What P6 Schedule Comparison Tool Should You Use?

this is a Primavera P6 project schedule all right this is a Primavera P6 project schedule that your contractor just submitted and this is a well it's another Primavera P6 schedule that your contractor submitted but what are the differences exactly well you're about to find out because in this video I'm going to guide you through tools that help us compare Primavera P6 project schedules to each other to find the differences welcome back to plan Academy I'm Michael LePage and by the time you're done watching this video you're going to know exactly which Primavera P6 schedule comparison tool is right for you because I'm going to go through four options in depth to help you make the right decision so why do we care about these tools anyways well comparing two P6 schedules is one of the most fundamental things that we should be able to do and do accurately why well perhaps you're on the owner's side and contractors are submitting schedules to you you want to verify what the differences between those are because the contractor might not be upfront with you you want to be able to dig out those differences maybe you're on the delay analysis side you'll need a tool that's going to help you walk through any sort of methodology where you're comparing two schedules to figure out who's at fault or who gets a claim make sure you stay to the end of the video where I'm going to summarize my findings and also talk about the affordability of each of these products now before we get into the analysis I also want to tell you that plan Academy is a partner of one of the tools that we're going to present however I'm doing my best to give an unbiased view of all the tools some of these tools I've been talking about for a long time on my my blog and writing about them and working with them so I'm doing my best to give you an unbiased view of these tools even though we are partnered with one of them and I'll talk about that later in the video so if you're ready let's get started with tool number one and that's p6's own schedule comparison tool it used to be called claim Digger in case you're familiar with it by that name a couple versions ago it got re-categorized and actually kind of re-engineered as well so to find this tool you can go to the tools menu and down at the bottom you'll see schedule comparison by the way I'm using P6 standalone so when you run the comparison what you'll see is that it comes up inside of visualizer visualizer is kind of an add-on tool it bundle with P6 and let's have a look at what you can do with our analysis tool so number one you can pick from your database to tools two projects to compare I've already got mine set up down here on the general tab you can kind of pick your output options we have HTML CSV ASCII text in the file that it's going to Output to we'll just for fun keep it at HTML here and then lastly on the advanced tab you can pick all the different things that you want it to compare for fun I've just included everything and then you just run and save and draw it now when you run it and send it to HTML you essentially just get this output which is incredibly long long output all formatted in tables if you opt to get it into Excel it's the same situation all of the data is in a huge table as you can see this data is incredibly hard to work with so it's even very difficult to find what exactly I'm comparing in each section so you can see here here I'm comparing primary constraint here and comparing calendar name or criticality and it's just hard to find there's no highlighting there's no colors there's nothing it's just data dumped into a file and that makes this data very difficult to use although it is very complete you can see that it covers lots of different areas very well all the way down to notebook topics which changes in Notebook topics costs are supported as well which is something I really like another little bit of a gripe I have here is that when there is no previous value it just says value not specified in the database and in some areas you'll see that written over and over and over value not specified in the database they could have just put a dash that would have sufficed so not a lot of thought has been put into how to handle this data at the end for example if you wanted to take that data and put it into a report you probably have to erase that reformat it one of the things I I don't like as well is at the Top If you compare WBS code it basically just regurgitates the entire project and that's because the project name has changed here you can see I have 4A and 5A and so it's actually just regurgitating the entire project but the truth is I did have WBS change you can see here in the first one I made a WBS change between General conditions and startup I added a new WBS level but it'll be incredibly hard to find those differences in this WBS data I also had trouble getting the data into Excel using the CSV file a lot of my data in P6 has commas in it and those commas screwed up the imported into Excel so I had to use different options so let's look at pros and cons of p6's schedule comparison feature couple Pros number one obviously it's included so you don't have to pay for any additional tools we expect it to work lots of fields are covered so the the comparisons are very thorough and that's great including costs some of the other tools don't support cost but you will find it here some of the cons are that the output is incredibly difficult to use I find it very challenging you're going to spend a lot of time formatting output and making changes to make it usable it is missing a couple key fields that I would like to see I don't see any change in legs I do see legs reported but I don't see any changes reported I also don't see data date reported anywhere it's just a key high level data piece lots of users report problems getting visualizer to run so that is a common problem that we've seen complained about too if visualizer doesn't run and there are technical problems for some getting it to run then this feature will not work for you either and lastly I did see some inconsistencies in data for example I put cost expenses on activities however they were reported as project expenses not activity expenses and a few other little minor things like that in summary if you don't have budget for an additional tool this certainly will work if comparing P6 files is kind of your bread and butter you probably want to invest in something better okay let's talk about my next tool this is change inspector change inspector is a tool that I've written about before my blog quite a few times what I love about it is it is a tool that was designed exactly for this to compare two schedules now you can either choose the xcr files so select your base and your revised xcr files to compare or you can actually connect directly to a database and that's what I'm doing here so I'm going to connect directly to my sqlite database and select the project right for my database and run the comparison we'll get them loaded in first and I'll show you how we can run the comparison with just a couple clicks okay so I'm going to choose here run all the reports and these are all the things that I'm going to compare and then create them a couple things that I really like about change inspector are that it gives you this summary report so summary report lets you know all of the different aspects of your project that has changed at a high level and then you can dig deeper into what's different by going to say your early start Tab and seeing the differences not only that there's also this changes combined area which lists all of the different changes all in one place so that's also kind of nice you can see everything that's changed combined from all the different tabs in one place now this is the app but the output to excel is incredibly good as well let's go look at the output to excel you can do that just by clicking here and I've got one open already we start on the index the first Tab and the index lets you jump to the different tabs I love that the output is broken out by tab it makes it so easy now check this out as well we can go to our schedule dashboard this is also a feature I really like it highlights again the high level things that are different the number for example number of complete activities between the base is 28 and 39. the number of activities of negative float etc etc we got some graphics that kind of let you see what is going on not only that we should get the schedule settings and the project details there's a little bug when you do it with the database that the schedule settings aren't coming out in the project details but normally these are great pages that show you exactly the differences between the settings and how they were compared when I jump to say actual date change you can see that it lists not just the activities with actual starts but the actual finishes are here as well as well as the percent completes so that's another thing that the developers done a great job is like combining the data together on one tab so I can see the differences and starts finishes and percent completes and that is a theme that's carried out throughout this tool so a couple things that are missing for me is a change in the criticality of activities when has an activity been critical and now is no longer critical or became critical that's missing as well as it would be nice to have support for costs where we can compare our actual cost total cost between all of those different fields since change inspector Imports xcr files it would also be nice to see support for XML files as now in my opinion we're starting to use XML files a little bit more these days let's go to my summary I really like change inspector it's very simple and makes it very easy to do comparisons I mentioned that it also supports connecting to a database the output to excel is excellent incredibly flexible and easy to find what you're looking for I love the summary I love the dashboard and it has a comparison of legs as well as driving path and the variances that I mentioned a couple cons that I'd like to see improved are support for costs can we Compare costs and see the differences especially when we're doing earned value and as well as changes in criticality and changes to our critical path we have the driving path but I'd like to see changes in critical path added here as well so that's change inspector and next we're going to talk about xcr schedule toolkit so this is xcr schedule toolkit what is it it's an online tool actually that does a whole bunch of things it's a viewer it's does analysis dashboards a bunch of features in one of those features is the schedule comparison now so you're aware it's not just a scheduled comparison tool it does all these other things so if you want to know what it does check it out but let's talk about the schedule comparison feature and here's kind of what it looks like we've got our two projects loaded in here now what we can do from here is where and this is where I feel like xcr toolkit has done things a little bit differently is you can actually just in here at a glance see what's different so for example at the project level the data date or the actual units you can see the actual units kind of show up here and hey there's some colors there's differences I like that kind of stuff but we can actually go down to the WBS or task level logic all these different levels and this again is where I feel like they've separated themselves a bit we can compare all these things at the WBS level which is really interesting to me so for example if I want to see which WBS areas have new finished dates I can do this select finish and kind of expand the results and see the differences so not only that in this list we can also see some high level things like total number of activities whether it's changed or down here number of material assignments at the WBS level whether that's changed you'll see a few of these number type categories in here so let's go to the activity level and again you can see all these different things that we can look at and down at the bottom we see number of Labor assignments number of cost assignments so where are their differences so that I really like there's a nice visual interface here and it allows me to dig in now I can also send all of this to excel which is what I've done so let's look at what the Excel output looks like I like this summaries tab on the Excel output you can see all the different changes uh early starts lots of differences and again at the different levels and the filters are already set up for me so let's say I wanted to just filter on logic changes I can filter on logic changes and see the different things that it is identified I can then use the tabs again I love it when my results are broken up by tab so I can go down to the different tabs to dig in and if we go to the activity tab you can see all these different things I can filter in on the change and finish date free float late date number of cost assignments Etc so there's lots of different flexibility here to really dig in and I really like the filtering I like the colors I like how easy this is to look at another thing that I really like is how some of this comparison is broken out by labor equipment expenses and material you can see here we have these categories budgeted costs budget units broken up by these different areas and you'll see them on a spreadsheet as well on top of that if we head over to the summary page put all these things up you can see these areas here and not only that we can see the actual Crews and different labor Crews on here so we can see where there's been changes related to a crew changes related to a material or non-labor equipment so that really gives me a lot of visibility into that stuff no what did I struggle with once again I don't see any leg feature in here so where have legs and Lead numbers changed I'm not seeing that here in the logic area and also I like all this breakout budgeted cost and budgeted units but what about a progressed schedule I don't have the same ability to track the actual costs or the remaining units I can just work with the budgeted costs here I really like the interface for quick looking at comparisons or exporting to excel to find the differences again I would really love to see lags in there I like that the cost is in there but not enough on the actual side there might be some other features in here I'm missing but this is what I saw in the comparison area so let's go to my summary okay so the things I liked about xcr toolkit very detailed analysis very complete I like that a lot costs in units as I mentioned they're broken up by that resource type the labor non-labor but also by resource when we get into the spreadsheet view that's cool I like the WBS level analysis I'm not sure I would use it too much but I'd like that it's there in case I did want to do that kind of analysis and again I think the Excel output is really excellent makes it really easy to filter and find what I'm looking for on the con side I still want to see support for legs I don't know why it's not in there but it seems like it could be easily added so maybe it's not such a big deal but I also would like to see the comparison of actuals at the resource assignment level for when I'm doing any kind of cost related progress stuff xcr toolkit is also a web tool which means that I'm uploading schedules to the web and I know for some Industries and maybe govcon kind of stuff that we're not going to be thrilled with putting stuff up on websites we want to keep that stuff secure that is a bit of a detractor but overall I'm I really like what xcr toolkit is bringing here in their schedule comparison features so this is deltek acumen fuse maybe you've heard about it it's been around for a little while as well Dell tech Acumen fuse is a tool that really is geared towards doing forensic analysis this is a tool that has really aimed at the professional user who needs to tease out all of the intricate details and differences as well as doing forensic analysis to Aid in claims and other things there's a whole risk side in here as well but I'm just focusing on the fuse side which is the forensic analysis piece now we've I've loaded in my two xer files here and I'm going to show you kind of two areas where you can really see some professional level analysis that we're able to do in Dell tech Acumen fuse so I'm going to start here on the Diagnostics screen and I can run all sorts of different Diagnostics on my project I've just run one here on constraints I chose constraints down at the bottom and ran a diagnostic now one of the things I like about this screen is what they call the phase analyzer so as you can see my project is now divided into these three phases or three years on my timeline and I can see exactly where problem activities or activities with constraints are landing on the timeline so that can be incredibly helpful now if I want to see these two activities that have constraints I just click in the box and they're surface here on the right so it's really quick and easy to find the problems by using this kind of analysis with the phase analyzer as you can see lots of tabs down at the bottom I'm able to do all sorts of analysis for legs logic duration float etc etc I'm not going to spend too much time on all of them but that gives you a flavor for the kind of phase type of analysis that is unique to Acumen fuse from the other tools that we've looked at now let's go to the forensics area as well and this is where you can run detailed forensic comparisons like we've been doing with the other tools comparing two schedules together to see what the differences are and if we're looking up at the top toolbar you can see all these different areas will pull up different data so it's like our tabs at the project level again just having a high level look I love the visual indicators this is up this is down this is the same it makes it very easy for us to figure out what's going on let's go to leads and legs for example you'll see these X's so on the One schedule this relationship doesn't exist and in the other schedule it does and it's a finish to start and there's zero lag and you can see the legs and the leads the leg and the lead support is here that's what I've been looking for we can do all sorts of analysis and in fact if I expand inputs here you'll see all sorts of different things we can do so actual start analysis for example we'll just pull it up and again we can see the difference is this project has no actual starts in these activities this one does and again if we open up outputs you can see all of the different analysis here's our critical analysis as well so we can see which activities were on the critical path in one project and were moved off the critical path and another and it's very simple and straightforward analysis that we can do here support for costs is in here as well but we also have the ability to export all this and publish it to excel so let's go look at what the Excel output looks like as well a lot of the Excel output looks similar to what we saw in the tool we still have our icons and our visual reminders and sometimes things are expanded a little bit more as you can see if I show you all the different tabs that acumenfuse outputted look at all the tabs there's just a ridiculous amount of analysis that it does let's go to resources for example to the resources Tab and again we've got our filtering that we can do here we can filter on our different resources and we can see the differences up or down now these are units that we're reporting and the one thing I struggled with a little bit was finding the costs at the resource assignment level I'm not seeing good support for that so that's a little bit of critique there but really there is an incredible amount of analysis that we can do and the Excel output is very well done as well so how does Delta document fuse compare at the summary level well things that I really like we're getting a really incredible professional level analysis out of deltec Acumen views we have that view by time phase that I showed you so that we can actually see where in a timeline these particular problems or differences are occurring we have visual indicators the analysis is easy on the eyes it's easy to find what I'm looking for and not only that you can see that we can not we can compare metrics as well in those phase analyzers I can actually build metrics and compare metrics between schedules as well as individual Fields the differences between particular metrics or individual Fields And when I say metrics I could be talking about like a dma 14 point analysis metric like your number of lags percentage of lags or percentage of activities longer than 20 days Etc et cetera those kinds of metrics now a couple cons things that are challenging remember that Dell tech Acumen fuse is more geared to an Enterprise kind of user you can see how it's positioned that way it is a professional level tool it is also a bit complicated it will take you some time to learn trust me I'm learning it I attended a course and I'm still learning things about it like any tool it will take some time um there might almost be too many features or there might be more data than what I need and in some ways during those forensic analysis it's actually to your benefit to pare it down to the specific things that you're looking for and leave them out leave out the other things so that's one of my recommendations here as well okay let's bring this all home now before I do if you want to see a detailed analysis that shows you the fields that each of these tools does the comparison for I'm going to post that on a Blog check it out the link is below this video okay here we go now if you don't have any other options you can definitely get by with p6's schedule comparison tool you're going to struggle with the output as I said and some of the things that are lacking there but you can do it change inspector and xcr toolkit are both excellent options I like change inspector as I said I've talked about it in the past I also really like xcr toolkit it is web-based and it also supports the costs so those are both options and I want to mention that they are very much priced for the individual user and a very affordable options that you can consider if you're having to do this kind of analysis lastly if you are a professional and having to do this analysis often I highly recommend you look at Delta Acumen fuse it is priced more at the Enterprise level but it is a Powerhouse of a tool that can really give you a lot of power I want to let you know that plan Academy is a Dell tech partner and I've put a link there where you can get some more information and see some of our other videos that we've done about Delta Acumen fuse lastly if you really like this video leave me a comment below subscribe share let me know what you thought what other tools I may have missed love to hear your feedback as always I'm Michael at plant Academy I'll see you again soon Michael out

Channel: Plan Academy Inc.

Views: 6,501

Keywords: Schedule comparison tool, p6 schedule, p6 schedule comparison, how to compare schedules, Xer toolkit, acumen Fuse

Id: OvkDKt-N8Ys

Length: 26min 51sec (1611 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 27 2022