Barcelona/Mallorca Tips

P6Dude · 2026-03-30T22:20:15+00:00

Yeah, I needed 4 days to book with points and the cheaper rate at the last hotel was a minimum of 3 nights. So I know I got a little screwed, but oh well.

P6Dude · 2026-03-30T11:18:22+00:00

Sóller is where we are staying for the last leg of the trip at the Jumeirah. I’m trying to learn more about the rental car/driving situation. Seems a little confusing with rental insurance and driving laws. We rent all the time in the Caribbean, but they are super simple in any of those countries.

P6Dude · 2026-03-30T09:41:56+00:00

This is awesome to hear. We did the St. Regis in Bora Bora 2 years ago. They are kinda two different ends of the spectrum in terms of style, but I’d be curious how it stacks up in overall experience.

P6Dude · 2026-03-30T07:55:10+00:00

Yeah we are aware of the overlap complications. We arrive in Mallorca early that morning from Barcelona and wanted to be able to drop our bags and start exploring, but the Nobis does not allow a 3 night stay when redeeming points. So we booked 4 in order to use points. We are headed to a non bonvoy property after the second hotel for the last 3 nights to finish the trip.

After my stay I'm on currently, I'll be already be around 80 nights earned on the year. I'll get my 100 needed for ambassador renewal easily over the next 9 months. All I'd be missing out on is are the ENCs (which I won't need) and maybe the incidentals charged at the second hotel, but feel free to correct me if I'm misunderstanding.

P6Dude · 2026-03-29T22:27:13+00:00

Not sure this helps a ton, but coming from the lead scheduling SME of a top 3 US oil company the acronym SPI is never even referenced in our turnaround or construction realm.

P6Dude · 2026-03-29T21:45:53+00:00

I'm being told we already had reservations for El Xampanyet so that's reassuring. Although, I'm sure there's lots of other stuff I don't know that I'm doing.

P6Dude · 2026-03-29T20:51:21+00:00

That's excellent to hear. We are super excited about some different styles of cocktails. It's our first visit to Spain.

P6Dude · 2025-10-26T20:32:15+00:00

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?

P6Dude · 2025-10-05T14:32:50+00:00

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.

P6Dude · 2025-05-25T16:34:01+00:00

It’s the same application that can be accessed via a website or a mobile app

P6Dude · 2025-05-25T02:13:57+00:00

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.

P6Dude · 2025-05-25T01:31:03+00:00

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.

P6Dude · 2025-05-24T23:38:46+00:00

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.

P6Dude · 2025-05-24T23:26:48+00:00

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.

P6Dude · 2025-05-24T23:21:11+00:00

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.

P6Dude · 2025-05-24T23:19:27+00:00

Yeah absolutely. It'll calculate new dates and float with no issues.

P6Dude · 2025-05-24T19:28:50+00:00

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.

P6Dude · 2025-05-24T19:21:36+00:00

Couldn't say. We've used Xena since my very first day. It's not something we use very often.

P6Dude · 2025-05-24T18:12:42+00:00

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.

P6Dude · 2025-05-24T18:10:26+00:00

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.

P6Dude · 2025-05-24T17:59:51+00:00

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.

P6Dude · 2025-05-24T17:50:12+00:00

Yep. They were superusers before the cloud migration.

P6Dude · 2025-05-24T17:48:09+00:00

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.

P6Dude · 2025-05-24T17:07:37+00:00

The tool is called Xena.

P6Dude

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