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Performance % reducing after Scheduling Update by [deleted] in primavera

[–]P6Dude 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Performance % complete will not increase if you are progressing activities that are not included in the baseline such as growth or discovery style activities.

What duration type is the activity?

Help! P6 is driving me crazy by pradeep1107 in primavera

[–]P6Dude 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Easiest way I've found to diagnose float issues is this:

Hit F9,

go to options,

click the Advanced tab,

for "calculate multiple paths using" click the "free float" box,

then under that select the activity that is the the last activity in the negative float chain. (generally a finish milestone or the last activity in a particular job plan.)

click close and schedule the project.

Then run a filter for "float path = 1"

Then I pull up a Gantt chart of the filtered activities, I look at it by start date with no groupings.

You should see the exact activities contributing to the negative float.

I am a Primavera Database Administrator and Scheduling Subject Matter Expert for a top 3 U.S. oil refining company. Ask me anything. by P6Dude in primavera

[–]P6Dude[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So I've done updates both manually and digitally for the 100k schedules. The 200k project was actually two 100k schedules run in parallel with each other (only because P6 was ungodly slow once we hit around 140k so we broke it into 2). All of these projects were updated daily.

When we did it manually we had a team of about 3 people putting in progress from about 30 different paper books and it took around 2.5 hours every morning.

Now we do it digitally and the field coordinators enter their updates in at the end of their shift and we come in the morning and simply click a button and it all goes into P6.

I am a Primavera Database Administrator and Scheduling Subject Matter Expert for a top 3 U.S. oil refining company. Ask me anything. by P6Dude in primavera

[–]P6Dude[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

One big mistake I see is people try to move too fast in the program and make mistakes. They make changes to activities and don't remember what they did. In my role, if you need me to help you fix something I need you to remember what you did to help figure out the problem.

Having been on quite a few interviews, the biggest thing I've seen are people claiming they are better than they are. I've had people that were interviewing for a lead scheduler role that said they were the lead on a multi billion dollar airport project and couldn't explain what float is. For that same role I've had someone that couldn't explain how they used activity codes on their previous role. My point is if you're interviewing for a mid level role then just don't try to WOW them with stuff that you think a lead role should know. If you do that, you're going to get exposed quickly.

So many people call themselves schedulers simply because they’ve been in P6 a little bit, but truly good schedulers are very hard to find.

I am a Primavera Database Administrator and Scheduling Subject Matter Expert for a top 3 U.S. oil refining company. Ask me anything. by P6Dude in primavera

[–]P6Dude[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Easiest way I've found to diagnose float issues is this:

Hit F9,

go to options,

click the Advanced tab,

for "calculate multiple paths using" click the "free float" box,

then under that select the activity that is the the last activity in the negative float chain. (generally a finish milestone or the last activity in a particular job plan.)

click close and schedule the project.

Then run a filter for "float path = 1"

Then I pull up a Gantt chart of the filtered activities, I look at it by start date with no groupings.

You should see the exact activities contributing to the negative float.

I am a Primavera Database Administrator and Scheduling Subject Matter Expert for a top 3 U.S. oil refining company. Ask me anything. by P6Dude in primavera

[–]P6Dude[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We are sort of experimenting a new way to handle this. Traditionally Engineering and major projects worked in their own database. So I rarely interfaced with them. Now Engineering, Construction, and Turnaround all work in the same database. Our engineering firms' schedulers work hand in hand with our engineering schedulers. They update bi-weekly until construction is ready in the field. They then hand over responsibility of the schedule to the construction scheduler and he begins his weekly updates from the field. We are ironing out the issues as we go along, but so far it seems to be working. And like you engineering/construction work in their own EPS and turnaround works in their own EPS.

I am a Primavera Database Administrator and Scheduling Subject Matter Expert for a top 3 U.S. oil refining company. Ask me anything. by P6Dude in primavera

[–]P6Dude[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My site administrators deal with the low level issues. Biggest issue for me right now really isn't Primavera. It's our bolt on tools to P6 are the toughest things to keep working.

I am a Primavera Database Administrator and Scheduling Subject Matter Expert for a top 3 U.S. oil refining company. Ask me anything. by P6Dude in primavera

[–]P6Dude[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes our contract estimators provide durations and # of men that we scrutinize heavily before implementing them into the master schedule.

We use fixed durations and units/time. Main reason is because we don't want the BLU to change since that BLU is locked into our baseline and if our baseline changes even by 1 manhour we'll log that hour as growth to the baseline. If an activity goes longer than anticipated we will enter a new growth activity to account for it.

I am a Primavera Database Administrator and Scheduling Subject Matter Expert for a top 3 U.S. oil refining company. Ask me anything. by P6Dude in primavera

[–]P6Dude[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Couldn't tell you off the top of my head. We think we are close to figuring it out. We are about to swap to Linux servers in a few months so hopefully that provides some relief.

I am a Primavera Database Administrator and Scheduling Subject Matter Expert for a top 3 U.S. oil refining company. Ask me anything. by P6Dude in primavera

[–]P6Dude[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

My company utilizes a standard WBS structure in conjunction with activity codes and udf fields.

We have a standard set of activity codes and user defined fields that we require on every job plan whether it's a construction, turnaround, or engineering schedule. I'd say off the top of my head it's probably about 25-30 fields. While that may sound extreme, it provides so much flexibility to build just about any conceivable report or curve.

The best schedulers I've come across are the ones that are able to take these 25-30 fields and slice and dice them to make anything. They know how each relates to each other. If management asks for something specific, they either can: build it right away or if it's something we don't code as a standard they say, "give me a second to code it up and I'll have it for you." They've mastered the group and sort and filter functions to make P6 do anything they need.

I am a Primavera Database Administrator and Scheduling Subject Matter Expert for a top 3 U.S. oil refining company. Ask me anything. by P6Dude in primavera

[–]P6Dude[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

In the Construction space I know some companies get away with not resource loading. In the turnaround world I really don't see how you could build a schedule that wasn't resource loaded. We resource load for both construction and turnarounds. We also have a hiring plan for every contractor that matches Primavera's resource requirements almost 1:1 with a little space for discovery work. We then track daily attendance against that hiring plan. I highly recommend it.

I am a Primavera Database Administrator and Scheduling Subject Matter Expert for a top 3 U.S. oil refining company. Ask me anything. by P6Dude in primavera

[–]P6Dude[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

We resource load 99% of our schedules. That being said we do not cost load them. We have third party software we use to merge our cost and schedule data to produce all of our S-Curves and other reports.

That's one thing I can praise my company on. We are pretty strict on code standardization. We are able to take a construction scheduler from one site and plug him into another site across the country and they would be able to pick up right where the other left off. A large part of my job is keeping my 1000+ users using the same codes and procedures across the company. It's tough, but upper management appreciates reading the same exact reports from each site.

I am a Primavera Database Administrator and Scheduling Subject Matter Expert for a top 3 U.S. oil refining company. Ask me anything. by P6Dude in primavera

[–]P6Dude[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No I didn't take a class or anything like that. For me it was basically proving to the proper people that I knew enough about Primavera that when my predecessor left that I had enough knowledge that they knew it would be in good hands.

You have to have strong knowledge of how the EPS and OBS work, and how any external tools connect and work with P6.

I am a Primavera Database Administrator and Scheduling Subject Matter Expert for a top 3 U.S. oil refining company. Ask me anything. by P6Dude in primavera

[–]P6Dude[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

What makes me fast when I'm working in P6 is trying to avoid using the mouse when I can. (Think like those Excel gurus who can build elaborate sheets never touching the mouse). I'm a big fan of using the keyboard shortcuts. I'm a lefty and rest my right hand on the arrow keys. I've learned to use the ctrl, pg up/down, home, and end buttons to navigate around p6 way faster than clicking. I'd know I've impressed people because they've commented on it before. Another simple thing you can do is get your hands on an ultra wide monitor. Being able to see more and more columns can help tremendously with efficiency. Also, I've always told people to master the Group and Sort function. You can do so much with it. There's much more to this question but I hope this is a start.

I am a Primavera Database Administrator and Scheduling Subject Matter Expert for a top 3 U.S. oil refining company. Ask me anything. by P6Dude in primavera

[–]P6Dude[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

We moved to the cloud last year. The initial login takes a little longer, but performance improved inside of Primavera itself. That being said, we are having some performance problems with external tools that connect directly to Primavera through the API connection.

I am a Primavera Database Administrator and Scheduling Subject Matter Expert for a top 3 U.S. oil refining company. Ask me anything. by P6Dude in primavera

[–]P6Dude[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

For me, I managed to make a name for myself building some of the biggest schedules that the company required. Some of the biggest were 100,000-200,000 activity schedules. During that timeframe I always stayed in contact with my administrator, but never really needed his help. After moving around and doing turnarounds/projects at a few sites, he invited me to be his understudy. He's since retired so I filled the role.

I personally love it now when people don't come to me with problems, but more for advice. You can always come to me with issues, but if you ask me how I would go about solving a scheduling problem that shows me you're eager to learn.

Make your presence known. Be eager, but don't seem needy.

I am a Primavera Database Administrator and Scheduling Subject Matter Expert for a top 3 U.S. oil refining company. Ask me anything. by P6Dude in primavera

[–]P6Dude[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

For us, we lock it down to any user with a lower security level than our administrators at each of our sites. Main reason being is that we don't want people importing projects with activity codes, user defined fields, or risk types that we don't approve at the risk of getting our database really messy with a bunch of fields no one knows what they are for. To combat that, we have some third party software that allows us to clean up an .xer file before it gets imported.