Primavera P6 Tutorial 2 : Level of Effort Activities in Oracle Primavera P6

hi there this is Michael LePage again and welcome to another CPM solutions video tutorial on Primavera p6 today I want to talk to you about another little-known activity type called the level of effort activity what makes this level of effort activity different is has to do with the duration now let's think about a standard activity like say this activity here B 1010 design building layout notice this activity actually has a duration of 10 days which which a standard activity we usually punch in that duration that's our estimate of how long we expect that activity to take but occasionally we have situations where an activity maybe doesn't have a known duration for example what if I had activity called meet morning meeting and that was a meeting that I want to have every morning with my construction crew before they went out and I'd like to have that activity on my on my project plan well if I wanted that activity to span the entire duration of the project or a particular phase maybe the construction phase of the project what is the duration of that phase or of the entire project now I might know if I have the entire project built or the entire phase is built but that may also change so it's unreliable for me to actually hard-code a number in there this is where a level of effort activity can come into play I can actually create a an activity that will grow or shrink dynamically based on the relationships let's let's do one for example here and we'll see what it looks like so I'm going to focus on the activities in this building system phase of the project I'm just going to move this over a little bit by a little bit more screen real estate here now I want you to notice the building system phase of the project is 327 days and it goes from January 2nd oay to April 2nd so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to create an activity that spans the same duration okay and I'm going to actually anchor that activity to pick up the start date of B 1000 here which is the first activity in the list and then I want it to also I want to anchor it in in the finish to pick up this finish date by that's hanging out here with b11 70 of April 2nd so here's what I'm going to do I'm going to go ahead and create an activity I'm going to call this activity building overhead costs and I'll tell you why later again I'm not going to give it a duration because I want it to figure out the duration on its own here's how we do that we can have a level of effort activity create its own duration through the relationships that it's been assigned so like I said I'm going to anchor it here to have a predecessor or B 1000 and on the other side I'm going to anchor it to 1170 so think of it like a hammock that's hanging between these two activities okay be a thousand B 1170 now watch what happens when I schedule this project oh you know I forgot one step let's go over here to the general tab and let's actually make this a level of effort activity okay again schedule the project see what's going on and look at that it automatically mimics or it automatically stretches itself between the activities at its anchor to in relationships now this can actually benefit you in a but in a bunch of different ways okay I can I can also use this activity type for say doing something like this notice I called this building overhead costs well this is actually a dummy activity but I want this dummy activity to actually track my overhead ask maybe my labor rates are very specific and I want to have I want to be able to have the specific labor rates for each activity but I want the overhead cost track somewhere as well so here's what I would do I'm going to add a resource here you're going to notice here that I've created a special resource just let me change the filter okay and that special resource is right here called overhead costs assign him in there now notice the rate is a hundred dollars and so I'm going to assume that for one hour for every day my overhead costs are a hundred dollars for all of my crew I know it's a small small number in reality but over the course of the three hundred twenty seven days that really gives me $32,000 an overhead costs now that's kind of cool here's another little feature I might use if I was going to use a level of effort activity to do this I'd actually apply a resource curve and a resource curve actually can can allocate the resources to come on to ramp up slowly and then to to ramp down slowly as well here's here's an example okay so I'm going to apply a bell-shaped curve here and the bell-shaped curve essentially will allocate these 327 units in a bell shape over the duration of the 327 days let's get a visual on this okay if I go to my resource usage profile graph I can I'll just scroll this over here for you and make a little bit of room here I'm highlighting my overhead costs resource and you can see that they're actually allocated in the shape of a bell curve if I hadn't applied that curve they would strictly be it'd be linear it just be a straight line across here so here's an example of where you can use a level of effort activity to for activities that need to have dynamic durations if I extended any of these activities by a couple days let's say I extend you know what let's do an example let's say I extend this activity by 14 days up to 14 days what do you think is going to happen my level of effort activity well you guessed it absolutely right it's going to automatically expand to fill that void as well that's how you would use a level of effort activity and you might actually use it for overhead costs or other cost estimate features I'm Michael LePage I hope you enjoyed the tutorial have a great day

Channel: P6 Consulting Inc. | Oracle Primavera P6 Training

Views: 18,777

Rating: 4.9322033 out of 5

Keywords: Oracle Database (Software), Primavera, Primavera Systems (Business Operation), Primavera tutorial

Id: eVOE3xreU6k

Length: 6min 55sec (415 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 05 2014