Primavera P6 Tutorial 5 : Linking Projects Together

michael--ah pass here from CPM Solutions coming at you with another Primavera video tutorial welcome today we're going to talk about a situation that happens quite often in many industries that situation is linking multiple projects up to work together inter relating those projects so that they can work as one I see this all the time when I work with clients we have a client who wants to have a master project plan with sub project plans underneath just like I'm showing here I've got a master project and I've got sub project one in sub project - how can i link those projects up so that the master project essentially contains a summary or all of the sub projects altogether and can I have those projects work as though they're one big master well absolutely you can so the situation we're looking at here is sub project one has got these activities sub project two is got a bunch of other stuff and actually the master project just has this one activity which summarizes the whole shebang summarizes everything up two hundred and forty four days here's my total start my end date for the entire project so today we're going to dig in with an example to show you how we can set something like this up let's get started by the way folks just thought we mentioned we don't just do excellent tutorials we also have online learning courses for Primavera go ahead and check out CPM solutions ta /e learning okay let's move on so let's go on over to the projects window let's check out these two projects I've got here project phase a and project phase B let's get those open up so here we go we've got two simple projects project phase a I've got design plan build Commission closeout bunch of durations in there nothing scheduled nothing's linked together with activity relationships yet and then I've got down here in project phase B a budget baseline bonuses now the one thing I want you to notice is that these guys over here in phase B are only finished milestones at this point okay so let's start by getting some things linked up here I'm going to go ahead and select all these activities I'm going to right click go on down to linked activities I'm then going to go ahead and schedule this project let's see what happens when I expand things out boom I've got an expanded Gantt chart there we go so things are linking up already now next step then is to link these milestones up down here in place so I'm going to bring up the bottom half of my screen here make a little bit of room these milestones down here I'd like them to link up with phase a so I'm going to enter link these two projects my budget milestone I'd like to occur as soon as my design is done so once I'm done my diet design I should have a budget in place as well so what I'll do is I will assign a predecessor of design and I will make it a saree finish to finish relationship go ahead and we'll schedule that and boom that puts my budget milestone where I want it similarly I'm going to do the same thing with a baseline I'm going to make the baseline be show up in the project after the planning is done so I'm going to put it in there I can make it a finish to finish so that these two finish at the same time schedule the project let's see what happens all right so there's my baseline milestone now bonuses are going to occur after I've done my commissioning so let's go ahead that's when we get paid out our bonus payouts everybody likes payday put that in there again finish to finish schedule the project great now let's make a little room here trim things down a little bit so we can get the whole project looking together the nice thing about Primavera is that a project is just a compilation of activities and those activities just sit in the database somewhere so activities are really kind of wrapped in a project wrapper but if I've got this project wrapping these ones in this project wrapping these ones because they're all in the same database it's really easy for these two projects to kind of work together as one so here's what we can do to get a visual of that I can go in here I'm going to turn off my group and sort and I'm going to go ahead and organize these by start date and now I get a visual on the project with the activities interrelated and showing up on the Gantt chart where I want them to so essentially I can work with these two projects as though they're one in this in this fashion now let's dive into some more interesting things the next step we're going to do is we're going to go and create some baselines for these projects so again I'll go up here to maintain baselines I've got my phase a project my phase B so let's go ahead and add in a baseline for project phase a reverse doing a little bit of thinking there it is okay we'll call this call us my initial plan go ahead do the same thing for phase B great those are created next thing to do is to go and assign those baselines to the projects so here in my assigned baseline you'll notice I've got two projects I can choose up here so that's just a little word of warning in case you forget so project a gets the phase a baseline and project B gets the phase B baseline go ahead and assign those now let's check them out on the Gantt chart all I want to do is add in project baseline bars and I also have some milestone bars down here and I know I need to make a little change here and set this to project okay so there's my baselines displayed on the Gantt chart as well I'm going to go ahead and put on my WBS group and sort once again now let's say I make a change to one of these projects let's say I turn turn my re-estimate my design down to five days if I schedule this you not going to be too shocked to see that my baselines move as well there is linkages between these two projects and as I make a change to one it affects the other now here's what's really interesting is what if I choose to just work with one project at a time so let's go and just open up phase a now I just have phase a open the other project is closed how does this work in Primavera what happens if I make changes to a one project how do they get reflected in the other well here's what we'll do we'll take our Commission's and we're going to well you know what we'll make it even simpler let's increase our design to fifteen days go ahead and reschedule this we can see the changes versus the baseline here what happened to project B phase B let's go and check it out to me these are the same dates that we had before when I had changed things down to five days but if I reschedule this project on its own what do you think is going to happen let's find out exactly right if you guessed primavera picks up the changes in the other project even though it's not open automatically so I can control here through the scheduling feature when this project picks up those updates and whatnot so this project gets reflected when it's scheduled based on the other project now this is really very nice functionality to have it's nice that you can control when you hit the schedule button it's nice that you can set a baseline and see how things have shifted and whatnot okay let's open up both projects again so what I want you to start thinking about here is scenarios that you encounter all the time perhaps phase a belongs to a subcontractor so they're off working in their own primavera database with this data and this data comes to you in the form of a nxe our export on a weekly basis perhaps so you can see how you can have your section of the project linked to it and when they send you an updated one you just got to make sure you go into yours open it up schedule and you can see the changes you make sure you do a baseline first so that you recognize where things have changed okay so this is the kind of process we will start thinking about now how do I get a summary of the whole thing how do I get that master project how do I get the summary of the whole project or both projects put together well some nice features in here if I go into my group and sort right off the bat and there is this show grand totals checkbox you'll notice when I turn that on I get this total up here let's go see what that looks like what that does is it actually puts this total bar up at the top in that total bar summarizes both projects for me together okay so I can see 90-day total interestingly enough in this project it matches the same as the phase a so it's easy to get that total bar up at the top by just going in there and turning on show grand totals so if you didn't know about that go play with that I'm going to turn that off though what I'd like to do is I'd like to get have an independent project that summarizes all of these so how do I do that well let's go back to projects here I'm going to quickly whip out a new master project call this master a a I got to pick clever names because I may have similarly named projects already in here and you know what I don't need to go through all that stuff I'm just going to go and click finish so notice I've got my new master a a project created also notice here that it's already open for editing now let's go back into activities ok have a look here my master a project just down here at the bottom how do we get it up at the top well one thing I could do is what we want to do actually is we want to go in here and we want to turn on this sort bands alphabetically now one thing about this is this may sort all your WBS bands alphabetically however for me it's producing the desired result I want it puts the master a project up at the top so that's one way we could do this what's another way let's go explore the other way to do this is actually to use the organizing power of the WBS so if I go into my WBS one new I can see how my projects are listed here and I can use the arrows to organize them any way I want so I want master a phase a phase B I could again reorganize these any way I want I can have them like that if I wanted etcetera so use the arrows over here in the WBS window the work breakdown structure to organize those come back in here here's my master a project and a create a new activity for it I'm going to call it the summary activity some reactivity now if you're not familiar with this activity type called the level of effort this is a great time to go and check out some of the other tutorials we've created especially the one about level of effort activities this is a great time to use a level of effort I want this activity to basically summarize all of design all the way down to close out including the bonuses and whatnot so what I'll do is I'll create a level of effort activity go in here assign a predecessor of design make it a start to start assign in the successor of close out negative finish to finish ok let's go ahead and schedule this keep your eyes on the original duration and these dates up here as I scheduled that's a little bit better that's the result I'm looking for ok so I've got the 15th to June twentieth ninety days and now my master project summarizes the both projects together and I've got the desired result that I'm looking for here go ahead and play with interlinking projects together you're going to get really good at it don't be afraid to mess around in Primavera I'm Michael a pass with another video tutorial hope you enjoyed it folks have a great day

Channel: P6 Consulting Inc. | Oracle Primavera P6 Training

Views: 22,573

Rating: 4.8473282 out of 5

Keywords: Primavera Systems (Business Operation), primavera tutorial, Oracle Database (Software), primavera p6, primavera software

Id: KqQqbQIrtSw

Length: 14min 35sec (875 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 05 2014