Are there any good references on how to manage on master schedule where a few partner companies have thier own sections of the master WBS which they create, maintain and update. I see two possible options; I don't think updating by Excel would be practical as the partners will be updating and using thier schedule during the month.
1. We work in one EPC on a shared cloud server, with seperate projects and sync our updates and processes. The Master schedule would include all of the sub projects.
2. Export each of the sub projects to the partners for thier updates and import thier updated project files. Are ties between project maintained when exported and reimported.
Which would work best. What other ways are possible or preferred.
Thank you Santoshl this is very useful.
Thank you Santoshl this is very useful.
What if the requirements for schedule updates are different in different subprojects?
For example, engineering activities must be updated once in a week, but on construction site it must be done every day.
What if one of the users wants to play what if (changing resource assignments and activity durations, dependencies and calendars) and to compare different versions of the project schedule to select the best option?
Could you please explain the ways of managing this in P6?
Brian,
No problem, It's one of those paradoxes, to keep things well controlled you need to increase the administrative burden of managing the database, but then loosening the restrictions can end up causing more chaos in the long run.
But my suggestion would be to try to keep everyone working in the same database at aleast, even if you have to create distinctly different portions of the EPS for each projects or even each user.
Thank you Santoshl this is very useful.
Brian,
What you describe is very complicated to manage. Ideally you would have everyone using a single P6 database and using security profiles/privileges manage who can do what and what they can see edit etc. But appreciate that this is not always possible.
With the above, which I think you describe as your first option, the key is to ensure everyone updates at the same time, that is, they all move to a consistent datadate for each project, down to the same hh:mm in the scheduling option. Where there are interfaces between projects, you have two options
If you export/import projects from one database into another, you'll have to deal with issues such as the importing of global data from each database. Overwriting existing data (can be fatal if calednars are being adjusted). When P6 exports relationships to other projects, these are turned into "External constraints" so if you import them back in, you're again stuck with having to re-build these relationships if you want the master schedule functioning as a single schedule.