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.