Primavera P6 - Tutorial 3: Activity Splitting - One Way

hi Michel Lapage here at the planner tutorials hub welcome back today we're going to do another Oracle primavera video tutorial today's topic is activity splitting how can I get on my Gantt chart in activity that's split so it starts has a gap in there and then carries on now Primavera doesn't support natively activity splitting so I'm going to show you how we can get creative and use user-defined fields to split an activity now let's talk about what Primavera does support Primavera does support suspend and resume however those features those two date fields are only available when on status in an activity so when I'm putting into my actuals I can say I started the work I had to suspend and then I had to resume the work again what we want to do is have that same sort of behavior but for planned work we'd like to have an activity that plans to start has a gap of no activity and then resumes work again now we all know that Primavera counterpart Microsoft Project does support reoccurring activities and splitting activities or tasks as they're called there so let's see how we can get creative what we're going to do today is use user-defined fields to see if we can split an activity let's get started so as I said I'm going to be using user-defined fields to split a particular activity so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go up here to the enterprise menu check out user find fields and I want to create two new user-defined fields you want to make sure that if you're trying this tutorial that you have the appropriate permissions to create user-defined fields you may not if you don't try to go find somebody who might have permission and see they can do it for you or perhaps you want to try another approach to splitting activities we're going to create activities user-defined fields under this activities heading I'm going to go ahead and add a new one I'm going to call it you I'm going to call it split var start and it's going to be a start date and I'm going to add another one and it's going to be called split bar finish and it's a finished state with those two added I'll close out of here first thing I'm going to do is add them to my layout so we'll go ahead and expand find those guys there we go great okay just do a little little bit of adjusting the screen here what I'd like to do next then is to increase the duration of this activity to 50 days and go ahead and reschedule the project this will just give me a little bit more visibility make it a little bit easier for you to see on your screens with these user-defined fields on my page now what I'm going to do is essentially set the split bar start and finish dates for these two activities I'm going to set them outside the bounds of August 3rd and the 19th so let's see we'll set perhaps September 1st - let's say September 15th there we go okay with those dates set we're actually going to go and reconfigure the Gantt chart so that we can show the split bar as I said we got to get creative this is how we're going to do it we're going to go into the bars area and we're actually going to add a new bar type here so we'll click the Add button okay we'll call it split bar there we go and now here's the tricky part what we're going to do is or call it the creative part we'll go down here and choose user dates so the user dates now fill in the split bar start and our split bar finish user defined fields into these user date columns all I need to do now is to perhaps just change some of the colors so we can make yellow will have a visual watch what happens when I click okay I now get a essentially a split bar as I said this solution is a little bit tricky the the setback to it is really that the original duration of the activity doesn't actually expand out and represent the finish of the the split bar however it is a creative solution and for those situations where you just need to do one split this can work really well now notice I have a little problem here notice the the relationship line is attached to the split and that's actually not accurate so what I'll do is I'll go back into bars and I'll take my split bar and I'll just shimmy it down the list here so that it shows up after say remaining or critical remaining these remaining bars and that essentially adjusting the order of things makes the relationship line drawn appropriately from the red bar this solution works really well as I said if we just have to do one split I have lots of clients who come in and say well my manager is indicating to me that they need to see the schedule this way so how do I do those kinds of things this is an appropriate solution for that situation sometimes we have a manager or a client who just wants to see the split on the Gantt they're not sometimes they're not too concerned about what the data sees says but they are concerned about what the Gantt chart shows and in this situation this user to find dates user defined fields solution works really well there you have it a split bar in Primavera ah feel free to check out the download files back on planner tuts com hope you have a great day happy planning

Channel: Plan Academy Inc.

Views: 50,972

Rating: 4.8095236 out of 5

Keywords: Primavera (software), Software Tutorial, Oracle Primavera P6, P6, primavera training, primavera p6 tutorials, primavera online training, activity splitting

Id: lslaNm75Akg

Length: 7min 2sec (422 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 23 2011