5 Things You Should Know About Primavera P6 Calendars

Primavera P6 has a pretty smart scheduling engine built-in, but it’s not quite smart enough to know what time to tell the electricians to start in the morning and when to have lunch.

That’s where Primavera P6 Calendars come in. You can’t build a schedule in Primavera P6 without at least one calendar. So to help you master P6′s Calendaring features and understand how Calendars work with the scheduling engine, here are some essentials you’ll want to learn.

1 – Calendars are assigned to activities, not projects

That’s right. In Primavera, since a calendar is assigned to an activity, you have a extreme flexibility to use many different calendars within a single project. So perhaps the engineering work is scheduled with a 8 hr / day, Mon-Fri calendar. That won’t affect the construction activities which can have their own 12 hr / day, Mon to Sat calendar. It’s very common to use many different calendars on more complex projects with lots of trades who might have their own unique calendars.

But what if you need the entire project to use the same calendar? No problem, use the Fill-Down feature to copy the same calendar to all activities in your project.

2 – Calendars boss around the P6 Scheduler

If you create a calendar where Mondays are non-working days and assign that calendar to your project – you shouldn’t be surprised that Primavera P6 will NEVER schedule activity work on a Monday. The work and non-work rules you set in a calendar is adhered to strictly by Primavera P6′s scheduling engine. I never liked Mondays anyway!

3 – Calendars have 3 different time levels to work with

By time levels, I’m referring to:

• Hours of the Day
• Days of the Week
• Days of the Month / Year

When you create a Primavera P6 calendar, you can set these rules at each time level:

• Define what Hours in a day are workable and non-workable, eg: Start work at 7 am, end work at 7 pm.
• Set what Days of the week are workable and non-workable, eg: work from Monday to Saturday, Sunday are off.
• Pick what Days of the Month / Year are workable or non-workable, eg: July 1st is a corporate holiday.

4 – Primavera P6 Calendars come in 2 flavours – Activity and Resource

Activity Calendars are the most common and most of what we’re discussing here has Activity Calendars in mind. P6 Resource Calendars are used less often but essentially work the same way, in special situations.

For example, say you had a BullDozer that required a maintenance cycle every 2nd Friday for 2 hours. You could build a Resource Calendar in Primavera P6 specifically for that BullDozer, and captured the maintenance cycle. You could then tell Primavera to schedule work around the BullDozer’s maintenance periods. To do this, you would have to use a special Activity Type called “Resource Dependent”. There’s still a bit more tweaking and manual work to get the scheduling set properly which is why I think schedulers don’t bother going to such detail and avoid using Resource Calendars for scheduling.

5 – Changing an Activity’s Calendar can sometimes mess up your Durations

Occasionally, you will have to assign a new calendar to an activity. And occasionally, making such a change can cause the activity’s Original Duration to change. This can happen when the new calendar has more Hours / Day than the original. Now no one wants to their duration estimates to change randomly, so don’t worry, I’ve got your covered with an explanation and solution to potential calendar mayhem already.

From Planner Tuts

Primavera P6 Excel Import Problems

Many P6 users have trouble importing data from Excel. Many of the problems are focused on importing costs or other numeric data fields that have been manually typed into Excel.
 

Why can’t I import Primavera P6 cost data from Excel?

Primavera P6 only imports data that is formatted as “Text” in Excel. If you have manually typed in a value like “$32000″ into an Excel cell, Excel will auto-format that field as “Currency”. Then on re-import, P6 will not accept the data, as it needs to be “Text”.

Setting Excel’s Format Type Doesn’t Work

If you try to set a cost cell or a number cell to Excel’s “Text” format type, P6 will still not import it. Why?

You Need The Apostrophe ( ‘ ) !

P6 won’t import the field unless it has a leading apostrophe. The apostrophe is a legacy indicator that a field is textual and P6 looks for it. It your cell’s data does not have the leading apostrophe, P6 won’t import the data in that cell.
 

Ok, I have the Apostrophe, and I still can’t import Costs into P6!

As our good friend Zoltan Palffy has pointed out, to import costs from Excel, you’ll need to ensure that P6 is not calculating costs for you. On the resource tab, you can add a column called “Calculate Costs from Units”, which is a checkbox field you can check on or off. If your resource assignment has “Calculate Costs from Units” checked ON, then you won’t be able to specify a cost, and thus import costs from Excel. Make sure this field is checked off before you try to import.

To turn that setting off for all resource assignments, build a Global Change, that sets “Calculate Costs from Units” to No.

The Apostrophe is still important.

from Planner Tuts

How to Tell Which Data Fields Can be Imported via Excel?

by Bill Pepoon

Microsoft Excel is a great interface for sharing and editing Primavera P6 data. I often send spreadsheets to clients for their input on data such as durations and budgets. For clients who do not own P6 or understand how to use it, Excel is an easy way to communicate changes. In fact, I typically request that my clients use spreadsheets to submit progress for updates; inputting progress manually inside P6 takes too long and introduces the possibility for errors.

It is very important to understand which data fields can be imported via Excel to avoid wasting time making changes in the spreadsheet. Thankfully, P6 will always warn us if we know where to look.

The quickest way to export P6 data to Excel is to right-click inside the Activity Table, which brings up the following menu:

There are some limitations, however, to this export method. Some of these limitations are:

· All activities currently displayed in the Activity Table are exported; you must filter the activities in the Activity Table first to limit the number of activities being exported

· All columns currently displayed in the Activity Table are exported; you must change the layout to see other columns or to limit how many columns are exported

Note that Activity ID, Activity Status, and WBS Code are always exported regardless of whether they are currently displayed. This is because P6 needs these references for any changes you might want to import back into P6.

The image below shows some typical data fields displayed when exporting directly from the Activity Table to Excel:

Here is how you can tell which data fields can be imported via Excel: data fields that have an asterisk (*) in the second row of the title can not be imported. In the above example Budgeted Total Cost has an asterisk. While this data can be exported directly from the Activity Table, any changes made to the budgets will not import. Similarly, changes can not be made to the Start or Finish dates; these are calculated fields. Activity Name and Original Duration, on the other hand, can be modified in Excel and the changes will import.

In the next example I am going to export P6 data using the spreadsheet template method. While this takes a little longer to set up, it offers the distinct advantage of allowing users to export:

• Activity Relationships
• Expenses
• Resources
• Resource Assignments

These are considered to be Subject Areas and each Subject Area will appear as a separate tab in Excel. More importantly, users can edit data in these tabs and import the changes back into P6. (There are some limitations to what type of data can be modified in which tabs that I will point out in a moment).

To create a spreadsheet template, select File > Export > Spreadsheet – (XLS):

Because I want to edit budgeted costs for my activities I have chosen the Resource Assignments Subject Area during the export process, as seen below:

Budgeted units and costs can only be modified in the Resource Assignments tab in Excel. Resource Assignments can be displayed in the Activities tab but any modifications made to the budgets in this tab will not import.

In the next screenshot I have selected Budgeted Cost as a data field. Note that the data field does not mention the type of resource (labor, nonlabor or material) because each resource assigned to the same activity will appear on a different line in the spreadsheet. P6 therefore does not need to be told the resource type.

The final image shows the spreadsheet created by the template. This time there is no asterisk in the Budgeted Cost title, meaning this data can be modified and imported back into P6.

But notice what can not be edited – the Activity Name. The Activity Name can only be edited in the Activity tab (which I did not include in this template) or in the initial spreadsheet exported from the Activity Table. Every tab has some limitations in terms of what data fields can be imported. The Subject Area should be your first clue.

In any case, that little asterisk is a big help once you realize what it means!

Project risk and issue reporting

Reporting on project risk and isssues is a matter that changes in every project and for specific client. There is no method and format known for this kind of reporting, but erverybody concurs that including it on the status report will be an inprovement for the decision taking activities.

 

Are there guidelines about what risk information should be reported to senior management?

No, not that I am aware of. The PMI Risk Practice Standard doesn’t include anything. The PMBOK® Guide talks about ‘Project Performance Reports’ but provides no detail as to what these should include. I think you’ll have to define the content of your reports yourself.

 
What should you include in a graphical risk management dashboard?

For a senior management report I would only report the open risks per project and/or open risks per category (scope, budget, schedule etc). This would let you see if there is one area like schedule that has a big risk impact on all projects.

I wouldn’t include:

• Total number of risks overall
• Closed risks
• Risks with an impact status of Low or Medium

This is because the senior management team can’t do much, if anything, with this information. The number of risks alone is pretty meaningless. Some may be very small, some projects may only have a few but they could be significant. A better way would be to report risk impact – what is the cost of all the risks if they happened?

The best approach would be to ask the key stakeholders what they are interested in seeing. I don’t think closed risks or number of risks is of any use as it doesn’t give them information they need to make decisions about the project. Risks by category, or risks with an impact rating of ‘High’ is more meaningful.

 

Should I show risk trends over the months?

No. What would the senior management team do with this information? At the beginning of the project you’ll identify lots of risks and then close some and open new ones. If you have a risk review meeting one month and identify another 50 risks this will skew the trend data. I would advise only showing a snapshot in time. You could use an arrow to indicate whether the overall risk profile of this project is going up or down, using a metric like whether there are more or less High risks or whether the cost implications for risk mitigation are going up or down.

 
What about reporting on issues?

For senior management, only show the high priority open ones. Typically I report also on ‘high priority closed this month’, then those issues drop off the report for the next month. This shows that you are making progress in resolving issues, even if new ones come along. If you don’t do this, your report could show that there are 20 open issues with a status of High Priority this month, and 20 next month. However, they could be 20 completely different issues! Without more detail, like issue names and descriptions (which, frankly, your sponsor is not going to want to wade through), your stakeholders will not know that you are dealing with issues and may assume that you are not tackling problems on the project.

As well as a graphical representation in a pie chart or dashboard, I would also include the top 10 issues in more detail – descriptions and action plans. If you need senior management input to resolve any issues make sure that these are included in the report and that you highlight where they need to make decisions.

Again, the best approach would be to ask your senior management team what they want to see. If they don’t know, present them with your graphs and report for a few months and then ask for feedback about what they think and what else they need to know in order to carry out their roles on the project i.e. decision making, governance and oversight.