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Hi
I have a need to add WBS Summary & LOE activities into a group of contractors' programmes to aide with reporting.
However, in order for these new activities to correctly take on the Start & Finish dates, it appears that I must reschedule the programmes, but this causes the activities within the contractors' programmes to be rescheduled. Therefore the report being created does not show the dates and progress as submitted by the contractors.
Is there a way to calculate the WBS Summary & LOE dates without rescheduling the rest of the programmes?
Or a way to reset the dates and progress back to what they were before rescheduling?
Although I have a good knowledge of planning, this is my first real foray into P6. So nice & clear how to instructions would be most appreciated.
Thanks very much in advance.
Kris
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Kris,
Firstly some blame engineering. How is it possible, given the who-pays-who relationship, that your contractor does not give you the information exactly as you require it? The usual answer is that the contract which engaged the contractor fails the planning department by missing out a couple of paragraphs the planning department could create in half an hour. This is a bit of a recurring theme with me. Every owner seems to have the same problem.
In P6, the minimum scheduling unit is a whole project. Given P6’s great multi-project capabilities, that is not a bad definition of what a “project” is in P6. You cannot schedule parts of a project.
Best to make a baseline before you do anything, that is essentially a copy of the project and it will let you make date comparisons very easily. This means you can beat the contractor's plan into submission, but still see the original dates in columns or as bars in the barchart. Since the way baselines work in P6 is by pairs of Activity IDs in the Current and the Baseline plan if you delete an activity in the current plan, you cannot access its dates in the baseline – so any modifications you make should not delete an activity, perhaps reduce its duration to zero.
Since activities can have any number of Activity Codes, they can be summarised multiple ways. So I am pretty sure your answer is to add more than one Activity Code to some of the activities so they can be represented in more than one summary.
Thanks David
I do need to reschedule the contractor's programmes, BUT only after I have created a summary gannt report on what the contractors have provided.
I have used Activity Codes to regroup and sort where possible, but due to nature of the project I need some of the contractors activities to be summarised / pulled through to multiple areas within the Summary report. This why I had thought that adding new WBS Summary or LOE activities to create the necessary duplications with the additional Activity Codes would work for me - only to find that the contractors programmes reschedule (because they are poorly created and/or issues with converting from other planning packages)
There is a good possibility that I dont have the right settings within P6, which is why Rescheduling / Pressing F9 is altering the contractors activities as submitted and not just causing the new WBS Summary & LOE activities to calculate their dates.
I suppose simply I need to create 2 reports,
The First that summarises what the Contractors' submitted
& the Second that reschedules their programmes to address issues in reporting, logic & inter-dependencies between projects that have been modelled etc
The second report isnt an issue, as I control that, and therefore the additional WBS Summary & LOE Tasks will be calculated correctly.
It is preparing the first report, where I need the contractors dates and progress to remain unchanged.
Is my issue due to trying to use WBS Summary tasks within the contractors programmes?
As could I have all my additional / duplicate summary activities as LOE activities in a separate programme within the same portfolio, and then ensure that I only reschedule this separate programme?
Thanks for any more thoughts that anyone may have on my predicament.
Kris
Kris,
Leaving aside the issues associated with why you would not want to reschedule the contractors' plan(s) (which is a little like deciding not to check their arithmetic) I would suggest that you might achieve the result you want by adding an activity code to the activities you want to summarise, and then when you Group-and-Sort by that activity code, you get the summary bars and summary dates you require.
You should ALWAYS be able to press F9.
they can not do that they are reporting activities not driving activities. The relationships for the LOE must be incorrect.
the LOE activity should have a activity type of level of effort. The predecessor relationship to the LOE actvity should ALWAYS BE a SS the successor relationship to the LOE activity should ALWAYS BE A FF.
Thats it do not tie any other activities as either FS predecessor or FS successor.
Email: PPadmin@planningplanet.com
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