I called it Planning Practical Solutions.
I invented this name or maybe some other person already used it before, that I am not aware of.
I am creating spreadsheet VBA programs as tools that will help us planners to efficiently cope up with our workload. If workload is not too much, it is still enjoyable to have these tools automate your routines.
P6 is a very powerful scheduling software, calculation of dates and floats based on your sequencing of work is its main strength. It is highly accurate as well, considering that the unit of measurement is by time. On the other hand, P6 has no spreadsheet capability. Still, it is practical to calculate the project manpower requirement on a spreadsheet, specially, if you deriving your resources by productivity rate.
You can create a material resources with corresponding unit of measurement, assign it to an activity and put quantity as budgeted unit. But where is the column for the material quantity? How about creating a weekly manpower or equipment histogram, showing the peak numbers for each trade or equipment, P6 will provide you with a table reflecting the budgeted units (which can be translated to total man-hours or man-days), but never the peak requirement for the specified time interval.
Well, Excel to the rescue, the good thing is you can copy your P6 data and paste it to a spreadsheet.
Still, P6 is so cruel, the pasted program has no color on its WBS heading, you should possess a keen eyes to read the WBS and distinguish it from the activities.
For me, the initial step in creating a spreadsheet VBA program is not looking at the entire finish product but rather tackling the hurdles one problem at a time. Solving the WBS heading color problem is my earliest accomplishment.
Now that you have your whole program on the spreadsheet with colored WBS, you can easily assigned quantity to activities, get your productivity rate records, devise formulas to come up with the manpower requirement for each task. Still an exhausting undertaking.
What if with one keyboard shortcut, an organized database of activities and productivity rate will pop-up on your screen, and by selecting the corresponding code for the activity your spreadsheet will automatically reflect the total manpower requirements. No formula required.
Now we’re getting efficient, more than 50% of work time saved.
But what if after completing your resource derivation, and with another keyboard shortcut will populate the data according to P6 format for importing resources via spreadsheet, and copy it to an open pre-exported P6 spreadsheet with sheet name TASKRSRC.
The pre-exported P6 spreadsheet with new data is ready to be imported back to P6. Resource loading completed.
I am talking about one of my Planning Practical Solutions in the form of an Excel VBA program. I have a handful of this spreadsheet programs.
For those interested in my spreadsheet programs, please email me at vicmalou@yahoo.com [1].
If you need a quick explanation and you have plenty of mobile credits, you can call me anytime on my mobile +974 66751167 until 2nd week of April, after that I will be back home in the Philippines with a new mobile no.