I am starting to think that what makes a great schedule is what you don't put in it - what should you leave out? for example:
P6 schedule make a bad, redundant Submittals log (why do it twice) P6 should just have the dates from the log that effect deliverables. (NOT SAYING DON'T HAVE A SUMMARY ACTIVITY(S) FOR A SUBMITTAL - BUT P6 IS NOT GOOD A PARTIAL APPROVALS & NUANCE ETC LIKE EXCEL)
P6 is not a meeting calendar: meetings change quite often and are not logic driven, they are "when everyone has a free time slot" driven - only inlcude them if they drive a deliverable
What would you leave out?
Been on too many jobs that the schedule becomes too big for the resources to update it "when the job gets busy" - how many can you update it. I think I can put in about 15-20 new activities a day, I can update about 30-40 a day.
What about you?
(that is based on working for about 25 companies, about 200 jobs in a wide variety. If i worked at worked at 1 job for 30 years it would be higher)
You do not want to have activities divided into multiple segments when meant to be performed contiguously.
John, I suggest to keep on trying to meet this target. Dive in the challenges that you encounter.
Engineering schedules are relatively easy to make and update. Think about the work engineering packages.
Suggestions: Engineers keep a useful log in the Master Document Register (MDR). Copy and paste the relevant data and import these in P6.
Regards
Johannes
Thank you for answering. Food for thought. Individual projects and experience make these question difficult. Updating 300 activities in a day would only be possible if there were very few logic changes and the update information was better than engineers typically provide. Its not like we normally go walk a job and markup a schedule pdf ourselves. If you you have 300 activities to update - that might be 5 engineers with 60 activities to update. Maybe there are engineers out on an oil platform with a lot of time on their hands, but getting an update on 60 items from an engineer might take a while - logic changes etc. Now multiply that times 5, every month - seems optimistic - but then again depends on the job. Maybe all these guys have worked on that project for 10 years and they do it. A more typical situation is that different people are thrown together for a project and it takes a while to get efficient. More commonly you get a combination of people who want way too much detail and others who are not enthusiastic about the task and then some that do a good, normal job on the task.
this depends on the level of the schedule and type of schedule. For instanace an outage schedule is more likely to have more activities than a 2 or 3 year lets say building schedule. Simply because for an outge you maybe workinf 24/7. Putting that annomily aside for a second I would say to only have major submittals inthe schedule you would still have the regualr submittal log to refer to. The major submittals would support the major procurement and delivery items. For example I would have a generator submittal in the schedule but I would NOT have a conduit submittal in the schedule.
you only have to update as many activites that you work on during an update period and again this depends on the level of detail in the schedule. For example I can have 1 activity F,R,P slab in area B which would be for forming, rebar installation and pouring the salb in area B. Or ir can be 3 seperate activities
form slab area B
install rebar for area B
Pour slab area B
so in this eample this is 1 activity vs 3 activities all depnds on how you want to break it out.
John,
Say you have an 3000 activity schedule. This is approx.. 300 activity updating per period.
This can be done in one day. Second day is for analyzing, and reporting status like summary,CPI, SPI. reporting s-curves per discipline.
This is my experience.
Johannes
I remember seeing a schedule that once had a milestone for the reporting date of each month. for a 48+month schedule. <shakes head>