Mohammad & Nadeem,

Thanks to us for becoming friends. That makes us a better person. I owe both of you a good coffee.

All,

For me, like Hannes, Intelligent ID is very helpful.

Best regards,
R. Catalan

Hi All

I saw my name popsup in some stage of the discussion, and lucky it is not in the middle of the fire.

LOL

back to the topic: the reason I recommended not to use intelligent activity numbering just because a few individual in the organisation think it is a good idea.

1. The intelligent you built into the Activity id will be very hard for reporting... give u an example said the first character is area code, second character is the floor and the last third is for something else. Then whe you try to build your filter, the conditions become very complex
2. Only a few individual will understand the meaning of the code, outsider will not able the read the schedule. Then the schedule loss one of its function - communication tool. The site supervisor will not thank "U" for it
3. Duplication of code, a lot of time I saw schedule had intelligent into it also built-in the intelligent into their project code as well, and that mean double effort and room for error.
4. ....

I think I had said enough, I am not discounting the credit of intelligent Activity ID but the same result can be achieve with better result in Activity Code.

Futhermore if you are not using activity Id to identify work package it will (to some extend) force the planner to have a better descriptive activity description. And that is certainly an common problem in lots of schedule I encountered in the past.

HTH

Regards

Alex

I Apologise Kaifi Brother.

Hi Mohd. Kaifi & Nadeem,

Can we request that we avoid verbal abuse in here?

It seems that you know each other, I’m thinking maybe you can sit down and settle your differences.

Thanks my friends,
R. Catalan

The usage & importance of activity IDs are industry specific. In this case, the example cited by David regarding the phase change is true in a sense that if we try to build too much intelligence into these activities, then we might end up changing them at every instance of a change in project scope or progress(thru more imports & exports). At the same time, I agree wih Taqi that some worthwhile moment spent on structuring the activity ID’s might be useful in fulfilling the requirements from some corners of the organization. (some people will be more intersted in viewing the activities sorted by activity ID’s which is serial # for them than viewing them by logic al sequence which unfortunately they don’t understand).

Regards
Naveen

hi kaifi,
the program you people were working on here in ax-324 was rediculous, how could a professional planner work on such a program, it was total non sense, i think you were also a member of that group isnt it.

hi kaifi you are not a good planner i know you from dubai international airport ax-324, dont talk *nonsense*.

*Edited by Gary W to replace expletive*

Before you import anything to P6, first export in a spreadsheet from P6 to capture the proper codes for import, the user data that will be the second tab. We use P6 in a Citrix environment and have no issue doing imports. I have not had any issues importing anything other then status (*); any item marked with an asterisk will not import. Otherwise everything is created in Excel for import into the P6 schedule because it is a lot faster.

Check with your network administrator if you are having some hitches in the giddy up. I hope this helps.

Frank

I create the Activity ID in Excel and then import the remaining information with it. When I create an activity Id it has specific meaning, what sub assembly, which line for example then I can reuse the activity id with the change of one letter or number in the coding and I get double the reward for little effort. We have created a 6000 activity schedule and after the first hundred I needed to find a better way.

Thanx Alex,

I told the same thing and I have changed my job too but this is not always possible and for everyone.

Any way, just keep your mood good and everything will look good.

I would go much further than Alex. The ONLY important attribute for an activity ID in P6 is that it does not change. If you build "intelligence" (that stupid, stupid expression from the P3 601 course) into the activity ID, eg you use the 4th and 5th character to identify the phase of the work, then if the phase of that job changes you have to change the activity ID and loose your audit trail......

So I would say it is not just poor style, but bad practise to have the activity IDs mean something or run in sequence.

Dear Planners

If you are using P4.5 or above, I don’t see any reason to have intelligent activity id. That is only for planner still using P3.

This is depressing, because it is like asking please quote the bar code of the ice-cream you just brough. The bar code is only for the computer to read. We human read meaningful description....

Alex

i believe you don’t need global change, just sort by Activity ID and/or Start Date, for me, activity id sequence doesn’t matter (it happens because of late insertions or additions of some activities), just make sure that the logic-sequence(s) are correct