Whether you’re using Primavera P6 Professional or Primavera P6 EPPM the Web Based flavor of P6, you should be aware of the importance of the P6 Time Periods settings in the Calendars.
This article takes a brief but vital look at the Time Periods dialog that can reap havoc on your resource loaded schedule if you don’t set it up correctly.
Calendar Setup
Primavera allows you to create Global, Project and Resource level calendars. Global calendars are available to all projects in the system. Project calendars are available only to the project you associate with that calendar and resource calendars are used to model details of a particular resource’s availability; typically when you are loading named individuals as resources in the system.
As part of the process to create a new calendar, you enter the overall weekly hours using the Workweek button in P6 Professional or the Standard Workweek page in the Enterprise Data area of EPPM.
In both systems, the hours you set for each day of the week are applied for the entire calendar, which runs from 1900 to infinity. Yes, you could feasibly schedule a 23rd century Star Trek voyage using P6. But keeping to more earthly concerns, if you change the productive hours of a standard calendar, BE SURE TO ALSO CHANGE THE TIME PERIODS.
Let’s say for example that you have just created a 10 hour, 4 day calendar using the Standard Workweek or Workweek dialog in Primavera P6 EPPM or P6 Professional respectively.
Primavera P6 EPPM Calendar Set Time Periods
I’ll illustrate here for clarity. Look at the following screenshot. The Standard Work Week has been set to 4 days at 10 hours. In addition, the Set Time Periods dialog has been opened and the Hours/Day field changed to 10.0.
If you fail to set the time periods dialog, Primavera P6 will behave strangely when you start assigning resources to activities using this calendar. The dialog itself tells you “Values are used when entering or displaying units and durations in time increments other than hours”. Specifically the resource assignment issue is this. If the resource has been set to a Default Units/Time of 10..0 Hours/Day (as would be typical for a 4 x 10 environment), the assignment would show up with only 8.0 Hours/Day on the initial assignment. P6 looks at the Hours/Day field in the Time Periods setting when assigning resources.
Primavera P6 Professional
The issue is identical in Primavera P6 Professional. The button to click is called Time Periods in the Modify Calendar dialog. Again, be sure to align this with your hours per day, week, month and year values. It does affect more than just the way P6 displays stuff.
I’ve seen mismatches in this area cause some serious confusion and in some cases the need to remove and reassign resources.
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