Hi all
I'm a recent graduate who's just got his first role in planning. This site looks to be a good way to chat to other planners.
I've been on a basic Primavera course but I'll be doing plenty of updating programmes etc and have encountered my first problem using P6.
If anyone could help I'd be most grateful....
I've inherited a programme where there is are two activities that start on a monday and need to end the following Friday. The odd thing is that when I change the start and end dates to suit - one activity says the duration is 5 days, and the other 4 days.
They both need to last the same duration with matching start/end dates - is there something wrong in the ways the activities are 'set up'? It just looks odd that when 2 identical tasks need to last a week, one says 5 days duration and the other doesn't match.
I also find that it is useful to tick the box in Admin Preferences > Time Periods, Use assigned calendar to specify the number of work hours for each time period, otherwise P6 will just use the default hourly time period within each calendar which makes a hell of a mess.
both the activities having different calender with different working hours. If u want to keep the duration same for both activities assign same calender for each.
Jon,
Its the calendar work hour/day and also your user preference setting on hours worked in days,months and years. All of these parameters could cause the different durations in each activity.
Cheers,
Adrian n
Be aware that these weird durations factors can even increase the duration to display several days per calendar days, this can be very confusing.
In the following example about 3 WBS days represent a single calendar day and who knows how many work days.
Even with software that do not present such abnormal duration in days it can still be confusing as they still are subject to the effect of fractional days that affects the average work hours per day. My workaround is to display both duration in days and durations in hours in the same table, also the average work hours per day can be displayed using a very basic formula.
Look at the following screen, if the work hours for designated days of the week are equal within a single calendar, no matter if other calendars are different, the workdays will be as expected but if the work hours in the particular calendar varies then there migh be some discrepancy between calendar work days and the amount displayed, please look at activities 6 and 7. The effect of fractional days still can be elusive. Fractional days effect can be caused also when an activity start at the middle of the day and continues on the next day up to the designated hours per a single day. This can be further complicated if you have a work cycle different from a regular week like a cycle of 3ea 12 hour days and a day of rest in between. As Ron Winter said by displaying hours you can see what the software is doing.
The advantage of software that have individual factors for hours/day is that data entry in days is easier to enter and understand for calendars whose work hours per day are all equal no matter if 4 hours all workdays or 8 hours all workdays. For those calendars whose workdays have different work hours a marker shall identify them.
Jon,
One possibility is that the two activities have different workday calendars. Another is that there are fractional days involved. You cannot understand what P6 is doing if you do not display hours as well as dates. Have a look at a paper I co-presented at an AACE conference titled, “Understanding P6 Dates” http://www.ronwinterconsulting.com/published.htm. I hope that this helps. Good luck!