In this month’s newsletter, we will examine how to check for some of the most common schedule quality problems in Oracle Primavera P6.

Delivering and maintaining a quality schedule is necessary to remove ambiguity in a schedule’s construction and assist in the development and effective execution of Planned Project outcomes. In many cases, the schedule that needs checking is one that you have received from a contractor or an external company. Conducting a good quality check before accepting the schedule is important.

What are some of the common problems that occur in schedules? The following are some of the more common issues: open-ended activities as a result of missing logic, crowding of logic, excessive activities with constraints, unsatisfied constraints, negative lag, and a large number of different calendars in use. All of these issues affect the quality of the schedule produced in Oracle Primavera P6 and will provide a strong indication as to whether or not a project will ultimately achieve execution success.

This month we will look at two of the issues mentioned above, open-ended activities and excessive activities with constraints.

Top Tip #1: Checking for Open-Ended Activities

In P6 there are two methods available to find missing logic. The first method, visual check, allows you to assess the open-ended activities visually, but the second method, schedule log, is more effective because of its accuracy and speed in producing the schedule log.
Method 1 Visual Check:

Follow  these  steps  to  check for open-ends:

Step 1: Log into Primavera P6 and open the project schedule that needs to be checked.

Step 2:
Open a suitable layout to display the Gantt chart.

Step 3: Click the schedule icon in the toolbar.
Step 4: In the Schedule pop up window select the ‘Options’ tab.
Step 5: In the ‘Schedule Options’ window click the ‘Radio’ button to select ‘Make open-ended activities critical’.

Step 6: Click ‘Close’ and then ‘Schedule’.

Step 7: In the schedule you will see other activities that have joined the critical path and are coloured red.

Before:

After:

Whilst this method does show you the open-ended activities graphically, it is not the best method because it is less accurate than creating a schedule log and isolating Activities with either absent Predecessors or absent Successors.


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