Hi,

After having used other planning software systems for years, I’m now starting to learn P6 (version 7). One of “problems” I’ve met here is how to understand the way P6 treats WBS summaries and I therefore have some questions to this. Hope somebody can explain.

I have a programme set up with, say 1000 tasks and 100 summaries. Under the “Activities”-tab I then see both the WBS-summary in a coloured row (what ever level is may be in) without an ID-number and immediately below a “task” / “activity” with the same name with an ID-number which is defined as “WBS Summary” under General – Activity and also same start / finish dates. Then come all the normal tasks under each summary like they normally do.

Q1: How are those 2 WBS-summaries levels related? The coloured one is of course the overall one created under the “WBS”-tab whereas the second one seems to take the info from the other, however, the name, actual start/finish dates, etc. for the second one can be changed afterwards, without having any impact on the first overall one. What is the purpose with this feature? Pros/cons?

As I don’t like to see this double name twice I apply the filter “Non-WBS Summary Activities” and everything is OK, until I check the schedule log after a “Reschedule”. Now it states that I have 101 activities without a predecessor and 101 activities without a successor. When checking the programme, I’ve no activities w/o pred./succ. except the start date (w/o pred.) and the completion date (w/o succ.)which only accounts for 1 in each. As I can’t see the activity ID’s mentioned in the schedule log, I now remove the filter applied above and observe that all the remaining 100+100 errors/warnings are coming from the WBS-summaries. These, of course, haven’t been linked as I never – and have always been taught never to – link summaries.

Q2: Should these “secondary” WBS summaries be linked in P6 and how does the whole system of linking summaries then work? If the “second” WBS summary is linked, is its big-brother WBS summary (on the coloured row immediately above) also then linked or what? What is the purpose of linking WBS summaries in P6?

Q3: Depending on the answer to Q2, how do I remove the error / warnings from the schedule log concerning this counting summaries (called activities in the log) without predecessors / successors?

Regards,

Bo