right-click on your Time Distributed report and choose the Modify button.

When you see the following prompt, click the Yes button.

Clicking Yes will open the Report editor as seen below. This is the underlying canvas that gets created by the wizard when you initially build a report. While it is possible to build a report from scratch using this feature, we do not recommend it as it can be a little time consuming: rather you should always create your reports first using the Report Wizard.

The Report editor allows you to add or remove fields used in the population of the final report output in P6. In this case we’re going to add a field to the sub-total row in order to solve our issue with the misaligned spreadsheet data. The Subtotal field is spanning the space of the Activity ID and Activity Description fields in the data row above. Therefore the subtotals get written on a row that has one less column.

Adding a new field to the Report

First we need to make some room for a new field, so we click on the right-hand end of the Subtotals field and drag it right to about half its original size.

Now we right-click on the row behind the Subtotal field and from the menu choose Add Text Cell.

This places a text cell on the same row, at the far right end and opens the cell’s Properties dialog.

In the Cell type field, select Custom Text and then close the properties dialog using the small x button at the top right.

The next step is to drag the new cell over to the left of the row. This will add a column to the CSV file that is opened by Excel in the final stage of this process.

Without further modification this cell placement won’t look very pretty in the report preview; however as it’s primarily for creating spreadsheets that doesn’t matter.

Finally click the OK button to close the report editor and then run the report, saving it to an ASCII text file using the example settings below.

In the final spreadsheet, you can see that the addition of a new text field has caused the data to come out correctly in line with the headers.

Thanks Ten Six.

Earned Value Management (EVM) – To Do or Not To Do

by Ten Six

Why should we do Earned Value Management (EVM)? For those of us who implement Earned Value Management Systems (EVMS) regularly within many different organizations, we hear plenty of reasons why an organization shouldn’t do EVM. At the end of the day, most organizations implement an EVMS because they need to comply with a government contract.

Why We Shouldn’t?

Here are some of the most common reasons why organizations don’t want to implement an EVMS:

· Too bureaucratic.

· Too expensive to implement.

· Too many people are required to administer an EVMS.

· Special IT tool-sets are required.

· The Baseline cannot be established early…development programs have too much uncertainty, let’s wait and see.

· “This program is too small to need such an intrusive tool.”

· “We’re only a small company and can’t afford this.”

· “This program is too big…Earned Value is meaningless to us.”

Those are some of the quoted reasons and more often than not, there are other hidden issues that are not shared so readily. These include:

· The objectivity an EVMS provides leaves nowhere to hide.

· We’ll have to do detail planning ahead of the game and are not willing to make that much effort.

· EVM will reveal more details about actual costs than we want Internal or Customer Management to know.

· We don’t want to undergo a Customer based Integrated Baseline Review (IBR) to prove our baseline is valid.

Number 4 above is amusing as it implies that they have a choice whether or not to conduct an Integrated Baseline Review with their customer.

Why We Should?

It won’t be a surprise to anyone that the number one reason to implement a robust EVMS is because it’s a contractual requirement. In fact, the government and agencies have different contract Dollar thresholds where EVM must be a contractual requirement. You can see some examples of these in the table chart here.

Here are some reasons why you should not only implement an EVMS but also embrace it for all programs:

· The Government requires EVM to see cost and schedule variances in order to mitigate issues before they are too large.

· Non-compliance with the Government could be very costly and they do have deep pockets to pursue you.

· The 32 Guidelines reflected in ANSI/EIA-748 represent sound project management principles. Of these Guideline groupings, which do you think should not be reflected in your company’s processes to effectively set up and manage your programs?

• Organizing: Defining the work and assigning responsibility/accountability for its performance?
• Planning & Budgeting: Developing a definitive plan to monitor how you’re going to get there and the costs required?
• Accounting: Establishing cost charge numbers to accrue direct & indirect costs by major element. This will help in comparing actual to planned costs?
• Analysis: Routine review of cost & schedule performance to date to see where you’ve gone off target, understand how it’s going to get fixed and what it’ll ultimately cost?
• Revisions: Maintaining a track record of changes made to the contract with the impact to the cost and schedule baselines to use for the next similar program?

It’s true that implementing and executing an ANSI-748 EVM compliant project management plan does require effort by both the project team and senior management. The alternative of not establishing a solid plan to manage a contract’s scope, schedule, budgetary and risks could result in project failure and a financial pressure on your organization. Is it worth the risk to not do EVM?

What about Firm Fixed Price?

Firm Fixed Price (FFP) contracts often do not require EVM as all the risk is on the contractor. But it does beg one question. Why would a company that’s taking on a FFP contract that has them bearing all the cost and schedule risks not do EVM? They are effectively in a position to not know their potential cost and schedule exposure risks. Are you willing to bet your company that everything will work out OK?

Summary

Earned Value Management is essentially best practice project management. Getting bad news on project performance early enough to take action is a lot less painful than the consequences of project failure and contractual non-compliance.

In complement to this post read this.

Why won’t my activities Start/End on the correct day?

From primaverablog.in

There have been times when activities in Primavera don’t Start or End on correct dates despite the math saying otherwise . There are several reasons that can cause this to happen, lets look at them in this post.

1) Out of Sequence Activities – These are activities that have started before the predecessor activities are completed. These activities are created when you using “Retained Logic” as your scheduling preference. This creates non-working periods and this can cause the activity to be pushed out of the normal calculated dates. You can check which activities are being pushed Out of Sequence by checking. You can choose “Progress Override” to schedule and correct these dates or change relationships for these activities. For a better explanation on these option check this blog post Scheduling Options – Progressing Activities .

2) The activity calendar contains non-work time that is pushing the finish date out.

3) Resource Leveling – “Level resources during scheduling” option should be unchecked in “Schedule Options” when you schedule the project.

4) Multiple calendars – If you are using multiple calendars and the number of working hours do not match the Time Period settings under Admin Preferences then the activities might end on a different time of the day.

5) Constraints - If an Activity has an “As late as possible” constraint. The As late as possible constraint allows an activity to start or finish as late as possible without delaying its successors. This constraint sets the early dates as late as possible without affecting successor activities. Even if the activity is started, the Finish date can be pushed later in time if positive total float exists when the As late as possible constraint is applied. This will make the Finish date appear to be later than it would be based on the remaining duration.

6) Project has Activities with Actual Dates > Data Date – To check if any of your activities has this problem you need to go to Tools, Schedule open schedule log. In the schedule log, you need to check and see if any activities are listed in the Activities with Actual Dates > Data Date section. If yes, then you can either remove the actual dates, or move the data date after the actual dates.

Primavera P6 Percent Complete Types

by TheP6Pro

When adding activities to a Primavera P6 EPPM or Professional schedule, you have three possible percent complete types to choose from: Duration, Physical and Units. Which one you choose depends on your desired outcome. This article explains each of the Primavera P6 activity percent compete choices, when you should use a particular percent complete type and how they affect your process for entering status to your project’s schedule.

The Activity % Complete Field

Before we get into the specifics of the percent complete types, we need to take a quick look at the Activity % Complete field. This field’s existence can be a little confusing because it sounds like another percent complete type. However it is, in fact, a field (column) into which a value can be placed to update the value in the activity’s selected percent complete type field. In other words you don’t need to add a column for all three percent complete types that you might be using within a schedule, rather you just add the Activity % Complete field, and enter your values there.

Any option that reduces the number of columns you need to have displayed in your P6 table area is a good thing.

Duration % Complete

This option is used to calculate progress from the planned and remaining duration values. For example, if you enter 6 days of remaining duration for a 10 day duration activity, Primavera P6 will calculate 40% complete. Transversely, if you enter 40% in the Activity % Complete field, P6 will calculate a remaining duration of 6 days.

Original or Planned Duration – Remaining Duration = Percent Complete

Usage:

Enter a percent complete value in the Activity % Complete column or directly into the Duration % Complete column. Primavera P6 will automatically calculate the Remaining Duration for the activity. Or enter a Remaining Duration value and let P6 calculate the percentage.

This percent complete type is best used for more level of effort type activities where measurable deliverables are not expected and the percent complete represents elapsed time more than deliverables completed.

Physical % Complete

The percent complete values will be entered by the user manually. Entering a value in the Activity % Complete field will update the Physical % Complete value. The Physical % Complete type is required if you wish to use Steps to drive progress.

Caution: When Physical % Complete is used, you must adjust the Remaining Duration as this is not calculated by Primavera P6. You must enter a Remaining Duration manually, or set an Expected Finish date on the activity.

If you don’t adjust the Remaining Duration, P6 will add the Actual Duration to the Remaining Duration. This will cause unnecessary variance in the project and will likely alter your critical path. As you can see in the following figure, the Remaining Duration remained at 10 days, the Actual Duration was added to it, giving an At Completion Duration of 14 days, and pushing all successor activities out but that amount.

You can use the Expected Finish date option to help control the remaining duration of Physical % Complete activities. Adding a date in the Expected Finish date field locks down the end date of the activity and forces P6 to calculate the Remaining Duration.

In the above image you can see that an Expected Finish date of 27-Jan-15 has pulled the end date back to its original date and caused P6 to calculate a 6 day remaining duration.

Physical % Complete and Steps

An additional advantage when using the Physical % Complete technique is the ability to progress the activity using weighted steps. Weighted Steps are simply a checklist of things that must be completed before the activity can be considered finished.

Continuing with our Mobilize activity example, weighted steps have been added from a Step Template.

The weights values entered will be calculated to a percentage value by Primavera P6 and will drive the Physical % Complete value of the activity. The weight values can be any decimal number and thus spare the user from manually calculating the Percent Complete values; they just enter some arbitrary value based on whatever factor they choose; number of hours, relative degree of difficulty, whatever.

As Steps are checked off as Completed, so they will drive the Percent Complete for the activity. The user will still need to manually update the remaining duration or expected finish date values as previously described.

Note: the “Calculate Activity % Complete from the activity steps” must be set in the “Calculations” tab of the “Set Project Preferences” dialog must be set in order for this feature to work.

Usage:

The Physical % Complete progress type should be used when dealing with discrete work that equates to one or more measurable delivery items.

Units % Complete

The Units % Complete type is used when resources are assigned to an activity and actual units worked will be tracked. Actual Units may be entered manually or via the Apply Actuals feature that loads actual units from a timesheet module such as Primavera Progress Reporter.

As with Physical % Complete, Units % Complete doesn’t calculate the remaining duration for activities, so you will need to use either the Remaining Duration field or an Expected Finish date to manually control the calculated end date for your activity.

Usage:

Use Units % Complete when resources are assigned to the activity and actual units will be tracked. The only drawback of this method is that hours expended doesn’t necessarily equate to progress achieved, so this method is not very discrete.

Summary

I hope this article helps give you a better understanding of each of the Primavera P6 activity percent complete choices, when they should be applied and what the outcome will be when statusing your project.

The original post is on here! On Ten Six Consulting blog.

Managing Remote Workers

07/12/13

by Ten Six

Managing Remote Workers In today’s business world, teams are often a group of individuals who don’t work in the same office, don’t speak the same language when they are at home and perhaps don’t even work for the same employer. That’s one extreme of virtual teams. At the other end of the scale is a situation most project managers will be familiar with: project team members who are remote workers. They could be scattered around the country or based out of their home office. Here are five tips for successfully managing remote workers.

Make Sure They Have Access To The Tools

Project teams need tools: plans, timesheets, task tracking software and so on. Enterprise project management tools tend to be centrally hosted, which is fine if you are at your desk in your office, but not so helpful if you are working at home. Make sure that any team members who are not based in the main office have access to the same tools. Talk to your IT department about how to get them set up with the appropriate remote access.

Include Them In Social Events

One company we know has software developers based in multiple locations, so they organize a virtual film night. Some of the team actually watch the film during the day, due to the time difference, but everyone comes together, with the help of instant messaging and an open conference call or internet conferencing number, to watch the film and chat about it together. They have also done the same with online gaming, setting up a team online gaming environment so that the team can play with each other in multi-player games.

In another company, any individual who brought cakes into work for a special occasion would package a few up and put them in the internal mail so those in the other offices wouldn’t feel left out.

Trust on project teams is built through sharing small confidences and experiences with other team members, so try to involve the remote workers in social activities as far as you can. Organize their travel and an overnight stay for the office party. Celebrate everyone’s birthdays. Find creative ways to involve the whole project team in events.

Set Clear Objectives

Make sure that people working remotely have clear expectations of what they are supposed to be doing. They need clear objectives for the project and for their behaviour. Are they supposed to join a team conference call weekly? How will they report progress, and who needs to know? What are the standards for the task in hand?

Work with your remote team members to set clear, written goals, and hold the team members accountable with regular feedback.

Train The Whole Team

Training someone on how to work remotely seems a little bit odd. Surely it’s the same as working in an office, but just further away? Actually, remote working is different. There are different distractions and if you are based at home you may feel a sense of isolation. Remote workers may need training on the technology, such as how to access core systems remotely or how to use web conferencing effectively. Soft skills like communication become even more important, so remote workers may benefit from training in those areas.

Project managers may also need to be trained in how to manage remote team members. For example, you can’t watch someone’s performance if they aren’t there, so you need to learn to manage (and judge) by results instead. Again, communication skills are key, so project managers may like to brush up.

Finally, the rest of the team – the ones who are based together – may also benefit from some training, or at least an overview session. This could cover things like how to get in touch with remote employees, why some people are working remotely and others aren’t, how to work together to ensure the project moves forward smoothly and any technical issues like sharing files.

Stay Organized

The most important tip for managing remote employees is to stay organized. Remember that they are there and that they have a valuable part to play in the project’s success. The remote team member still needs work planned and scheduled, and goals set. They need to be invited to team meetings so you may need to be more organized and book meeting rooms with the conferencing facilities instead of holding stand up meetings by your desks.

Using remote workers can add a great deal to a project team, not least because it widens the talent pool for picking the right people for the project. Project managers should learn to make the most of this opportunity and learning how to manage remote workers is a step in the right direction.

Percent Complete - Are We Nearly There Yet?

By Ian Webster

I’ve got this old watch at home. It’s broken – completely and utterly useless as a timepiece, but I can’t quite bring myself to throw it away, and at least it tells the right time twice per day. I wouldn’t use it to manage a project, though.

Percent Complete

Relying on percent complete as a true indicator of project progress is about as reliable as using a broken watch to tell the time. Percent complete has the same limitations. It can be correct, but usually just twice – at 0% and 100%. Everything in between simply cannot be relied upon as the truth. At best percent complete is the product of guesswork. At worst, it’s a lie… a broken watch.

The unwary project manager can easily get suckered in. Here’s how it goes. A task starts and the person doing the work reports progress regularly to the project manager. On the face of it, things move quickly early on. Progress moves from 0% complete, to 10% complete, 20%, 30% and so on. The project is progressing. It’s encouraging. The tracking Gantt is updated. Progress is reported upwards. Everyone is happy.

Then progress hits around 80% and things can appear to drag. People working on high profile projects don’t want to look like they’re dragging their heels, but they still need to demonstrate progress, so the percent complete increments keep coming, but they get smaller – 75%, 78%, 79%, and then they usually get stuck. The last 20% takes 80% of the time – that’s the Pareto Principle (also known as the 80/20 rule).

MS Project

There’s a rather convenient if little known feature in MS Project that enables you to set the % complete field to be precisely what it should be if things were going to plan. You don’t need to think. If the work on a task should be 57% complete by now, that’s what you can set the task to be – with a couple of clicks of the mouse. It creates the illusion that things are progressing perfectly in line with the plan.

In my early days as a project manager I’ll admit to using it once or twice. Some years later, in my early days as a program manager, when I inherited what at the time was a failing program, I discovered my whole team of project managers were using it to routinely report that progress was as it should be (when in reality it was anything but). They stopped doing so. We understood where the projects were really at, and we turned the thing around.

A Communications Tool

The problem is percent complete is lovely as a communications tool. You can draw sexy progress lines on a Gantt chart with it. It works to a point, for a while, then it starts to become meaningless. People confuse the amount of elapsed time that’s passed with the amount of progress that’s actually been made. They assume one is the same as the other. It’s quite possible to use up 100% of the time allocated to a task and for it be 0% complete. You’ve spent all your money. Burned all your time, but you’ve got nothing to show for it.

Psychology

There are some psychological factors at play here:

People are over-optimistic when the original estimates are put together, and often don’t want to admit this when work gets underway

Project managers don’t like change requests so this persists the original plan

People lie (for any number of reasons, such as to cover their poor performance or to stop the project being seen in a bad light)

Work will generally expand to fill the available time anyway (for example, the amount of time countries have to prepare for major sporting events such as the Olympics or the World Cup is measured in years, but they’re almost always scurrying around at the last minute sorting something out – the project report has probably been stating that they’re at 99.99 something-or-other percent complete for the last few weeks).

What’s the Alternative?

Tracking the amount of work outstanding is usually a more honest and effective approach. Kids in the back of cars know this instinctively.

“Are we nearly there, yet?” they ask, followed by the qualifying question “How much further?” They’re not interested in how far you’ve traveled. They just want to know how much further there is to go.

Personally I prefer milestones. A milestone’s status is binary – it’s either complete or it isn’t. It’s a cleaner metric. You can’t be half pregnant with a milestone – there’s no mistake (which could ultimately mean much less irritation coming from the back seat on long car journeys).

http://www.pmhut.com/percent-complete-are-we-nearly-there-yet

7 Scheduling Mistakes to Avoid

by Ten Six

Scheduling is one of the key things that an enterprise project management tool can help with. But however good the tool, it is only as useful as the data you enter in to it. Complex project schedules inevitably end up changing along the way – as German Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke said, no plan survives contact with the enemy.

However, you can give your project a fighting chance of success by avoiding these 7 scheduling mistakes.

1. Failing to tick off completed tasks

Every single project manager I know loves ticking off tasks on a list. Given that, you’d think that we wouldn’t see project managers forgetting to mark completed tasks as actually complete. Unfortunately, it’s a common mistake. It just shows that the project manager is not up to date with current project status, and is not close to the teams doing the work. Get regular updates from team members and make sure you know exactly what has been completed at any point.

2. Failing to update progress on in-flight tasks

Lack of progress tracking doesn’t just affect completed tasks. Progress should also be tracked for tasks that are underway. This allows you to see what is currently being worked on.

3. Not breaking down high level deliverables

Schedules are only useful when the tasks listed are of a level of granularity that makes sense to track. Activities like ‘Organise conference’ are hard to track because they are made up of a number of smaller deliverables like ‘Hire venue’, ‘Invite speakers’ and ‘Set up booking website’. Break down big tasks into smaller tasks. A rule of thumb is to stop when the task durations are about a week long.

4. Missing dependencies

Your schedule becomes less accurate when the dependencies are missing. You won’t be able to see what has to happen first, or what downstream effort is relying on earlier tasks to complete. Sit down with the team and work out where the dependencies are, then make sure that your schedule accurately reflects all of them. Don’t expect to be able to do this by yourself.

5. Failing to adjust forecasted effort

When tasks on the schedule are running late, the optimistic view is to hope that the team will catch up. With all our experience at Ten Six, we know that this happens very rarely indeed. Late tasks typically get later. If you know that something is running late because it is taking longer than planned, adjust the remaining effort for that task accordingly. For example, if a task duration is four weeks, and you have completed one week’s effort but it has taken two week’s elapsed time, you know you are running at about half speed so you need to plan in another four weeks for this task.

6. Not planning for resource availability

Even the best schedule in the world will stop being accurate the moment that people are unavailable to work on their tasks. Plan forward, especially with part-time resources. You should be aiming to give people (and their managers) notice about when they are expected to start working on their tasks, and remember to keep them up to date if things change because you are running late or have made up some time and will be requiring their skills early.

7. Failing to adjust the schedule for scope changes

There has to be a link between the project’s change management process and the schedule. The majority of changes will have some impact on the schedule, either through adding or removing something from the project scope or amending key milestone dates for some reason. Make sure that your project joins up the change management process and the planning process, so that you can immediately implement the changes to the schedule as a result of changes to scope. This is also a good way of ensuring that everyone knows that a change has been implemented – sometimes project team members on the periphery are not close to the core processes and may not be aware that something has changed.

Good scheduling takes time and commitment, and the effort to keep on top of everything, all the time. It’s a big job, especially on complex projects but if you keep your focus you can avoid these 7 scheduling mistakes. Helmuth von Moltke would be proud.

What is Planning?

In my everyday work life I’m explaining what is Planning and talking about its meaning in public. Every person has a perception of what is planning and of what is needed to do some kind of plan, but usually they are thinking on different things. In my readings I’ve come across a 2 pages very good helper on this meaning, from The AACE (American Association of Cost Engineers). It presents a broad scope of what is planning and afterwards defines what is schedule planning and also schedule development.

“Project planning in general consists of:

· Identifying project stakeholders and their roles, responsibilities and their effect on the scheduling planning process.

· Identifying contract requirements including project delivery methods under the terms of the contract. The contract delivery method will determine the extent of the planning effort by the project team.

· Identifying the constraints, and variables that will allow the project team to begin the planning process.

· Establishing a planning process to determine the scope of work, client requirements, schedule hierarchy, division of responsibility, project plan review and approval requirements and distribution.

· Identifying major work activities (phases) and deliverables (goals) and the preferred sequence in which they are to be accomplished.

· Establishing an integrated time phased plan to achieve project completion as required.

· Identifying project management coordination necessary to establish cost/schedule areas for the further definition of the scope of work.

· Development of non-schedule related planning methodologies such as logistics planning including but not limited to: site access plan, heavy lift plans, placement of cranes, long lead material/equipment procurement plans, owner provided material/equipment planning, and other such specific purpose plans.

 

Schedule Planning and Schedule Development

Planning and scheduling are distinctively different but related processes for capital construction projects. Schedule planning and schedule development usually require a different set of skills and knowledge.

Planning consists of planning the work, the resources, and the estimated cost over time to complete the scope of work defined in the early phases of project. Schedule planning includes the identification of many elements that are associated with the scope of work which is developed into work packages, sequenced into phases and then discrete activities. The means, methods and resources have iterative planning processes as the project plan is developed prior to the project execution phase. Schedule planning continues evolving during the life of the project and puts emphasis on the experience and knowledge gained from previous project successes and failures.

The purpose of planning by a project management team is to establish an acceptable course of action ("plan") to perform the defined scope of work of a project in an efficient, coordinated manner based on a review of project requirements and responsibilities. Included in this planning effort is the identification of stakeholders, contract requirements, and the project delivery method that are key elements in the initial planning effort.

The purpose of scheduling by a project management team is to develop a time phased management tool that will help implement the approved plan and guide the project toward the desired results using the outputs of the planning process. Planning should precede the scheduling effort and while it may become less formal in later stages of the project, planning is a continuous process that never stops until the project is completed. The project schedule is detailed during the schedule development phase of the project. There is a relatively seamless transition from project planning to schedule development while the project plan document is finalized and reviewed by the appropriate stakeholders.”

(From 39R-06: Project Planning – As Applied in Engineering and Construction for Capital Projects, of AACE® International)

New Release 8.3 of Primavera Professional

The exciting news this week is that the long-awaited Primavera P6 R8.3 update is now available. This release includes updates for the Primavera P6 Professional client.

Starting with Primavera P6 Professional, very little about the client has changed from a visual perspective; always a good thing for existing users. What has been introduced is a new tool called the Primavera P6 Professional Visualizer: an attractive interface tool that brings together the original TimeScale Logic Diagram (TSLD) functions and a basic Gantt chart viewing tool. The Visualizer is an additional desktop application that can be launched from the P6 Professional Tools menu or from your Windows Start menu. Because it connects to the database directly you don’t have to have P6 Professional running to use it.

See here tutorial from Tensix in video.

Another new item is a Discussion tab in the Activity Details. This allows users to communicate via the software by posting comments against particular activities in the project.

Other features include XML import/export improvements addressing one-to-one matching of data items exported in XML formats to those of the original XER formats. Users can now exchange XML project files with users of earlier version of Primavera P6 going back to P6 R6.2 SP4.

The IPMR Data Item Description (DID), number DI-MGMT-81861 went into effect on July 1st, 2012 and part of this calls for a specific UN/CEFACT (XML) software-neutral export format for the IMPR Format 7.

For government contractors, this format is now available to Primavera P6 R8.3 users via the Export Format dialog as shown above.

Further items of note are the options to load or not load the project summary data upon startup of Primavera P6 and the option to use either online help or local help.

Standalone configuration with XE

Many times we are contacted by planners and project managers that installed P6 in standalone mode in order to solve issues to access the database and login to P6. This is a transcript from a post of Tensix on the subject that makes all the sense to avoid support requests. It applies to Oracle Primavera P6 Professional version 7 and over.

When Primavera P6 Professional is installed as a standalone application, it installs a copy of Oracle XE for use as its database. If for some reason you are unable to login to Primavera P6, you need to know the steps to reconfigure the connection information. The following steps will give you the information you need:

1. In the login dialog, click on the Database field’s ellipse button.

2. In the Edit Database Connections dialog, select the PMDB database.

3. Click on the Configure… button.

4. In the Select or Create Alias dialog, choose the following settings.

5. Click Next.

6. In the Configure ORACLE Connection dialog, verify or enter the following Oracle Connection String.

7. In the Enter Public Login Information dialog, enter the following information.

The default public username is pubprm$pm.

The pubuser password will be the same password you entered during the original installation, e.g. admin01, i.e. the same password you have been using to login to P6 Professional.

8. Click Next.

9. In the Validate Database Connection dialog, click Next. This will test the connection.

10. If the public username and password are correct you will see the following dialog:

11. Click Finish.

If the public username and/or password are incorrect, you will be returned to the Select or Create Alias dialog where you can repeat the process with the correct database login credentials.

Other Primavera P6 Configuration User Names And Passwords

Administrative user name: admprm$pm

Privileged user name: privprm$pm

Public user name: pubprm$pm

Background job user name: bgjob$pm