Recently, one of our clients wanted a Key Performance Indicator that provided the percentage of Activities added to the current Primavera P6 plan since the last baseline was created.
Tools like Schedule Comparison or Claim Digger will provide a list of Activities that are in the current plan but not in the baseline plan and vice versa. Unfortunately, they don’t provide the just number and so in this case, was not an option that we could use.
When I was presented with this problem there was one way to solve this that immediately sprang to mind. I came up with the idea that Primavera P6 needed to store a 1 in a User Defined Field for each Activity not in the Baseline and a 0 for each one that was. So, a Global Change was required to do this.
Checking for absent values in the Project Baseline doesn’t work. The screenshot shows a test for “BL Project Activity % Complete” being absent, but it always true.
The trick is to reverse the test and create one that will only return true if there is a Baseline Activity present, otherwise it returns false. Doing this with the usual culprits such as “BL Project Activity % Complete” above doesn’t work. It always returns false.
The solution is to check the “BL Project Activity Status” for any value being set. If there is a corresponding Activity in the Baseline it will return true other wise it returns false.
The screenshot contains the Global Change used in this way to set a UDF to 1 when there is no corresponding Baseline Activity and 0 when there is.
There are several ways to develop this to get the total numbers out. I had a number of other similar percentages to calculate so I made use of a User Defined Field called “Count” that was set to 1 on every Activity. I then ran a report that was grouped on “Count” and set to show summaries only. Any integer added to the report would display the total. I therefore had the total number of Activities, total number of Activities without a corresponding Baseline Activity and a few other KPIs.
I was constrained by having to use Primavera P6 without any API programming so ended up with a fair number of Global Changes.
I hope you find this tip useful. You could apply the technique for other purposes – possibly setting an Indicator Red if the Baseline Activity is not there and Green if it is. I’m sure you can come up with many other ways of using this tip in Primavera P6!
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