Work Completed or progressed in the last reporting period

you can not change this it wil remain what it was during the time it was input.

A work around is to add the correct resource

export the resources and values to excel

populate the new resources in excel

import the excel file 

then delete the old resources no longer needed.

Hi,

Have any of you come across the following error message when trying to change the type of resource?

"The resource type cannot be changed because this resource is currently assigned to one or more projects. The project plans and baselines would be invalidated"

If so does anyone know a way around it?

We currently have a number of projects imported from Suretrak where all our resources were set to Labour however in P3e it would probably be better for us to have cranes and tooling as non-labour.

Earned Value Management [EVM] does not distinguish available float, it does not distinguish between critical and non-critical activities. Tracking variance at the activity level without taking into account float makes no sense. We must pay attention to critical activities and resources where EVM is of little or no help.

• An S-curve is a result of schedule logic. On the level of activities, projects tend to have many paths, some of them critical, other not. A tiny (if compared to total project duration) schedule variance of an activity can become a cause for substantial rearrangements in the project network, it can change critical path or order of activities, enforce a total reorganization of works. This cannot be captured by either Earned Value or Earned Schedule calculations - potential problems might be masked by compensating positive and negative schedule deviations.
• Earned Value Analysis does not distinguish between the works done on critical activities and activities with sufficient floats. A project could be late but EVA will not notice this problem if Earned Value exceeds Planned Value.
• Earned Value Analysis motivates project managers to do expensive tasks first delaying cheaper activities that could have higher priorities.
• The Department of Defense [DOD], the father of the creature is against the use of EVM in fixed price contracts. 
• Department of Defense Earned Value Management Implementation Guide
• 2.2.3.7 Exclusions for Firm Fixed Price (FFP) Contract Type. The application of EVM on FFP contracts and agreements is discouraged, regardless of dollar value.

The schedule contract milestones give us all we need to know if ahead/behind schedule; Cost Accounts tell us if we are under/over budget.  It is simple; no esoteric procedures such as EVM are required, no EVM jargon only a few at the field understand. If you must live with EVM learn its limitations.

• Earned Value Management as a tool for Project Control
• However, if to be implemented, the method should be used according to its purpose: it is not a tool for forecasting; instead, it facilitates progress monitoring, determination of project status (on time? to budget?), identification of potentially negative occurrences and a rough estimate of their combined effect on the project’s outcome. If the project is to be managed consciously, these occurrences should be then investigated into by means of more accurate methods.

Eared Value will not give you the details necessary to consciously manage the progress.

• An activity will have Cost Budget for none/some/several Cost Accounts, will have Effort Hours Budget for every assigned resource, will have volumes of work for every assigned work parameter to every activity.  For example, an activity such as Elevated Slab might include work on forms (measured say in SF), might include reinforcing steel installation (measured in tons), might include concrete in place (measured in cf). 
• This you can show in EVM reports depending on your software, some are very poor at creating such detailed EVM reports.
• 
• Still it will not tell you about float and criticality.  The name Critical Path Method says it all, it is about float and criticality.  

Simple suggestion.

Compare the EV of every activity of the Current Data Date with the EV from the previous Data Date, do this in Excel.

Other reports will not be a simple summary but will include the details without sacrificing accuracy. 

• Can include a single period, a group of periods or all past/actual & future projections.
• Can also include ALAP projections for work still to be performed.
• Can include hours/period/activity for every resource, work/quantity/period for every work parameter as well as cost/period/activity for every cost account. 

Use reports to communicate performance data to others who do not have access to the software or not proficient but need to see the data in a format anyone can understand. 

It is not uncommon for a Contractor to be in need to report using different periods for different Manager as well as different periods for different client.  If the jobs belong to same portfolio and share financial resources as well as any other resources they must be kept in same database.

Some reporting will mandate:

1. Accuracy following the natural year.
2. Accuracy following the fiscal year, a year that can be different for different companies.
3. Accuracy following a weekly reporting period.
4. Accuracy for the billing period, at times a period that starts 1st day of the month and finish last day of the month, at times a period that changes the 15th day of the month, at times different.

• https://www.emerald-associates.com/item/primavera-analytics-and-p6-financial-periods.html

• http://primaveratips.blogspot.com/2012/12/financial-periods-and-project.html

Spider Project can tackle reporting unlimited periods providing flexibility for any number of jobs within a single database without sacrificing accuracy. 

If you can live with the limitations of keeping the schedules under separate database this can be a workaround for P6.  Another option would be to define monthly financial periods as this should cover most of the reporting needs without sacrificing accuracy. It would be good to hear the comments and recommendations from those who use P6.

Ron,

If your Financial Periods have been set to Weekly, you can use that to store the changes every week.

Unfortunately this is set at the database level & not project level, so would depend on what is already in place in your system as may not be weekly.

Have a look at the Help for Period Performance:

I do not know how it is done within P6.  I use different software but the question is the same, my warning is generic, is not software dependent.  

When asked what work was performed during some window including values outside the window is wrong.

A work around might be to filter the activities using the new P6 filter, make weekly report and export to Excel.  Then delete data outside the week in question.  Not as straightforward but relatively easy. 

When the 7 days window does not start at first day of week as it happened in my example; the truncation got it right without need to export to Excel using work per day granularity.

Good Luck

Ron,

Use Zoltan's method to give you the details.

Unfortunately Primavera does not appear to provide for Variance on % Complete or Remaining Duration, but it may be possible to generate this value using a global change into a UDF to calculate the difference or set a flag if they are not the same & filter on this column instead.

Regards,

Steven

Similar to the more general report for any date range, to capture and report the work that had been progressed during last week without including work outside the range you will need to truncate project in order to clean out work done outside last week.

A filter will not get it right as while it will yield the same activities it will include work outside the range.

assuming an update interval is weekly

filter

any

where start is with in the range DD (low value) DD+7d (high range) 

or

finish is with in the range DD (low value) DD+7d (high range) 

or

activity status equals in progress

You might need to report on what was the progress during a time window without including work done outside this window.  Merely filtering activities will not make it, project truncation will make it.

Project truncation is one of the report forms executed for a certain period and presented in a separate project form. In project truncation, project data and representations are all displayed, also data under charges of cost components and materials, duration, volume, and also cost and materials calculation for the set time period are automatically executed. In the Activity Gantt activities which have been only planned or executed during this period will be presented.

 WHOLE PROJECT

 FILTERED SCHEDULE - Might include other data outside the range.

  TRUNCATION BOX

 TRUNCATED SCHEDULE - This is it.

The following images show how it can be done if using different software, the details might vary but I believe you should be able to create your own filters.  Similar to a lookahead but for a window within any two dates.

You must be missing something in your filters.

You got:

a) Finish within range = Finish ≥ D1 AND Finish ≤ D2

You might be missing:

OR

b) Start within range = Start ≥ D1 AND Start ≤ D2

OR

c) Start before range & Finish after range = Start < D1 AND Finish > D2