Tips on updating up 1500 to 2000 activities

Hi Geoff,

Updating 1000 activities on a schedule is easy as you can utilize export-import feature in P6 to MS Excel. But evaluating actuals of a 1000 activities is not only thorny but also boring.

Best regards,

R. Catalan 

Geof,

To be honest I have never updated that amount of activities on a single schedule. Our schedules on average are of about a total of 600 activities with a duration of 20 months, because some activities span two updates periods, on average we update about 40 to 50 activities per month. These are small jobs of about 20 US Million dollars, simple commercial buildings, schools, water treatment plants, vocational schools, hospitals, none a Big Dig, we play little leagues pampers division with regard to activity count but with regard to the complexity of the jobs we play hard ball and all advanced scheduling functionality is used.

I know Spider can handle huge jobs and has methods of his own for group updating, my experience is that updating is the easy part of scheduling unless a rookie scheduler created a monstrous schedule no one can update and the field does not follows. So cumbersome they are easy to question and prove wrong in court claims, even if correct, the complexity will kill its purpose and no judge will even consider it on its merits, it will become a credibility issue. 

Of course there are big jobs out there that require for group updating methods, even some old and inexpensive software provided some useful functionalities for these purposes, today it is a matter of knowing your software, it is standard functionality.

Even Primavera P6 improved on the limitation of P3 that would not allow you to make adjustments to closed financial periods. Other software like Spider Project have no such limitation on financial periods, these are not even required for your reporting purposes and allows you to report on overlapping periods and perform project truncation between any two dates.

Best regards,

Rafael

Hello Planners ,

I am a new user of P5 , I Have doubt regarding updating the base line schedule , pl tell me , wt i should do after creating the baseline schedule , i read the primavera manual , bt i could not understand , so pl explaine me clearly ..anuone of you ..step by step explanation will be better..

Regards

Justin,

Qatar

From P6 manual;

If collecting timesheet data from the Timesheets module, review and approve timesheets in the Timesheet Approval application, which is accessible from within the Project Management module and P6 Web Access, or as a stand-alone application (if properly configured).

For more information about combining activity owner and Reflection project features to collect activity status, see the Project Management Help and the Administrator’s Guide.

If collecting progress from activity owners, use Reflection project features to implement a review and approval process that enables you to examine updates to activity status and specify which, if any, you want to merge into the active source project.

As you can see all software provides their own method to handle large jobs. I use Spider Project and our methods are particular to Spider, therefore with regard to P6 I cannot be of much help. Ask a moderator to move the discussion into the P6 forum and probably those experienced with P6 will be able to help you.

I work on a standalone installation of Spider but if you are on a multi user environment access to the network and access rights to activity owners might be of particular interest for your needs. Don't forget to ask about Web Access.

On every update filter the activities by supervisor and distribute the worksheet file containing the records to be updated by each supervisor. When you receive back the individual files then consolidate them (copy and paste) and run the first round of the update.

It is called team work, if you do not have the authority ask the support of the person who can call for it.

Each software has it particular ways but if you specify yours most probably users of your software can be more specific on the most efficient procedures. Good software shall give you the tools for consolidating the data without manual re-entering the update data, the tool is usually a simple copy and paste procedure.