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.