It can be a real pain when trying to assign Primavera P6 resources to the activities in your Primavera P6 Project when you are going to use just a handful of the large number of Primavera P6 resources that are available.
The search facility in Primavera P6 can be helpful, but it means having to search every single time a Resource needs to be assigned. It would be great if P6 allowed you to create a pool of resources for each project so you would pick from a much smaller list instead of the whole P6 Resource Dictionary. This tip attempts to get close to that idea in Primavera P6.
This tip works best if you know every single resource you want to use on the project. It still remains helpful even if you know most of the P6 Resources. Normally you are presented with a list of all the P6 Resources just like in the screen shot below. You can see that there are a lot of resources because the size of the slider on the sidebar.
The first Activity we create in our Project is a dummy activity that can be deleted later on. Once it is created, we can assign all the currently known P6 project resources to it. This can be a little tedious but as you will soon, see we only have to do it once instead of every time. In the screenshot below we have used CTRL + Click to select many Resources before assigning them all to the dummy Activity.
Once all the resources are assigned, we can then change the filter on the Resource Assignment dialog to show just the projects resources.
From now on you will only see the P6 Resources you want and so can then pick from a considerably shortened resource list. After you have completed adding all the Activities and Resource Assignments, you can simply delete the dummy Activity. Typically, the current projects resources are all that are needed – well most of the time!
This may sound simple and trivial, but it has saved folks a lot of time in the past, and whenever we mention it during Primavera P6 training classes, it always goes down well. This tip is really aimed at saving time, but it also does have a nice side-effect. So long as you are careful with your initial selection of Resources, it can substantially reduce the risk of assigning a similar named Resource from the complete set of Resources to the one you want – unless, of course, you are wanting to use both resources!
I hope you find this useful.
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