Monitoring Deadline Dates in Primavera P6 EPPM | Ten Six Consulting

It’s very common for schedules that have a contract deadline that does not match the project’s projected completion date. In these cases, one thing folks want to do is monitor both in relation to each other.

Projects have deadlines; it’s a fact of project management. One main value of scheduling software is that you can monitor your project’s projected completion date versus the deadline, i.e. contract completion date. Primavera P6 EPPM R16.1 does not have a deadline feature. But with a little ingenuity we can highlight a deadline date in relation to the project’s current projected completion date.

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Monitoring Forecasted and Contract Completion Dates in Primavera P6 | Ten Six Consulting

Your Primavera P6 schedule has a binding outside contract constraint date that doesn’t coincide with your schedule’s forecasted project completion date. Because of this, you need to monitor both the project’s estimated completion date and the binding contract completion date on your schedule. Come along as we demonstrate the best way to describe both in one schedule.

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Reasons Why Construction Schedules Fail

CPM Schedules invariably become erroneous, despite best practices, when the rest of the team isn’t pulling their own weight. The integrity of the schedule may have nothing to do with why it became useless or meaningless, or as I like to say, a recorder more than a predictor of the critical path and progress. If the project is large and has multiple prime contractors, its schedule is all the more susceptible to deprecation.

First apear on RepOne Blog

From Plan Academy

Project Constraints and the Longest Path

If you want to optimize your schedule it is advantageous to look to shorten activities that are along the critical path. But what do you do if you have a project constraint that causes your scheduling software to either display multiple critical paths or completely obscure the true critical path?

It is generally stated that an activity is critical if it cannot be delayed without impacting the schedule end date. Well, there are exceptions to every rule. And in this case the exception is that the activity may not be delayed without affecting an activity constraint date, such as a ‘Finish On or Before’ constraint date. Here the critical activity is not causing the project end date to slip, but an interim activity constraint date.

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Is Retained Logic the best Scheduling Option in Primavera?

Written by Amit Parmar

Primavera has three Scheduling Options to choose from when you are scheduling your project. Retained Logic is the default scheduling option. When you are building a Baseline, the default option works fine. But things change when you start updating your project, activities start getting delayed and do not get executed as planned.  You then have to make a decision on whether you want to continue using Retained logic or choose Progress Override or Actual Dates as your Scheduling Option. A lot has been discussed over the internet forums on which option is the best for a project and Retained Logic has won with an overwhelming majority. But I have a different opinion.

Has your project ever followed the exact logic that you planned in your baseline?

If your project has followed the exact logic as planned in your baseline then you are an awesome planner and you don’t need to read this blog post any further. But in my experience, on most of the projects activities don’t get executed exactly as planned in the baseline. Some start earlier than planned, some start later than planned and some might get delayed during execution. This is where Scheduling Options in Primavera play an important part. Choosing different scheduling options changes the way Primavera’s scheduling engine executes its calculations for Forward Pass and Backward Pass. This then changes the way dates are calculated for the activities in your project and it has an impact on your completion date.

The three scheduling options available in Primavera are:

• Retained Logic

• Progress Override

• Actual Dates

For this post let us assume 3 activities with names; Activity A, Activity B, Activity C. They are connected by a Finish to Start (FS) relationship. We will update them out-of-sequence and schedule our project with all the three scheduling options and see what impact does it have on our project.

1) Retained Logic – assumes that you wish to Retain Logic of your relationships when you are scheduling your project. This means that the remaining duration of an in-progress activity is not scheduled until all predecessors are complete.

Retained Logic- Retains the logic of your relationships while scheduling the project

Let’s take a look at an example and see how this works. We have updated our activities out-of-sequence on the following dates:

You can see above that Activity B has been updated out-of-sequence but Activity A is still in progress. We then choose Retained Logic as our scheduling option and schedule our project.  Due to Retained Logic, Primavera assumes that we are retaining the logic of relationships between our activities even though the activities are being updated out-of-sequence. This means that Primavera calculates the Remaining Start of Activity C as per Finish-to-Start logic with Activity A (and not Activity B).  This makes Activity C non-working between the period of 1-Feb-15 to 5-Feb-15. The non-working period can be seen in the Gantt chart below:

Lets review the calculations for this example; the Data Date for our project is 1-Feb-15. The scheduling engine calculates that for Activity A Remaining Early Finish is 06-Feb-15, due to this the Remaining Early Start for Activity C is calculated to 6-Feb-15. The scheduling engine is told to retain logic for the relationships and picks the Remaining Early Start for Activity C after Remaining Early Finish of activity A because Activity B is already complete.

The non-working period calculated due to Retained Logic can be misunderstood as, no work will be performed on Activity C between the time period of 1st Feb-15 and 05-Feb-15. This non-working period also adds an extra 5 days to the completion of the project. Now, the purists can make an argument that in such cases we should change the logic of the activity because the logic has actually changed. But if your contractual obligations do not allow you to make changes to your current project without approval of the client then it might force you to keep your relationships fixed and decrease the Remaining Duration on the activity to adjust the non-working period.

2) Progress Override – this scheduling option assumes that network logic can be ignored in case of out-of-sequence activities and the remaining duration of the activity can be scheduled without delay. This means that Primavera’s scheduling engine will ignore the relationship logic between the activities and schedule the activities without any non-working periods.

Progress Override – Assumes that relationship logic can be ignored for out-of-sequence activities

For our example this means that, Activity C will not have a non-working period and the remaining duration of the activity will be scheduled from the data date of the project as seen in the screenshot below.

Lets review the calculations for this example: The Date Date for the project is 1-Feb-15. The scheduling engine calculates that for Activity A Remaining Early finish is 6-Feb-15 and Activity B is completely finished. Due to this the Remaining Duration of  Activity C is scheduled from 1-Feb-15 and the relationship logic from Activity A is ignored. Since there is no non-working period in Activity C, it finishes on 19-Feb-15.

It is clear from the above example that Progress Override reduces the project duration by 5 days by not adding the non-working period. This seems logical according to the work that is being done on the project as you might be working on Activity C continuously and unlike Retained Logic there will be no non-working period.

3) Actual Dates – this scheduling option uses the Actual Dates for Forward Pass and Backward Pass calculations.

 Actual Dates – Uses the Actual Dates of the activity for Forward Pass and Backward Pass calculations

When you choose Actual dates option, the scheduling engine does the forward pass and backward pass based on the actual dates. This means that you can update an activity with an Actual Start and Actual Finish after the Data Date and Primavera will schedule the successor activities based on the actual dates of the activity. For this example we will finish Activity B after the data date of the project.

In the above screenshot we can see that the Data Date (Blue line) is 1-Feb-15 which is before the start of Activity A but Activity B has finished on 14-Feb-15, after the Data Date. Activity C is then scheduled after finish of Activity B and starts on 14-Feb-15.

Lets review the calculations for this example: The data date for the project is 1-Feb-15. Activity B has finished on 14-Feb-15 but both Activity A and Activity C are not progressed. When we schedule our project on 1-Feb-15, the scheduling engine schedules Activity A from 01-Feb-15 (data date) as the activity has no predecessor but Activity C is scheduled from 14-Feb-15 because Activity B has an actual finish on 14-Feb-15. This method eliminates the out-of-sequence logic from the project.

Actual Dates option can be used to fix dates for activities which you know will happen in future for sure.  It can be used in situations when we know that an activity will for sure finish on fixed dates and we want to schedule the successor activities after that actual date. While this sort of thing doesn’t usually happen on projects, we can use this option to prepare some what-if scenarios.

After looking at the above examples, we now know that Retained Logic and Progress Override are the two main options that we can use to schedule our projects. I prefer using Progress Override over Retained Logic for scheduling on my projects because I know it represents the actual scenario. It doesn’t add non-working periods to projects and potentially extending their duration. I know a lot of my readers will think otherwise, please comment below if you don’t agree with my justification.

Why Project Calendars Are Preferable to Global Calendars

One criteria on the scheduling review checklist used by a government naval command agency looks to confirm that calendars are defined at the project level. Why? Let’s explore this issue.

The Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC) scheduling review checklist specifies that schedule calendars should be project-specific data and not global. Obviously, if you are submitting your schedule to NAVFAC then you have a compelling reason to use project calendars instead of global calendars. There are other sound reasons, however, that make project calendars preferable to global calendars. And these reasons may be the driving force behind the NAVFAC project level calendar criteria.

This article explores the reasons that Primavera P6 Professional project calendars are preferable to P6 global calendars.

The great thing about global calendars is that they are available to all users in the Primavera P6 Professional database, so all users have access to your defined global calendar. This is a double edged sword, however. Other users may not only use your global calendar; they may have the ability to actually change your global calendar. The implications are that their calendar changes are applied to any project schedule using that global calendar. Not good!

Another reason not to use global calendars is that exported global calendars clutter the recipient’s database. When you export a schedule assigned global calendars, those global calendars wind up in the global calendars list of the recipient importing your project. It’s amazing how quickly ones database becomes cluttered with rarely used global calendar definitions.

There is another reason not to export global calendars. Imported global calendars having the same name as global calendars already in the system are not renamed. They, however, inherit the properties of the global calendar currently in the system. So your global calendars of the same name, but in two different databases may not have the same global calendar definition.

Summary

Yes, it’s nice for your calendar to be available to all your projects and all your database users. Global calendars appear to be the way to go when creating a new calendar definition. But there are sound reasons for defining a calendar limited or restricted to a specific project.

Global calendars do not have the same security that project calendars have: other users can change your global calendar, and the respective schedules it’s assigned to. This alone compels schedulers to define project specific calendars. You may also clutter yours or your recipient’s global calendar list with rarely used calendars. There are also some export/import issues that may result in two global calendars of the same name, but with different date properties.

Primavera P6 Professional seems to favor global calendars as it makes it easy to convert project specific calendars into global calendars, but not vice versa. Despite this it is best practice to define calendars as project specific. 

reproduced from Tensix

S-Curves in Primavera P6 Professional

We’re frequently asked if Primavera P6 Professional is capable of displaying S-Curves. Sure, it can do that. You just have to know where to look.

This article is a ‘How To’ on S-Curves in Primavera P6 Professional, how to configure them and how to print them.

What is an S-Curve?

For those of you who are new to the topic, an S-Curve is a simple graph that plots costs, hours, units or other values (depending on the subject matter) over time. They are popular in Project Management because they give managers a quick and easy-to-understand view of cumulative budget, actual and remaining values over the project lifecycle. The term S-Curve denotes the tendency of the lines to form a shallow ‘S’ shape; flatter at the start, steeper in the middle and flattening off again towards the end. This shape is very typical of most projects as the effort ramps up in the beginning periods, stabilizes during the main execution phase and then starts to wind down again towards the Project’s completion.

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Conscientious use of constrains

Generally, constraints affect the dates, violates the network logic and one of the reasons for negative floats or irrationality on the schedule. But again this is based on your project requirements and these constraints could help you to provide a complete control of a project however no more than 10% of a project’s activity should be constrained. 

Constraints other than contractual ones are generally not used since they impose specific start and or finish dates and in some instances completely OVERRIDE the logic that is contained in the schedule. The idea is to let the logic determine the dates as opposed to using constraints to do this.

Early constraints (e.g. Must Start/Finish On or After) are a typically a shortcut to represent the outcome of related work that the scheduler is excluding from the schedule logic. This is justified only for interfacing work that - in total, including its initiation - is clearly outside the scope of the project scheduled (e.g. contractual access restrictions, customer-furnished info/eqpt/permits.) Using early constraints for in-scope work (or for external work that depends on in-scope work) removes that work from logical schedule analysis, overrides the logically-derived scheduled (early) dates of the constrained activities and their successors, and jeopardizes the validity of the entire logical model of the project including float calculations.

 Late constraints (e.g. Must Start/Finish On or Before) are typically imposed to represent external obligations or commitments – aka “deadlines.” Such commitments can be imposed by contract (e.g. completion milestones) or by some other governing document (e.g. Project Charter, Board Instruction, Executive Tantrum, etc.) Late constraints can override the logically-derived (late) dates for the constrained activities and their predecessors, thereby complicating the interpretation of Total Float and identification of the “Critical Path.” Where multiple late constraints are applied in a network of related activities, Total Float becomes unreliable as an indicator of driving logic; then other methods of logical analysis must be used.

Other constraint types (Start/Finish On, or Mandatory Start/Finish) are even more restrictive with respect to driving logic flow – they are rarely if ever justified.

It is true that ALL constraints affect total float computations but so do the calendars being used, the remaining durations, the logic, the lags, the TIMES etc. So I would re-iterate that this clause was included in the scheduling specifications because constraints impose specific start and or finish dates and in some instances completely OVERRIDE the logic that is contained in the schedule.

Tracking Labor Units on Multiple Resourced Activities In Primavera P6

If you have activities with multiple resource assignments in your schedule, it’s typical even with the best of schedules that your resources don’t always work the exact hours they were originally planned to. Do you know how to track labor units in Primavera P6 so that your progress updates on the multiple resourced activities accurately reflect the actual labor units expended?

It is important when tracking the labor units of activities, particularly, activities with multiple resource assignments, to follow the proper sequence for the procedures. If the procedures are not followed in the prescribed order, then Primavera P6 will compute erroneous labor units when recalculating the schedule.

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Why You Should Avoid Mandatory Activity Constraints

If you just cannot get your schedule to match an important finish milestone deadline you may be tempted to go “thermonuclear” by inserting a Mandatory Finish constraint on the milestone. You’ll definitely get your important finish date this way, but there will be collateral damage to your schedule. Let’s explore this.

If you want a child to stay away from a stove top burner you could simply tell the child ‘do not touch’. A more indirect approach is to tell them about the stove, and in doing so provide them knowledge that warns them to stay away. The later approach is our intent today in explaining mandatory constraints. We are telling you how mandatory constraints work not so you will haphazardly use them, but so that you will know enough to be cautious and even wary of their use.

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How to Show the Baseline Critical Path In P6

All project controls professionals know how critical is it to monitor our project’s critical path. And we all know that comparing our project performance to a baseline is also essential. Most of us are doing this critical path and baseline monitoring in Primavera P6 every day. But what about monitoring our project’s critical path vs our baseline critical path in P6?

Of course, as we execute a P6 schedule, over time, the schedule will diverge from it’s baseline. The myriad of changes, out-of-sequence fixes, late or early work will be inevitable. And it will happen that those changes will also affect our original critical path.

Are we able to check our path and compare it to the baseline critical path in P6?

From Plan Academy

Showing Relationship Arrows between Schedule Activity Bars and Not Baseline Bars

In a Primavera P6 training class last week, one attendee asked how to switch the relationship arrows from connecting the baseline bars to connecting the current progressing schedule activity bars. Once the project has been baselined and progress has been entered, you will notice that the relationship arrows are connecting your baseline bars and not the current schedule bars. How do you correct this so you can clearly see the relationships between tasks on your progressing schedule? Well, there is a simple way to make the relationship arrows connect the bars or tasks on your progressing schedule instead of the baseline bars.~

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The Case Against “Must Finish By”

When setting up a new project, the user will be faced with the “Must Finish By” option. Our advice is to leave it blank. Yes, every project has a finish date. Otherwise, it does not meet the definition of a project. That is to say, a project must be: (1) unique, (2) have a specified time frame, and (3) a defined scope of work. Unfortunately, projects often end up with a longer time frame and increased scope, but that is a subject for another day.

To review, the “Must Finish By” constraint is presented... 

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Assigning Fixed Price Costs to Activities in Primavera P6

Primavera P6 has a standard process for creating and assigning labor, material, and equipment resources to compute activity cost. What if the activity is performed at a fixed price? Yes, there is a way to specify a fixed price activity cost in Primavera P6 Professional.

A popular procurement contract type is the fixed price contract. In this type of agreement the subcontractor agrees to perform an activity at a fixed price, regardless, of the actual labor, material, and/or equipment costs. 

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Renumbering Activity ID in Primavera P6

By default activity ID in Primavera has a format like A1000, A1010 and so on.

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A process to includ inteligence on the activity coding feature.

Primavera P6 Four Week Schedule Look Ahead

Once a schedule has been created, baselined and started, you begin the process of tracking progress. In support of this effort, it’s not uncommon to want to report all activities taking place in say, the next 4 weeks.

David Allen’s popular book on organization entitled “Getting Things Done” encourages you to focus on listing the next steps required to keep your project’s progress moving forward. The beauty of Primavera P6 is that it can display everything that commences or is in progress over the next 4 weeks. These are the next step items of your project schedule.

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Primavera P6 Solves the Start-to-Start Open Network Problem

In Primavera P6, once all the activities are clearly defined and the corresponding durations accurately estimated, the next step in the scheduling process is to define the relationships between these activities. This can be a deceptively challenging process. It may appear that you have all the relationships between activities sufficiently defined. But when you start the update process your schedule has logic and critical path errors that are difficult to spot. These errors are most likely caused by an open network somewhere in your schedule. This means that the relationships between activities have loose ends.

A common relationship susceptible... 

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Creating a Believable Schedule

Defining activities is an important part of scheduling. Part of the complexity of the project is determined by the number of activities required to complete that project. When it comes to the size and/or placement of the activities, several control factors should be considered. Once the project has been broken down into unique definable elements of work, the duration of these elements must be accurately estimated. Accurate definition of activities and their durations creates all the elements necessary for a believable schedule.

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Organizing Filters by Project Layouts in Primavera P6 Professional

In Primavera P6 Professional there are several different filter types including default, global, and user defined. But did you know there is also a fourth type of filter? This is the layout filter type that can be associated with a specific Layout. This can be used to help better organize your filters.

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Primavera P6 Professional EVM Features

Increasingly of late, we’ve been getting enquiries about the capabilities of Primavera P6 Professional as far as performing Earned Value Management (EVM) is concerned. Can it do it? If so, can you help us use Primavera P6 for Earned Value Management? Can I develop a DoD or DoE certified EVM system using just Primavera P6?

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What is Primavera P6 Implementation and Administration?

Implementation?

The ‘out-of-the-box’ installation of Oracle Primavera P6 comes with a basic configuration set-up which requires additional customization of the administrative or ‘global’ settings in P6 to cater to your company’s needs. The whole process of customizing Primavera’s configuration is called Implementationin the Primavera world. Oracle usually relies on its Primavera partners and consulting companies with P6 Implementation Specialists to help clients set up P6 once they’ve purchased their software licenses. P6 consultants would sit down with your project team to conduct a needs analysis to help configure Primavera for you.

One of the main reasons it is necessary to have P6 configured is to make sure that the security and user access settings are properly configured to be scalable from a few to 100s of users. It is important to remember that P6 is database driven, where multiple people can work on and make changes to the same project at the same time. It is necessary to ensure that people are given access to only their projects or even parts of the projects they are responsible for. Once the security profiles are created, a user can be assigned different levels of access to various parts of Primavera, whether it’s “read only” to “can edit but not delete” to “no access”.

The basic settings the implementation process will help set up are:

• The EPS (Enterprise Project Structure)
• The OBS (Organizational Breakdown Structure)
• Security Profiles – Global and Project Security Profiles
• User Profiles
• Global Dictionaries – resources, calendars, project & activity codes, notebook topics, etc…

The implementation process can vary depending on the complexity of your company’s needs; a straight forward implementation can take as little as a day to a week. If there is a requirement to integrate other software programs with P6, then it may take upwards of a year or more to make sure everything is set up properly and tested.

Administration?

If your company is new to Primavera, you may be unaware that P6 requires at least one individual that is knowledgeable in the Administrative functions of Primavera. Your company may have involved a consulting expert with the set-up or implementation of P6, but the on-going maintenance of P6 requires an individual that can make changes on an as needed basis would be the P6 Administrators role. For example, if you purchase additional P6 licenses, then someone in your company needs to be able to create additional users with the proper security and access settings.

As a best practice, every company will have one “super administrator” user account (license) that will have full access and abilities to make changes in your company’s P6 settings. For larger companies, additional Business Unit Administrators may be needed for their division of projects.

Oracle Primavera has made changes on how to access the administrative functions in their newer versions of P6. All of the administrative access is now done solely through the P6 Web Access platform in the EPPM (Enterprise Project Portfolio Management) suite. In general, most companies primarily use the P6 Windows version of Primavera to manage their projects. However, these companies would need their administrator to be familiar with P6 Web Access as well for administrative purposes.

Some of the duties a Primavera P6 Administrator will have to do are:

• Maintenance of the EPS (Enterprise Project Structure)
• Maintenance of the OBS (Organizational Breakdown Structure)
• Add/Remove users
• Monitoring of Global/Enterprise dictionaries such as: Calendars, Activity Codes, Project Codes, Resource & Role Libraries, Calendars, Cost accounts, Notebook Topics, UDFs (User Defined Fields), Filters, Timesheets, Scheduled Services and much more
• Creation/maintenance of Layouts/Views, Dashboards, Portfolio Views 
• Some technical support – Java issues, database or SQL inquiries, Event Code errors, web browser issues, and other environmental issues that may come up.

Process Control & Schedule Hierarchy

A Schedule Hierarchy defines the schedule control system and several interrelated levels of schedules at various levels. Schedule hierarchy provides a framework for project schedule development.

Primarily, there are following 4 level of schedules being applied on medium to large size projects to identify the scope and division and as well as contractual/project milestones.

Level I: Milestone Summary Schedule

Depicts overall time frame of project, covers total project scope and highlights contractual and Project milestones. This schedule is used by Management to highlight major and significant events as well as to communicate overall scope and status of project. This level schedule can also be used for decision making.

Level II: Summary Schedule

Level II Schedule is summarized by facility, discipline and areas for Engineering, highlighting long lead items, critical items for Procurement, and summarized by work package for Construction. Level II schedule establish requirements at the facility level, phase or work phase. It depicts the relationship between facilities/phases and establish facility criticality.

Level III: Detailed Engineering, Procurement and Construction Schedule

Integrated EPC Schedule where Engineering is sorted by discipline, grouped by systems/area depicting system requirement. Procurement identifies demand by facility/area or systems and as well identify the major equipment delivery. Construction/startup is grouped by system/area depicting interrelationships and timeframes. Level III Schedules establish the basis for staff requirements Task deliverables, material and subcontract requirements and bull release and installation rates. Level III schedule establish construction equipment requirements and integrates facility/area breakdown into system turnover packages. Level III schedules are maintained at regular basis and used for What-if analysis.

Level IV: Identification of detailed work plan, log list

 Level IV schedule is broken down at work activity level i.e., drawings, specs, data sheets etc. It depicts construction by work package/area/facility/craft/crew and establish construction sequence. Level IV schedule provides basis for detail construction work planning and rolling schedules and its a working document that is continually updated and revised to reflect project needs and circumstances.

Schedule Baseline Process

Schedule must be baselined to map it to current schedule to avoid slipages and to get early warnings. This also assists in developing planned S Curves and histograms to keep the current schedule on track.

Creating a WBS for Success

Projects can be overwhelming; no matter their size, the task of completing a project is daunting. That is why a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) can be used to break down a project into manageable sections and help the project flow through execution to success. Creating a WBS requires project managers to strategically decide how they will lay out their deliverables, or work packages, in order to fulfill the project scope.

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Cannot filter on Start or Finish date

You have a very simple project. You want to show only activity which finish on 25-Jan-16.

As usual, you create an filter like this:

Then… SURPRISE. It’s a blank screen.

A big “WHY” question.

To answer this question. You need to show the time of activity by going to Edit -> User Preferences -> Dates tab -> In “Time” section, click on “24 hour”

Now you can see the Time when activity start and finish.

You can notice that when we define the filter, by default the Time is 00:00. That’s why P6 can not find any activity.

So we can change the criteria to cover the whole day like this:

Now P6 can show the activity which has finish date of 25-Jan-16.

How to get the Values of Your Activity Codes to Customize the Look of Your Gantt Chart in Primavera P6?

P6 Activity Codes as a Source of Gantt Bar Configuration

I have often been asked the question – ‘can I have my schedule activity bars automatically appear a specific color and/or pattern according to the value of a specific code?’  Yes, you can do this very easily.

Let’s look at one simple example.  

Above I have incorporated additional bar configurations along with the default Critical Remaining Work and Remaining Work configurations. 

The additional bar configurations are generating the hatching by filtering on the activity code used to assign the ‘Engineering’ and ‘Construction’ grouping in the layout.

Above are the results of additional bar configurations to add the hatching for the activity code assigning the Engineering code or Construction code.

Above, the default critical and remaining bar configurations have been turned off – displayed are just the hatching in the colors specified in the new bar configurations, specified by activity code.

The filter attached is a simple one line filter which will activate the bar configuration in accordance with the assignment of the specified activity code value to the activity.

The example above shows the simple filter attached to the ‘Engineering Activity’ bar configuration.

This is a very simple example. Be creative and use the functionality of the Bar Configurations to help you with creating the customized Gantt Bar(s) you require.  With the bar configurations you need enabled – save your layout – create different layouts/bar configurations as required.

Things You Should Know About Primavera P6 Calendars

By Michael Lepage

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

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“How Do You Know When to Use a Constraint or Lag?”

QUESTION

“P6 lets me add constraints and lags to activity relationships. How do you know when to use a constraint or lag on an activity and which one is best for each situation?”

ANSWER

This question seems to be a favourite in our P6 training courses. Not all relationships are the same when it comes to project planning. External and internal factors can impose challenges that project managers have to deal with ASAP! There is no specific rule that says when to use a constraint or lag on an activity, but based on what each does we can make an educated assumption.

First, let’s talk about constraints.

CONSTRAINTS

Constraints are set in P6 to specify a date or a point in time when an activity can begin or end. Constraints can also be imposed on the entire project. Constraints can be thought of as “rules” – they are concrete in the schedule. Constraints are imposed by external forces, like a delay in delivery of materials or a date a stakeholder requires the project to be finished. Constraints are best used on milestones but can also be used on individual activities. A rule of thumb is that the less constraints you use the better.

You can assign two constraints to an activity if it can only be completed in a specific time frame. For example, if a site is only available from Feb 1 to Feb 14 for a 5 day activity, you could assign a “Start On or After” constraint to Feb 1 and a “Finish On or Before” constraint to Feb 14 to have the activity completed between these dates.

Constraints can ignore network logic, if needed, to meet the requirements you set. In this way, constraints can affect your project schedule negatively if you do not complete predecessor activities on-time.

Overview of Constraints:

• Constraints are used to set dates in the schedule that must be met.
• Constraints directly affect the activity they are set to, and then indirectly affect the predecessor and successor activities.
• Use constraints on milestone activities to meet deadlines.
• Constraints Lare “rules” that cannot be changed.
• Do not assign too many constraints, or network logic can be ignored.

Lags, on the other hand, do not set specific dates. Instead, you can set a delay or a lead time for a predecessor or successor activity. If you enter a positive number, you will delay the successor activity by the number of days specified. In contrast, if you enter a negative number (lead), you will reduce the length of time between the activity and its predecessor.

Lags are usually imposed by internal forces. For example, a lag could be due to drying time required for concrete laid. These are forces that are due to the nature of the activity, not by an external force. In this example, you could add a 10 day lag to wait for the paint or concrete to dry completely and to begin the next activity. The date of the next activity will change depending on when the predecessor activity is finished.

Overview of Lags:

• Lags are used to set delays or lead time between two activities.
• Lags affect the relationship between two activities (predecessor and successor).
• Apply lags to any activity type, but usually task dependent or resource dependent.
• Lags are calculated using the predecessor’s calendar.
• Lags are used when an internal force causes an activity to be delayed.
• Lags are more “controllable” within the schedule.

CONCLUSION

Both lags and constraints should be applied with caution because of the effect that it can have on the schedule. The main difference is that constraints should be used when there is an external force, whereas lags should be used when there is an internal force affecting the activity. As a best practice, always add a note in the activity Notebook tab to indicate why you are adding the constraint or lag to an activity so that other P6 users do not change anything without prior knowledge.

Primavera Functions That Project Managers Must Know

Oracle Primavera helps to make your project management responsibilities easier and more efficient. However, understanding all of the tips and tricks in Primavera functions does not necessarily mean that you will be productive.

Instead, you need to know how to perform certain, specific actions and functions, and this list will help you get on your way towards a more successful, productive schedule.

Read the rest here

From Innovative Management Solutions