With too many constraints, you lose the fluidity of the logic dependencies (or maybe you didn’t bother with logic in the first place). So why bother with relationships if you plan to simply force every Activity to a set of dates? Constraining %50 of your Activities seems to be an effective way to get the dates you want….but it will cost you in the end. Those people usually go for the comfort of mass Activity Constraints to force Activities to start or end on the best dates.
P6 is a scheduling engine, but some of us don’t like to give the software the control to schedule our work.
NOTE: this feature is present in versions 7 of Primavera P6 or later. If your project is already built on a sequence incremented by 1’s or 2’s, then highlight your Activities, right-click and pick “Renumber Activity IDs” from the menu to renumber everything properly. Make sure to set your Activity ID numbering sequence on the Defaults tab of your project to increment by 5’s, 10’s or 20’s. (but maybe you don’t want to type it out 90 times either….I know. Maybe your client doesn’t know that “ASCMAC” stands for Aluminized Corrugated Steel Metal Arch Culvert.
Using too many abbreviations can have the same effect. But if you ever use P6’s tools to regroup, filter or sort, you may not always see the WBS, leaving that activity to any number of interpretations you don’t have time to consider. Maybe “Excavate” makes perfect sense in the context of that activity being under the WBS element “Area 3, West end (10+320 to 10+430)”. If you’re really going for a project that’s vague and ambiguous, then you should consider using lots of one-word activity names to add some mystery to what your crew is working on. Pick out the big dates in your schedule and use P6’s “Start Milestone” or “Finish Milestone” activity type to highlight those events in your project. And you don’t have an accurate Critical Path as there is no path to an activity with missing relationships (or perhaps no path from an activity if we’re talking about open ends). Without the relationships, you don’t have a network. A project schedule is really just a network of interconnected tasks put into a thoughtful order of execution. Now imagine a project schedule with 450 activities that have no predecessor or successor relationships.
Nowadays, if it’s not connected, your PC isn’t doing much good. Imagine trying to send an email from a computer that is not connected to the network. Link Only Half of Your Activities Together 11 Ways to Build a Cringe-Worthy Primavera P6 Scheduleġ. If you have fallen victim to some of these practices, don’t worry – we’ll see if we can straighten your project out. If none of these apply to you, congratulations! Consider this an entertaining read at lunch. So this post is going to present some of the worst practices we’ve seen in the building of Primavera P6 schedules. The lengthy process of building a project schedule in Primavera P6 can be riddled with pitfalls, tradeoffs and poor practices that can lead to poorly prepared schedules. Putting a schedule together is almost never an easy and straightforward task. Maybe you’ve been in the same situation in your job perhaps you were sent a contractor’s schedule to review, or maybe you inherited a “less than ideal” schedule from someone else, or maybe you work as a Forensic Analyst and see this sort of thing all the time. And it didn’t end up just taking a few minutes.
Once I’d opened up P6, imported the xer and clicked Activities, I was completely stymied by what was supposed to be a professional Primavera P6 project schedule. “Send it over.” I knew I was in trouble at “Um.” I’d like your opinion on it.” “Um….Ok.” I said. We just hired a new scheduler and he put it together. The day was looking up, until he asked me, as I was just about to head out the door, “Would you mind looking a schedule over for me? It should only take you a few minutes. I was going to win some business and they were going to get complete Primavera P6 training for 10 schedulers.