Dear friends,

Any one can share how to preapare project mile stones in schedules using Primavera P6

 

 

Regards

Mahi

Jovito,

Primavera P3 has the best graphics functionality for S-Curves I have ever seen and believe it is the envy of the rest in this regard, as far as I remember not only you could display your early and late curves for your current job but also early and late curves for your baseline, and not sure but maybe even 2 baselines early and late curves. That makes a total of 6 curves, and if not enough, very easy to set up.

Is good to give you a nice graphic to present to the owner, is a summary that tells where you are but not why, we as Contractors find it of not much value to manage the schedule. Of course it is a metrics of interest to the Owner who want to see a bird’s eye view of the progress.

What I liked about P3 being able to display late curve is that it tells/reminds the others you are not necessarily behind schedule, just some float was consumed. If it is limited, then only early curve makes it twice as limited and perhaps misleading by missing half of the short story.

Best regards,
Rafi Davila

Note there are start constraints that usually affect the forward pass while finish constraints can affect forward and backward pass depending on how the functionality is applied by your particular software.

It is important to identify and avoid those constraints that affect your backward pass computations. For example finis-no-latter-than constraint is dangerous in Primavera Software as it redefines the dates for backward pass computations different from CPM logic while in Spider Project it just simply places a milestone to show you whether you are missing the target or not, but it does not re-defines the backward dates.

But there is one type available in some software that is even more dangerous, I am referring to the must-finish and must-start constraints that fix either by overriding forward and backward computations without any consideration to CPM logic. These I would reserve to fix Milestones used for reference and not tied to the CPM logic in any way.

The S-Curve is determined by your CPM computations and very strange things can happen to it when your constraints creates negative float. I wonder how you would call when under the presence of negative floats the early and late curves cross each other. Maybe “negative float break-even point” can be used, whatever it means.

Your milestones can follow the CPM if tied by logic to the network or you can set them fix by simply not tying them to any other activity and having them fixed by a must-finish or must-start constraint depending on how your particular software handles constraints.

Follow Shahul advice, avoid as much as possible the use of constraints. Maybe others even will suggest never use them and only use CPM logic. These that will venture to advise you not to ever use them most probably will be very experienced schedulers whose advise has very sound reasons, although I believe in never say never at times my mind crosses the line to their side, even with regard to lag I have learned to be very cautious as I have been victim of their traps.