P6’s Undiscovered Activity Change Log

Did you know that P6 has a heretofore unknown Change Log built right in the system? Yes its true!

It provides schedulers and planners the ability to log any change made to an activity. And not just one! Any number of changes, in fact a complete history of changes can be stored and each change has a dedicated note pad that has all the functionality of the “Notebook” function. I hear you, “Why isn’t that just the Notebook that is already built into P6?” WELL! Can a notebook capture a complete history of changes? Can you run a report identifying changes made by specific users? Or how about within a specific date rang? Is there some kind of flag on the activity to let you know a note exists? I thought not. So come with me. Open your mind to the possibilities.

All kidding aside, in the following you will find a “simple” process for adding a Change Log to P6 by implementing a specific kind of “Step”. Yes I said Step. The step records are stored as a “many to one” relationship with an activity. Simply said, you can have as many steps as needed connected to any activity. As it would be, as long as a step has no weighting or progress information assigned to it, it has no effect on the associated activity. Therefore the “step” functionality provides a data set with great potential of storing data.

SETUP OF ENVIRONMENT

User Defined Fields
Open from the Toolbar, “Enterprise”-“User Defined Fields” and select “Activity Steps” from the pull-down.
There are no hard and fast rules on what fields to create. This is a freeform environment so create whatever will suit your needs.

Suggested  “Step” fields:
Seq #               : a unique sequence number i.e. 1,2,3,4…          Default field (Step Name)
By                    : change initiated by (initials)                              UDF Text
Log Date           : date of change                                               UDF Start Date
Change to field   : what is the change                                          UDF Text
From                 : original data                                                  UDF Text
To                    : new data                                                       UDF Text
From Date          : if change is referring to date                            UDF Start Date 
To Date             : new date                                                      UDF Start Date
Explanation        : reason or justification                                      UDF Text

Any layout can be modified to incorporate this procedure simply by adding the “Steps” tab to the “Activity Details” portion of a layout.
Right mouse click on the column header and select “Customise Step Columns” and add the UDFs

In addition to the “UDFs” you can also utilise the “Note pad” associated with each Step to include more detailed description or supporting docs as required.

Change Log records can be cut and pasted from one activity to another.
Step Templates can be used to create standard Log entries with some data preloaded.

Making use of the “Change Log” data.
On a layout, you can add the column “Activity Step Count “ to act as a flag to indicate changed activities. Or use the field to filter on changed activities.

The text report writer has the ability to access all of the Step User Defined Fields including the note field. You can filter and sort on these fields which makes it easy to select specific groups of changes i.e. changes made by a user, on a certain date or of a certain type.

Now I realize this is not the end all be all change log and it has some shortcomings. Like the fact that it is not automatic. But it is FREE and extremely useful.