Understanding the P6 Date Fields

hi thanks for joining us today for another ki6 training video presented by TEPCO located in Baytown Texas and I am one of the TEPCO trainers and p6 implementation specialists today we're gonna talk about the p6 date fields I've created an example project in p6 with three activities in it and a finished milestone before we get started I just wanted to point out all of the date fields that you can have in the activities view I've added them all as columns here so you can see anticipated start anticipated finish start and finish actual start and finish early and late start and finish plans start and finish and so on at TEPCO we get a lot of calls from our client base asking about certain date fields especially the plans start and plan finish fields because a lot of times they get confused with the baseline so hopefully later in this session I'll be able to clarify what those are I'm gonna scroll over and show you the rest of the date fields here we have remaining early start and finish remaining late start and finish expected finish we have constraint dates so there's primary and secondary constraints there's also suspended resumed dates external early start external late finish and then at the end here I have all of the baseline dates you can have for baselines assigned to a project one is the project baseline and then there are three user baselines that you can use if you weren't aware there is a hint help button I'm in version 15.1 and up here is the hint help button so I'm gonna turn that on for a second and if I hover above any of the date fields it's going to display the definition of those fields so that can come in handy if you're a little uncertain about what the date field is supposed to be showing in addition to the date fields that are in the activities view there are actually a few more date fields in the project's view so I'm gonna go over there now and I've brought those into my view I haven't brought all of them in but I brought the primary ones that I want to talk about project plans start I must finish by there's a scheduled finish start and finish date fields the data date but there's also these fields called anticipated start and finish and a forecast start and finish I'm going to start off by showing you the anticipated start and finish fields I'm currently in the p6 projects view and I've selected a project up above and I've also selected the dates tab down below in the dates tab on the right hand side there are fields for anticipated start and anticipated finish these fields can also be added to the table up above the anticipated start field and anticipated finish fields don't actually do anything they're not calculated off of anything if you enter dates into these fields they do not calculate anything else they're basically like a user-defined field you can add dates here if you want to at TEPCO we recommend just leaving them blanks so that they don't cause any confusion for upper level management reporting however if you do choose to use the anticipated date fields I'm going to show you what the result is in the activities view so here in the project's view I'm just gonna randomly select some anticipated dates and I'm gonna move over to the activities view notice how the anticipated start field and the anticipated finish fields have populated however they have populated with the dates that I have signed at the project level so these dates here do not have anything to do with the actual activity scheduled dates over here is the start and finish fields which show my current scheduled dates they are completely out of sync with what I put in for the anticipated start and anticipated finish that's another reason why we recommend not using the anticipated fields because if you were to bring these into the activities view it could be very misleading if you run a reports and upper management sees this report and then they have to question you about the dates now let's talk about the forecast start date and forecast finish date fields these are alternative date fields that you can use for manually leveling resources however they are only available in the projects view or at the WBS level they are not available on activities also be aware that using the forecast start date and forecast finish date fields does not cause any calculations of any other date fields in p6 they are primarily used in the tracking view or a resource analysis view to do high-level long term forecasting of projects another thing to be aware of is that in order to utilize these fields you have to make a change in your user preferences so I'm going to go up to edit and then user preferences and under the resource analysis tab you'll see time distributed data in the resource usage profile and spreadsheet displayed to Heim distributed remaining early data using remaining early dates or forecast dates typically we use remaining early dates but in order to utilize this functionality you need to switch this over to forecast dates to show you how this works I'm going to go to the tracking view for the example I've set up three projects called forecast one two and three and I'm going to go over to the tracking view which is this button right here and I'm also going to highlight all three of those projects in the left-hand side and you'll see them display over here in the middle pane and I'm gonna double click to get my Gantt brought over I'm going to right click in the tracking view Gantt and go to bars and I'm going to show you the bars that are currently showing first one is project current work and the second one is called a forecast bar the forecast bar is in orange and the current project work is in blue what I can do now is I can actually grab the orange forecast bar and I can click and drag it and when I click and drag it you can see the results on the resource profile down below and how the work has leveled out now I have the limit lines showing down below which is in black there's also this pink line which is actually showing the available units so as I move things around it is recalculating the available units that could be utilized for that resource so as I move things around I'll do it to the second one here and you can see things level out down below here I mentioned that this functionality could be used for long term forecast planning I've actually only used it with one client and they were doing a five-year look ahead forecasts of projects that they were going to be doing they used this view to level out the project data but be aware that this is not a permanent change if I actually wanted to retain these results I would have to go back to the projects view and reset my project plan start dates to match what I have currently set for my forecast dates the other thing to be aware of is that everything that I just did here can be reset back to normal by using this button right here I can click that and it brings everything back and the forecast dates match the currently scheduled dates now a lot of times when we're executing projects schedulers are asked what is the forecast finish or what's the forecasted start we want to make sure that we are not confusing that question with these date fields for forecast start date and forecast finish date because the functionality in p6 is to do more high-level future planning and it is not actually displaying the forecasted start or finish of a maintenance outage or a project so we want to make sure that we're clear on that it's probably best to not show these fields in any of your views unless you are specifically doing like a three to five year look ahead and leveling and forecasting of projects that are coming down the pipeline let's about a few of the other date fields at the project level we'll start with the project plan start date this is the date that's defined when you create a new project so when you add a project in the wizard starts it's going to ask you when the planned project start date is this is actually your system date by default unless you change it usually I like to set this to be the actual start date of the project you may want to change this because if your project gets moved say 3 months out or 6 months out you probably want to change this date as well to have it in sync with when your activities are going to start the reason I say that is because there are a lot of views where we look at time distributed data and you can tell the time distributed report to feed off of the planned start date at the project level to give a quick example of where you would see this I'm going to go to print preview and I'm going to go to page setup and I'll go over to the options tab if I'm running a time distributed report I have a time scale start and a time scale finish notice how this says PS in there if I hit the ellipses I have some options here PS PF for project finish the data date so if I want this report to be able to work on any project that I open and start at the project start date then I need to set this as PS but I also need to make sure that my project start is correct because if it's not correct you may run into a situation where you run the report but you have numerous blank pages to the left side of the report on the time distributed part of the report and that is probably a result of your project plan start date not being correct I try to keep the project plan start date in sync with when my first set of activities are going to start at the project level there is also a must finish by date field this is actually a constraint that is applied at the project level at TEPCO we recommend never filling this field in we like to manage our finish dates or our constraints for our finish dates with milestones in the activities view the reason we avoid using it here is because if the project gets moved for some reason and we don't reassure I that means a constraint can be hidden against that project and we won't see it in the activities view but all of our activities turn critical because they're putting pressure on a must finish by constraint at the project level that is no longer valid we find that it's much more beneficial just to manage our constraint dates in the activities view typically on milestones if we follow the general definition of a project where we have a define start and a define finish it's good to set up a start milestone for your project and a finish milestone for the project and then manage the constraints off of that all of your activities should eventually through the activity networks feed into that final finish milestone so you can call the project complete the scheduled finish field defines the early finish date of the last activity in your schedule so if you do have a finish milestone in your schedule this should match that finish milestone it should also typically match the calculated finish date of the activities which is this column over here however if you are leveling it's possible that your finish field will level out and actually exceed the scheduled finish because the scheduled finish is always the early finish of the last activity and when you level the leveled finish can be different from the early finish the start date field at the project level populates based on the date of the first activity that you have in your project schedule this can be different from the project plans start because the project plans start is manually set either here in the column or down in the dates tab on your project plan start the start field is the actual scheduled start time for the first activity that you have built in the activity's view this is where you want to keep the start field here in sync with the project plan start so right now my project plan Start is set for June 18th but my start of the activities is June 23rd I may want to change my project plans start to move it forward a little bit to say June 22nd or possibly June 23rd to be right in sync with the start of the first activity the finish filled at the project level will reflect the finish of the latest activity it's typically the early finish date unless you are leveling if you do level it's possible that that date will push out so I'm gonna go ahead and level this schedule which only has three activities in it and you'll see that the date has pushed out based on leveling the data day reflects the time that you have recorded progress up to and has moved each time you perform a progress update any activities that are completed would be to the left of the data date any impress activities would have an actual start to the left of the data date but the remainder of the in progress activity could be to the right of the data date and then future remaining work is scheduled to the right of the data date if you are progressing a single project file in p6 you can hit the schedule button or hit f9 and you can adjust the data date and move it forward in this field here if you are using multiple projects you need to adjust the data dates in the projects view as shown here I may need to update and move forward the data date on multiple projects reason being is if I try to schedule and I have multiple projects open the current data date field becomes greyed out and you are not able to edit it in the schedule dialog box let's move on to the date fields that are in the activities view the two most common date fields to use in the activities view are the fields called start and finish this is because these date fields reflect other date fields by default they reflect the early start and early finish dates however if I apply an actual as I'll show here it will reflect the actual start date so now it has changed from reflecting the early start to the actual start and same with the finish it now reflects the actual finish date rather than the early finish date the start and finish fields will also reflect constraint dates so in this example I'm going to put a start on constraint on it and it will now reflect the start on constraint that's signified by an asterisk being in the date field if I change the start on constraint to another date I have to schedule first to see the results and you'll see now that the date reflects the June 25th date which is what I applied the constraint for if the constraint date is unsatisfied for example if the data date has now moved ahead and exceeded the constraint date the start field will then take over and start reflecting the early start again so you can see here that I've moved the data data head to June 30th and that's when the activity can now start because it's been rescheduled but my constraint date down here is still set to June 25th this of course would cause negative float if you are using the p6 leveling functionality the start and finish fields will reflect the level dates after you level in this example I have three activities they are not linked to each other but they are linked to the finish milestone and I'm telling p6 to level within total float in other words when we tell it to level within total float it will only level up to this milestone and will not push the milestone I have a single scaffold resource assigned I have them intentionally overloaded here so these three activities cannot be conducted in parallel like this they have to be somewhat sequential and instead of linking them together I'm going to level it so I come up and hit the level button I am leveling resources only within the total float and I'm telling the leveler to preserve the scheduled early in late dates this means that when I do level my early and late dates are going to stay as the scheduled dates the level dates will be reflected in the start and finish date fields so let's go ahead and level you can see all three activities have now levelled out my resource over-allocation has been cleared up again these activities are not linked to each other we just let P 6 move the activities out based on priorities that I've preset in order to level the resource loadout but you can see here in start in Finnish fields that these actually now reflect the level dates they are no longer the early starts or finishes I've rescheduled the project to take the leveling off and by the way leveling is never a permanent change to the schedule you can always reschedule the project and set it back to the way it was so there is never any danger in leveling a project if you want more information on leveling we do have a video out or that so please review our video on leveling in p6 but I do want to point out right now one other thing regarding leveling I'm gonna go to the leveling window and this time I'm going to tell it to not level within the total float so I'm going to take this off and I'm also going to tell it to not preserve the schedule early in lay dates and I'm gonna hit the level button now the start and finish fields still reflect the level dates but notice how the early start and early finish date fields now actually also reflect the level dates they no longer reflect the scheduled dates I'm gonna go back to the leveling window and I'm going to turn it back on to preserve the early and late dates and I'm gonna go ahead and level and now you'll see that the early start and early finish and late start and late finish dates have now reflected the actual scheduled early start and early finish late start and late finish dates these start and finish fields still reflect the level dates leveling within total float just ensures that p6 will only delay activities if the activities have the float available to be pushed out to the right in order to accommodate resource overloads also while on the subject of leveling I want to point out the float fields you've probably commonly use the total flow to identify how much float or slack you have before an activity becomes critical or impacts your finish date but a lot of people question what the remaining float is the remaining float actually reflects the amount of float available after leveling activities in this case I have the three activities leveled out and you'll see that the first activity now shows 20 hours of remaining float so that's the float available between activity 1 and the finish milestone but the second activity has leveled out so some of the remaining float has gone away and now it only has 10 hours of remaining float the third activity has pushed out the farthest and it's actually bumped up against the finish milestone which shows zero remaining float I'm going to talk a little bit about total float in the next section when we talk about the early and late dates but I'll point out right now that the total float is still reflecting the float available based on the early finish and the late finish and the difference between those two dates one of the primary fundamentals of critical path methodology or CPM scheduling is an understanding of the early dates and the late dates when we add new activities to p6 by default they try to get pulled over to the left to the data date the only thing that would keep them off of the data date is if the calendar associated with the activities was not in line with the data date so let's say the data date is at 6 a.m. but the calendar start time for the activity is at 8 a.m. this means the activities would actually fall or schedule their early starts at 8 a.m. when newer activities are added we then apply logic ties between the activities or constraints to tell p6 that the activities need to be worked in a certain order or on a certain date in this example I have three activities and I also have the finish milestone currently the activities are not linked so I'm going to go ahead and link these activities finish to start and I'm also gonna link them to the finish milestone now I need a schedule to see the results and you can see now that the activities have scheduled out based on the logic ties that I've made when we tailpiece 6 to schedule the activities it does this in two passes the first one is called a forward pass where it moves from left to right over the activities and identifies the early start dates and the early finish dates after that's completed does a backward pass which basically starts at the right side of the last activity and moves to the left to identify the late start and late finish dates in this example I have a constraint set to june 25th for my finish milestone I'm gonna change that constraint and move it out a few days and I'm gonna reschedule and you'll see now that the finished milestone has moved out in this example p6 did a forward pass and it calculated the early start and early finish dates so on activity 1 the early start is going to be June 23rd at 7 a.m. and the finish is going to be June 23rd at 5:00 p.m. the next activity is on a day shift only calendar and it will start on the 24th and finish on the 24 and the third one will start on the 25th and finish on the 25th when it did the backward pass it moved from right to left back from the finish milestone to figure out how late can these activities actually start and finish before impacting or meeting the end of the project file so in this example the late start has calculated as June 25th and the late finish is also June 25th at 5:00 p.m. and the second activity calculated for June 26th and the latest it can finish is June 26 at 5:00 p.m. and the third activity has calculated as June 30th and the latest it can finish is June 30th at 5:00 p.m. so what it's done is in the background it has figured out how far to the right can these activities slide before they impact the finish milestone and it calculated those dates based off of that now once the early dates and the late dates are calculated p6 can use those dates to identify how much float is available by default p6 uses the early finish and the late finish and the difference between the two of those to identify the float so between the early finish of June 23rd at 1700 and the late finish of June 25th at 1700 on the first activity there is 20 hours of float available I mentioned by default that p6 uses the difference between the early finish and the late finish to calculate the float you can change this in your schedule settings although using the late inish versus the early finish rather than using the start dates is probably more common but if you go to your schedule window and you click on options down at the bottom there is a drop-down that says compute total float as and it says finish float equals late finish minus the early finish if you want to change that you can change it to the start float which means it's the late start minus the early start or you can tell it to calculate or use the smallest of the start float and the finish float I'm going to give an example that should help clarify the difference between the early finish and the late finish and how it calculates float let's say that I have to mow my lawn and it's Saturday morning and I the weather and the weatherman says that it's going to start raining at noon and since the weatherman is always right I need to make sure I get my lawn mowed by noon now it's gonna take me one hour to mow my lawn and it's eight o'clock in the morning right now if I start mowing the lawn right now at 8 o'clock in the morning I'll be done by 9:00 so my early start would be 8 a.m. and my early finish would be 9 a.m. but since it's gonna rain at noon what is my late start and my late finish well what is the latest that I can start mowing the lawn to ensure that I get it done by noon that would be 11 a.m. so if I start mowing the lawn at 11 a.m. I should be able to get done by noon so the late finish would end up being noon now the difference between the early finish which is 9 a.m. and the late finish which is noon is 3 hours so I have three hours of float the actual start in actual finish fields are the fields we use to identify when an activity has actually started and when it has actually finished now the actual start and finish fields can be automatically populated by marking an activity as started or finished so in this example and when a market is started and then I will mark it as finished it takes on whatever the scheduled dates currently were which would be identical to what is in the start date field and the finish date field also I can mark an activity as started or finished by simply selecting inside the actual start or actual finish field so in this case on activity 2 I'm going to set an actual start if it's not finished I need to either put in a percent complete for the activity or a remaining duration the remaining duration and the percent complete field for duration percent complete are linked to each other so by adjusting one of those fields the other one will automatically adjust so if you watch the remaining field on the left hand side when I put in 50 percent of the duration is complete you see the remaining field now drops down to 5 once the update cycle is complete I need to schedule and move the data date ahead so I'm going to go ahead and move my data data head one day and schedule it p6 will now use that to identify how much remaining duration is required or is left to do which is also linked through the other activities so this is really the fundamental of what we do scheduling for is to identify are we ahead of schedule or behind schedule are we making enough progress or are we not it's important to ensure that you do not have actual dates that are greater than the data date once your update cycle is complete so for example if I mark this third activity as started and finished you can see that I have now a progress to fully completed activity that is to the right side of the data date now part of my update procedure would be to move the data data head at this point but once I do that I always check for any actual dates that are greater than the data date it means that I need to back those dates up to be to the left of the data date and give a more accurate representation of when the activity was completed I mentioned earlier that the start date field in the finish date field will reflect any actual starts or actual finishes so in this example I do have an actual start and actual finish on the first activity and you'll see that the start and finish fields also reflect that on the second activity I only have an actual start so it's in progress you'll see that the second activity for the start column has an A in it but the finish column does not and then the third activity is also fully completed or closed out so it has a Zinn both the start and finish fields keep in mind that if you do use these two fields which are the most common fields to use and you decide you want to copy and paste this data to excel because there is an A inside the cell Excel is going to treat that as a text cell rather than a date cell so you may need to remove the A's once you get those pasted into Excel or you may want to just capture or paste in the actual start and actual finish and then possibly the early start and early finish for work that is not in progress there are four date fields that start with the word remaining so we have remaining early start remaining early finish remaining late start and remaining late finish I have brought the early start early finish late start and late finish fields back into this view so you can see the difference between the two of them the remaining early start and remaining early finish along with the remaining late start and remaining late finish for an activity that has not been progressed those dates will be the same as the early start dates early finish late start and late finish these four dates over here will reflect these four dates over here if you are leveling the remaining date fields will reflect the level dates in this example which is the same example I have used earlier for leveling I'm going to level this I am leveling and I'm preserving the schedule early in late dates and I'm leveling only within total float and you'll see that the activities have leveled out they are not linked to each other but look at the difference between the remaining date fields and the other date fields for early start early finish late start and late finish these four date fields still reflect the scheduled forward and backward past dates whereas the remaining date fields reflect the level dates I want to quickly point out what happens when activities are done out of sequence in this example I have it set up to use retain logic as my schedule setting this means that even though activity two has started prior to activity one and it was not scheduled to happen that way p6 is saying that it will not let us continue on the rest of activity two until activity one has been completed notice how the remaining early start now reflects when the second activity can continue its work so it is reflecting when the work is expected to start back up I also want to point out that the early start field is reflecting the remaining early start watch out in previous versions of p6 it did not work this way the early start field did not reflect the remaining early start and if you were doing look-ahead reports off of the data date you actually had to use the remaining early start if you wanted it to show activities where they were going to start again within the next 72 hours or something like that you had to use the remaining early start field in your filter criteria instead of the early start but in later versions of p6 this has been changed so now we can use either one of them I'm gonna go scheduled this again but I'm gonna change my schedule settings to show progress override so here we have an option when we have out of sequence activities if we're going to use retain logic progress override or actual dates I'm not going to get into too much detail on the difference between the three of those the one tepco recommends is to use retain logic but we're going to be putting out another video shortly that explains three of these in depth but I am going to change this to progress override and I'm gonna go ahead and schedule and what that does is it tells p6 to basically ignore this link right here a lot of people like to use it that way they figure well if we're running out of sequence like that we can run them in parallel the argument against using progress override is that the activities are now in parallel and if they were using the same resource now you may have a resource overload if you're using the leveling functionality it would override that and actually correct the resource overload in most cases what is usually misunderstood about using progress override rather than retain logic is that even though I have a link between activity 1 and activity two the float on activity 1 is now treated as if it has an open end as if the link doesn't even exist so now there will be a lot more float on this activity the amount of float that it would take to finish activity 1 all the way out to the finish milestone constraint that's one of the reasons that we recommend not using progress override is because the float that is reflected on that activity will not be valid now back to the remaining early start calculation when using progress override you can see that the remaining early start now is actually the data date so this work can begin immediately it doesn't have to wait for active one to complete an expected finish date as a date you can apply to tell p6 that you do expect the activity to finish on a certain date in order to utilize these dates when scheduling you have to go to your schedule window into the options and you have to turn on the check box to use expected finish dates I've inserted an activity here and I'm gonna go ahead and use the expected finish date on it first I'm gonna mark the activity has started notice that the activity is 40 hours in duration and I'm going to come in and I'm gonna set an expected finish date I'm actually going to set the expected finish date to be identical to what the currently scheduled finish is to indicate that we're basically on schedule now when I click in here notice that my finish date is for June 26 of 2014 this is actually in the past my data date is back a couple years but when I click in the expected finish field be aware that the date that it brings up is for 2016 so I'm gonna need to back this up and we'll choose June 26 and I'll go ahead and to be identical make it 1700 because I am scheduling in hours now I've applied the expected finish date when I scheduled if I went through a reporting cycle and let's say in this example that it's daily I would move my data data up into the 24th so one day ahead and I'm gonna schedule now what has happened here is I did not give it a remaining duration I did not enter a duration percent complete p6 automatically calculated those for me because I have this expected finish applied if I did not have that applied the activity would have moved ahead and I would continue to show 40 hours of remaining duration but it automatically subtracted 10 hours of the duration so now I only have 30 which also calculated that my duration percent complete is 25 I'm going to continue to move the data date ahead and I'll move it up one day again to the 25th and scheduled and you'll see that the data date has moved ahead but my expected finish date is still holding so P six is basically progressing this activity on schedule for me and if I continue to do this I'll move it to the 26th now it will continue to schedule for me and automatically progress the activity once I exceed and my data date goes beyond to the expected finish date which I will do in this example I'm going to go ahead and set my dad a date for the 30th notice how the duration % complete is a hundred percent I have 0 remaining durations so it has actually scheduled the activity as if it was on schedule and meeting its schedule that entire time each time I did an update cycle but you need to be aware that it did not mark the activity as finished this is a good thing I don't want p6 just to go in progress in activity and then mark it as completed we need to take control of that and ensure and gets information from the field or from the project team to ensure that that activity is actually completed using expected finish dates can be beneficial for project activities where they are impossibly long duration activities I typically support downstream and upstream outages in the oil and gas industry so turnarounds our turnarounds are typically scheduled in hours and and much smaller duration activities I wouldn't use an expected finish for turnaround scheduling but for longer duration activities on longer duration projects you may find this beneficial just be aware that p6 does update or progress the activity on its own the benefit is that it will not actually mark the activity as finished automatically you still have to come in eventually and with the finish checkbox on it and set the actual finish date activity constraints give you a way to impose dates on activities for specific reasons for example downstream and upstream unit outages or turnarounds are typically done within a certain window or a certain time frame and typically the start of the maintenance outage pre-defined as well as when they want the maintenance outage completed by in which case we put in milestones a start milestone and a finish milestone and we'll typically put constraints on those to lock those into place that helps us identify the window that we need to stay within in order to perform the work anytime you impose a constraint on an activity you have to identify the constraint date with the exception of one type of constraint and that's called an as late as possible constraint so if I hit the drop down down below here on this activity for the primary constraint you can see there's one called as late as possible and as late as possible constraint basically takes the activity and moves it to the right as far as it can until it bumps into its successor basically it removes the float from the activity all other constraints require a date associated with them so if you select any of the other constraints you need to make sure that you apply the date that you want to constrain the activity to there's different types of constraints I'm not going to go into them in detail but there start on start on or after finish on finish on or before are very common there's also two constraints that start with the word mandatory mandatory started mandatory finish at TEPCO we recommend not using those ever because if an activity network is set up as predecessors to that constraint so let's say that I put a mandatory finish milestone constraint on the entire project if my activity networker my critical path starts getting delayed and pushes into that milestone the network will actually go over the top of the milestone and the milestone will not be pushed it locks it in place the only way mandatory start or mandatory finish constraint can get pushed is when the data date finally actually comes up to it and puts pressure on it or pushes it out it can be a little misleading to use those two types of constraints because the activity network could be showing as very far behind but if you just ran a report on say a milestone with a mandatory finish constraint on it it could imply or look like everything is on target when it's really not now an activity can have two kinds of constraints you can have a prime and the secondary the primary constraint is most commonly used and I'll give an example of that here I'm going to apply a start on or after constraint to this activity and I'm going to go ahead and move it out a couple of days now I'm not gonna see the results of that constraint on here until I actually schedule so I'm gonna hit the schedule button and now you'll see that the activity has moved out in this example I brought back the finished milestone and I've also put a constraint on the finished milestone a finish on constraint for July 28th I've scheduled it and I've linked it to this new activity that I have here called activity with constraints and you can see that I have a total float of 150 hour based on the constraint date a primary constraint date of June 25th this activity has a hundred and fifty hours of float you can apply secondary constraints to an activity so I'm gonna do that now I'm gonna say that this has to finish on or before and let's say July 14th so to summarize I'm telling it that the activity has to start on or after June 25th but it also needs to finish on or before July 14th which is ahead of the finish milestone which is constrained for July 28th now watch what happens to the float when I schedule this the total float has now reduced to 70 hours this is because this activity's float is now being calculated based off of this secondary constraint that I have applied the free float on the activity is still calculating as a hundred and fifty hours because it has a hundred and fifty hours of free float until it impacts our finish milestone it only has seventy hours of float before it impacts our secondary constraint secondary constraints are not widely used but they are available if you do need to put a second constraint on an activity p6 has the ability to suspend or stop work on an activity and then also identify when the work is going to begin again or zooom work on the activity the fields are called suspend date and resume date you can use them in the columns or they also exist in the status tab in order to suspend an activity the activity has to be in progress so I'm going to go ahead and mark this activity is started and I'm gonna go ahead and give it a percent complete of 25 and I'm gonna schedule and move the data data head one day now that we've entered the progress it's possible that the work had to stop for some reason the suspend date has become available previously to updating the progress on it the suspend field was grayed out so I'm going to tell the activity to suspend or stop work and we'll go ahead and tell it to stop work as of e24 at 7:00 a.m. which is basically the data date now I can tell it when I want the work to resume or when I expect the work to resume and I can set this date here I'll move that out to the 30th now to see the results I have to schedule again now you will see a gap in between when the activity last stopped its progress versus when it's expected to resume work again I also want to point out that the early start and the remaining early start fields now reflect the resume date if you need to stop work on an activity and then identify when the activity will begin working again you can use the suspend and resume dates another way of looking at it is you are applying a resume constraint or a constraint to start work on an impress activity that's really the basic definition of it you are applying a constraint on an in progress activity on the remaining work of that in progress activity now we're going to talk about date fields called external early start and external late finish for this example I've set up three separate projects called external one external to an external three and I've added one activity to each of them and what I'm going to do now is link all of these activities together finish to start sequential II and then I'm going to schedule to see the results now technically each activity has an external link to an outside project plan because these are three separate projects if I look at the external two activity and the relationships tab you can see that it's linked to the external one project also as a successor it's linked to the external three project to get a better understanding of how these fields populate I'm going to run a little exercise here I'm gonna take the external two project and export it so I'm going to go over to my projects view I'm only going to open the external two project and I'm gonna do a file export and I'll export it in xcr format and I'm gonna save this out to my desktop and call it external test now I'm going to delete the external two project I'm also going to go and open external one and external three together back to the activities view I have now only shown the external one activity and the external three activity because the external two activity has been deleted I'm going to go ahead and schedule this notice still the external date fields have not populated with anything now I'm going to import the external two project back into the database so I'm go to file import and I'm going to choose the external tests that I saved on my desktop and go all the way through the wizard with the defaults and hit finish notice how when I brought the external two project in it relinked itself to the external one project and the colonel three projects so if I schedule again we'll see the results of that and we'll see how the activities were sequentially linked and they have scheduled out accordingly now for the next exercise I'm going to go and delete all three of the external projects now that they're deleted I'm going to re-import the external two project so only the external two project exists now and it's from an import file when I go back to the activities view notice how the external early start date and the external late finish date is now populated also notice when I have the activity selected that the relationships no longer exist so it's not trying to reference the external one project as a predecessor or the external three project as a successor now since there are no relationships tied to external activity number two if I schedule right now we would expect the activity to actually move to the left to the data date so I'm gonna go ahead and schedule notice how it does not move this is because when we imported the file p6 knew that they were supposed to be relationships there but saw that they no longer existed so what it did is it populated the external early start date field and the external late finish date field to accommodate for those relationships that are lost almost like applying a constraint a hidden constraint in the background to keep the activity locked into place based on what it used to be linked to now this situation can result if you have multiple projects in your system that are cross linked to each other but you export one and you export it for the purposes of sending it to one of your clients or to one of your contractors for them to review but they are not getting the external links to the other projects because you did not export those projects with it so p6 automatically populates the external early start and the external late finish Fields to accommodate for that the problem is is that the person that is receiving the export if they import it into their database and those links cannot be retied because the other two projects do not exist these fields populate and it forces in this case the activity to remain stuck out here to the right and basically constrained for may 30th so what happens is as they go and schedule it in their system and the activity doesn't move they may not be very familiar with how these external date fields work so the first thing they do is they go in to the status tab they start looking for constraints on the activity and they find out that there isn't any constraints then they might ask well maybe my calendars are messed up and I don't have calendar work time for this in this case for the time before this on the left hand side of the activity so they check their calendars and they find out that the calendars are ok as well then they go and look at the relationships and they see that there's not even any relationships tied to that activity so they don't understand why this activity is not moving to the left when they hit the schedule button there is nothing that they can see that would cause the activity to sit out there like that so schedulers need to understand that if they are using importing or exporting this can happen if you have cross project links and you are not exporting the external projects with it in other words if I wanted this to be resolved I should have exported all three projects together for a scheduler to fix this if they did want this to get released they need to come in here to the external date fields and they need to clear them now when I scheduled the activity moves to the left and it does a normal forward and backward pass on the activity and it schedules it properly if you ever run into a situation where your activities are not scheduling the way you would expect them to and you don't have constraints applied the relationships are not an issue the calendar work time is not an issue check these external date fields because they may be populated I've run into this numerous times where I would have my Gantt chart showing a path of activities or a sequence of activities where the first 20 activities in the path were positive float and they were green on the Gantt chart but all of a sudden we get down to activity 21 and the path turns red for no reason what was discovered is that the remainder of that work was imported from a contractor from an external source and it had an external link on it in the previous system but we didn't have that external link in our system the import process automatically populated an external early start date on it and that caused the path towards the tail end of this path that I was working with to turn red and show negative float and go critical because the external early start date was putting pressure on that path as if it was a constraint also be aware that p6 will not let you manually enter a date in these field and it is a little bit misleading because I can click on the ellipses inside the field I could go select a date but it won't populate you could even try to copy and paste from another field and p6 will not allow it in there these fields only populate due to importing and exporting of data that has cross project links where the cross project links are lost or deleted because the external project is not included in the export or the import the plans start and plant finish fields are probably the two most misunderstood fields in p6 they're most likely misunderstood because a lot of people associate them with baseline dates they are not the same as what we call the p6 baseline dates that you see over here on the right hand side for BL project start or BL project finish or be l1 start and finish by default the plan starred in plan finished date fields will equal the activity start and finish date fields but they change when you mark an activity as started notice here how the start for activity number one is June 23rd and it's also expected to finish on June 23rd and the plan Start is the same June 23rd at 7 a.m. and the finish is June 23rd watch what happens when I mark the activity has started the dates will stay the same for the moment but now I'm going to schedule it and I'm not going to put any percent complete against it so I've marked it as started and I'm gonna schedule it and move it ahead one day the data date now my plans start in planned finish fields have locked down but my current start actual start there and my scheduled finish have changed and I can actually change the current start to another date and when I do that you will not see the plans start or plan finish fields of change so the rule here is once you mark an activity has started once I hit the started checkbox these two date fields lock down the other thing you need to be clear about is that the activities that we did not mark is started have moved forward because we rescheduled and move the data date forward the plans start and planned finish for activity to inactivity 3 still equals the start and finish the scheduled start and finish for activity to inactivity 3 if I mark activity 2 as started and I could change the date on this if I want to and I could move the data date ahead and I could even give it some percentage here I'll give it 50% and I'll go ahead and schedule and I'm gonna move the data date ahead one day again the planned start and planned finish have locked down but they locked down in accordance with how the activity was scheduled before I actually marked it as started another way to look at it is that once I mark an activity has started he six takes a baseline of that one activity with the dates of where it is currently scheduled at think of it that way once I mark it as started p6 is quickly snapping a baseline on that one act and by the way that concept also applies to the durations like the original duration field along with the budgeted labor units versus the Act completion labor units because on an activity that has not been started when you make a change to the duration on it like I'll change this one to 20 notice how the act completion changes to 20 and if I make a change to the budgeted labor units I'll make that 40 notice how the Act completion labor units change and vice versa if I changed the Act completion labor units to 30 the budgeted changes or if I change the Act completion duration back to 10 the original duration changes but watch what happens to those fields once I mark activity 3 has started now I could come in and change the original duration I'll change this to 15 it does nothing to my ACT complete and if I change my act complete it does nothing to the original so these two fields the original and the a completion have been disconnected from each other once I mark the activity has started same with the labor units the budgeted labor units field and the a completion labor units fields have been disconnected from each other well when the activity is not started I'll go ahead and deep progress this activity notice how they resync back to what the budget it is so now the ACT completion for both the duration and for the labor units has reverted back to what the current budget it is keep in mind that the plans start and planned finish fields are not the baseline start and baseline finish fields they can be related in a sense and I'm going to explain that when I start talking about the baseline project start in the baseline project finish in the next section of this video the plans start employing finished fields really probably should not be used for anything if you are maintaining a baseline against the project the plans start and plan finish don't add any value for any type of reporting if anything that caused more confusion sometimes I get question why p6 even have those fields in there the only explanation I have is this I'm gonna go up to project and I'm gonna go to assign baselines now I have not created a baseline for this project yet notice how the project baseline says current project and the user primary baseline says current project p6 always has to be looking at some sort of baseline data so by default it looks at itself until we create a new baseline and assign that new baseline so using itself as the current project baseline and in order to use itself as the current project baseline it references the planned fields the plans start and planned finish along with the original duration and along with the budgeted units fields I consider it a type of poor-man's baseline he six is still calculating earned value and baseline data even though you do not have a baseline created now let's talk about baseline dates the baseline project started in baseline project finish the actual baseline date fields start with BL you want to make sure that you understand that and that you're not getting those confused with the plan start and planned finish that I talked about previously you can have four baselines in P six I'm gonna go up to project assign baselines and if I had created four different baselines I would see them here in the drop down list and I can assign a project baseline which everybody sees so any other p6 users that log in to this project if you have assigned a project baseline to it that is the baseline they will see there's also three user baselines there is a primary a secondary in a tertiary in TEPCO we recommend having two baselines at least on the project turnaround executions that we do the first baseline can include any added work because during the execution of a maintenance outage or a turnaround we find discovery work and we need to add that to the baseline there are schedulers that disagree with that concept but you have to have the activities or the new hours added to the baseline if you want to calculate earned value for them we also recommend having another baseline which is the original untouched baseline and we typically assign that as the user primary baseline and I rarely use the secondary or tertiary now I'm mainly gonna stay focused on the BL project start in the BL project finish because the BL one which is the user baseline one and BL one finish which is also from the user baseline these are all the user baselines and I did bring the fields in here but I'm really not going to do anything with those because if you understand the concepts of the BL project baseline the other three user baselines apply in the same manner when we create baselines there is an admin preference that needs to be understood and basically this admin preference defines which date fields inside a baseline the current project is supposed to reference to better explain I'm gonna mark this activity as started now remember when I mark it as started the plan started playing finish fields lock down and they become disconnected from my currently scheduled start and finish I'm also going to schedule now and move the data date ahead one day so you can see the results on the Gantt chart notice how if this is a baseline bar that this baseline bar is back here but the rest of the work that's scheduled out the baseline bars stayed in sync and the baseline bars moved with those activities that is because of what I was talking about earlier regarding the planned start and planned finish fields we don't have a baseline created right now p6 is looking at itself as the baseline so if I go up to assign baselines you can see the project baseline is the current project because of this p6 is referencing the planned start and planned finished date fields as the baseline and that's why these bars are also right now reflecting the plans started and planned finish fields if I create an actual baseline right now off of my current dates the way the schedule is right now we would expect the baseline to reflect the yellow bars to be in with no variance against the current bars in other words if I were to create a baseline right now a brand new baseline we would expect this yellow bar in the baseline to actually run the full duration of this activity this is where we need to understand the admin preferences so I'm going to go to the admin menu and then to admin preferences under the earned value tab in the admin Preferences window at the bottom there is a spot called earned value calculations and it says when calculating earned value from a baseline use budgeted values with planned dates the other options are at completion values with current dates or budgeted values with current dates so these two right here will reflect or look at the current dates in the baseline but the one that comes with P six out of the box as the default is budgeted values with planned dates I'm gonna leave that there for now and I'm going to go up to project maintain baselines and I'm gonna add a baseline I'm gonna save a copy of the current project as the baseline and that's done now I'm gonna go assign the baseline as the project baseline so I come in here and I go to the project baseline drop down I make sure I select this baseline right here which is the one I just created watch the Gantt chart notice how the yellow bars have not changed they are still reflecting the plan dates from over here but they're not actually reflecting these plan dates of the current schedule they're reflecting the plan starting plan finished date fields inside the baseline schedule which is stored in the background this can be confusing because when people want to create a baseline they expect there to not be any variance and I brought in the variance for the project baseline finish date field here and you can see that I'm ten hours behind on that one so this is a little bit misleading because when we create a new baseline we expect there to not be any variance and that we want a baseline with whatever the current scheduled dates are I'm gonna go back up to the admin menu to admin preferences and I'm gonna change this and let's use add completion values with current dates watch the Gantt chart again when I close this notice how I did not change this is because you have to have the admin preference for this set in place before you actually create the baseline you cannot create a baseline and then toggle or change that afterwards so what I'm going to do now I've already gone to admin preferences and I've made sure that this is now showing at completion values with current dates I'm going to create a new baseline so I'm gonna go up to project maintain baselines and I'm gonna go ahead and label this as old just so we don't get confused and I'm gonna add a new baseline I'm still gonna save a copy of the current project as the baseline and that's going to be now be - I'm gonna close this now I need to go assign that new baseline so I'm going to go up to project assign baselines and I'm gonna change this one to the new one that I created which is the one with b2 on it watch what happens to the Gantt chart now I have created a baseline with zero variance and it is baseline based on the current start and finish dates rather than the plan start and finish that were on the activity so to summarize planned dates and baseline dates the plans start and planned finish fields lockdown or disconnect from the current start and the current finish fields once we mark an activity is started the second I mark an activity is started these two fields disconnect if you have marked activities as started or finished and then you're gonna create a baseline after you've already entered some progress or if you need to rebase line you need to have a clear understanding of the admin preferences so if I go back to admin preferences I need to make sure that I understand under the earned value tab this setting right here because if it's set to the bottom one which is budgeted values with planned dates the baseline data is going to look at the plan date fields in the baseline which were derived from the current project planned date fields which may not be in sync with the current schedule because we have entered progress and we have marked the started checkbox on some activities so if you want a zero variance baseline any time you create a new baseline you need to choose a completion values with current dates you can also use budgeted values with current dates but the budgeted values that is related to hours so if you have increased or decreased hours you might be best just using act completion values with current dates the main thing to understand here is that this setting has to be in place before you create a baseline you cannot create a baseline and then change this setting so you want to make sure that when you implement p6 at your company that these types of settings are well understood and that you have them correct from the start so that everybody is scheduling and creating baselines with the same parameters and we're all working on the same page one of the main things I try to teach about planned start and planned finish when I'm doing p6 training courses is that once you have a baseline created and you are referencing the baseline to track your variance against the plan start and planned finish fields are no longer of use you may as well not show them in any of your layouts you want to stick to showing the baseline project start and the baseline project finish this goes with the hours fields as well and duration fields you want to start showing the Eldar ations or BL labor units do not show budgeted labor units or budgeted duration or original duration you want to make sure that once you have created a baseline that all of the fields that you're showing that you want to track variance against have the BL in front of them indicating that it's the baseline that you're actually tracking variance against or comparing against so the plans start and play finish fields are really of no use once you have a baseline created and you should not look at them probably should not use them for anything and definitely don't put them into any reports because if these are out of sync with what your baseline dates are and a manager sees that they can get confused and start questioning the functionality of p6 or what you may be doing in p6 the last thing I'm going to show you in this video are resource assignment dates and how they relate to the activity dates be aware that resource assignments in p6 do not contain any baseline data so there are no baseline dates there is no earned value data this would be very beneficial if Oracle would add this because there is a lot of reporting that we do especially in downstream and upstream turnarounds and projects in the oil and gas industry where we need to run earned value reports against specific resource assignments or resources and the companies that they belong to so I'm using the same example that I've been using and I've selected activity number three right now I have two resources assigned to this to clarify about the baseline data I'm gonna right-click down in the assignments tab and go to customized resource columns and if you look in here I'll expand the dates tab you'll see nothing that says BL on the front of it and none of the date fields that I brought over have BL in front of it either so there is not any baseline data being referenced here this applies as well to the resource assignments view over here on the left hand side with that said be aware that when you see plans start or planned finish down on a resource assignment this is not the baseline data it is the same plan start and planned finish date information that you get when you're up on the activity that we discussed previously so it's best to not display the plan start in plan finish fields for resource assignments if you are using a baseline which you should be using a baseline during the execution of your project another thing I want to point out are these fields called drive activity dates it's a checkbox option and what does is it tells p6 that whatever dates we have down on the assignments should also drive the dates on the overall activity now if I take these off I can come down here and change my date on the assignment that moved out to the 30th because of the calendar but notice how on the activity itself it has not changed the date to the 30th so now my resource assignment dates are not in synch with the activity dates one problem is that if I turn the drive activity dates field back on the actual p6 dates on the activity do not reflect the assignment dates yet so I'm still out of saying this is a problem so it's best if you see this drive activity dates field here this check box it's best if you do not ever turn that off because your dates can get out of sync down on the activity resource assignment with the actual activity dates and there is no way to actually sync them back up except to manually sync them back up with the drive activity dates option back on I have resync my start and finish dates on the assignments I want to show you a couple of other things that you can do here first of all I can put lag on an assignment which will offset the start date of that assignment from the start date of the actual activity so here I'm going to put 10 hours of lag on here I hit enter notice how the activity has now moved out to June 30th which is Monday so it did skip over the weekend also notice how when I did this the activity finish date also changed the start and finish on activity number three here are reflecting the earliest start of the resource assignment the scaffold resource is starting on June 26 at 700 the instrumentation resource is finishing its the latest finish on June 30th at 1700 the activity start and finish dates up above reflect that I'll go ahead and remove the leg again you can also manually do this so I didn't have to do with a lag I could actually take this activity assignment here and I could move it out to the 30th manually so I'm going to change the state manually it moves it out to the 30th the dates on the activity reflect this change also notice how he six automatically imposed the leg for me so I can either enter leg to offset the start time of this resource assignment or I could manually offset the start time I could move it out a week and you'll notice that the lag increases I'm going to go ahead and take the leg back off and that will sync up the start and finish dates between these two resource assignments also be aware that I can have an offset of durations here so the scaffold could be ten hours in duration but the instrumentation could be 20 hours in duration when I do that the finish for the instrumentation resource pushes out to June 30th and you'll also see that that's been reflected on the activity so the activity start and finish dates are going to reflect whatever the combination of the dates are down on the resource assignments and finally I'm going to go and apply an actual start and actual finish to one of the resource assignments and the calendar has been moved ahead to 2016 so I need to back that up a bit I'm just gonna say that it did start when the activity was currently scheduled to start so June 26th at 7 a.m. notice how when the actual start has been applied the actual start has also been applied up at the activity level this is because the actual starts down on the resource assignments also drives the actual start at the overall activity now watch what happens when I put an actual finish on and we'll just say June 26 but I'll make it for noon notice how I do have an actual finish here but activity 3 at the activity level did not apply an actual finish that's because my second resource assignment has not been finished yet so I'm going to have to actually mark the second resource assignment as started and finished and once I do that we'll say this happened June 26 but I'll put it for 1,700 now you can see that the actual start of the activity reflects the actual starts of the resource assignments the actual finish reflects the latest actual finish resource assignment we'd like to thank you for watching this TEPCO YouTube video on p6 dates if you'd like more information on TEPCO services or our training schedule please visit [Music]

Channel: TEPCOSolutions

Views: 373

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: p6, primavera, baytown, tx, new, plant, tepco, company, chemical, oil, gas, schedule, Camtasia, generating, excel, data, fields, understanding, primavera training videos, primavera training online, primavera training, p6 training

Id: hC2-5EZnZWY

Length: 76min 23sec (4583 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 10 2018