Are YOU Using this Primavera P6 Float Paths Feature?

as users of P6 we think of total float as an activity field that's calculated by the P6 scheduler assigned to an activity but in reality total float is not activity float a lot of times total float is shared float it's shared along a path of activities so if you think of an activity as having a bunch of days afloat and that flow gets eaten then the successor activities will also have their float affected chewed up so float is often shared on a path of activities let's look at a simple example you've probably seen these Network diagrams before the critical path is in red I have total float values in green and then I have the early and late dates calculated there as well okay so let's look at the float path along the bottom a d g h k as you can see all of those activities have three days of float so this is a float path with three days of float and if activity D eats up the total float then there's no more float left for G H and K because it's really shared along that path okay so what is a float path well it's a sequence of activities where the float is shared by the adjacent activities that float path can be a float path of one activity or many activities let's look at activity e it has one day afloat but there's no adjacent activities with the same float so it's on a float path all on its own same thing with c and same thing with j so how many float paths do we have in this project well if you count the critical path as one e as another C J as two more and then the path along the bottom that's five float paths so we have five different flow paths on this project now did you know that P6 also can calculate these flow paths let's dive in and I'll show you how it works hey if you're learning something relevant in this video do me a favor just hit the like button give it a thumbs up really helps us to let others know that you're enjoying this content and if you're on a project controls Journey you're trying to find more information you're hungry for great knowledge then hit the Subscribe button that's what we're here for we want to help people succeed in Project controls scheduling and other topics relevant when you do you'll see it's basically the same network we just looked at just programmed into P6 with activities a through finish okay we're going to tell P6 to calculate all of the different float paths through this project now to understand the results we need to change our layout a little bit so we're going to build a special layout okay let's hit the column button and let's expand multiple float paths and go ahead and add float path and Float path order and I want to put float path at the very top and flow path order after it okay great I also want to make sure that I add in my total float value so that's under durations and we'll add it in and I like to put it just after finish free float at the bottom let's click ok now I wanted to show you how to build this layout so that you know it's not that difficult and you can pull it up at any time one more thing let's go ahead and group click the group by well it's not grouped by WBS let's Group by float path float path Okay click ok here's our new layout now ignore these results for a moment let's save this as a new layout okay layout save as and let's call this my float path layout great pull this layout up at any time you want to do Advanced critical path analysis in P6 it's invaluable okay let's hit the schedule button F9 or hit this little button here and let's go to the options tab okay once we're here there's an advanced tab and I want you to turn this on calculate multiple float pass it looks like it was already on for me clap click that and let's set this to free float I'll explain why in a moment and what we'll do is we will display multiple float paths for the ending activity ending with activity finish so select activity finish we can up this to any value we want 10 is fine but that's good enough so once you have it set like this go ahead and click close And go ahead and click schedule okay you should now see results just like I have here we're having P6 calculate the many different paths from the start of the project to our finished Milestone and to show us the different float paths that we have as you can see we're grouping by float path so here are the activities on float path one we've got a b f i l and finish there's e by its own by its Lonesome C by its Lonesome J by its Lonesome and then we have that path along the bottom of the project if you remember that has dghk and it has here's here's our float value of three for those so here's our critical path float path one uh this one is one day one day or three days and the last one has six days of total flow now let's group our data by float path so instead of WBS we will set this to float path go ahead and click ok and there we have it now we won't see results until we run the scheduler in just a minute but I really wanted to show you how to make this layout so that you could pull it up at any time you're doing float path analysis on a project so let's go ahead and save this layout we'll go to layout here layout save as let's call it my float path layout it's a pretty simple layout but it's going to be invaluable anytime you want to use it to analyze the schedule let's go ahead and click the schedule button and then let's hit the options button on the scheduled pop-up window from here because this is an advanced course we're going to the advanced tab here we go this is where we can tell P6 when it schedules the project to go ahead and calculate the many flow pass on the project so what we'll do is we'll check this box on we'll make sure this is set to free float and then here we can hit the little button and ask it to calculate the float pass from the start to this activity the Finish activity in the project you can also specify how many flow paths you'd like it to calculate maybe just three or five if if there's fewer than 10 it'll calculate as many as it can I like to leave this at 10 10 is loss okay so let's close from here and let's go ahead and schedule the project well let's look at the results what you can see is my activity list divided by these blue bars which are my float paths so I have one two three four five float past of the project just like we saw in our Network diagram and if you look at the total float values you can see that flow path one has got zero so that's our critical path float path 2 has got one day that's activity e activity C has got one day that's flow past three float path four is that path along the bottom of the network with our three days and then lastly we have it float path 5 which is J having six days of flow we have a slight difference there uh in this calculation versus the network but let's ignore it for the moment okay now we also have this field here float path order and we can sort our results by flow path order which gives me the same thing and basically the it's a listing of the activities in the order along the path so obviously a will be earlier and L A B at the end okay so we can list them that way and it's common to sort this list by flow path order now what do we do with these results in the next video I'm going to show you how we can use this multiple float path feature in P6 to calculate Advanced critical paths or multiple critical paths through a project to intermediate Milestones hey you know what we covered this topic and so much more in our Primavera P6 course there's a link to it in the description check it out foreign [Music]

Channel: Plan Academy Inc.

Views: 7,173

Keywords: primavera p6 tutorial, primavera p6 training, primavera p6 online training, p6 float paths, oracle primavera p6, project management, total float, plan academy, michael lepage, free float, scheduling, critical path analysis, critical path calculation, near critical activities

Id: l5UAyVv92KU

Length: 10min 6sec (606 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 17 2023