You created a four-day work week calendar in Primavera P6 professional and assigned it as the default calendar to your current project. Despite this you Gantt chart non-work day shading still displays as a five day work week. Something’s wrong! Let’s look at what’s going on.
The Gantt chart is at the heart of today’s scheduling software, so understanding how to utilize Gantt chart features to display your schedule is an important skill set. When you are presenting your schedule, it can make sense sometimes that you would want to display non-work days as shaded. In this way you distinguish schedule non-work periods on the Gantt chart. But assigning a calendar to depict your schedule on the Gantt chart is not as intuitive as one would prefer.
This article describes how to assign a calendar so that your Gantt chart shades out the appropriate non-work time in Primavera P6.
Example Scenario
Let’s proceed with our demonstration project called ‘Pipe Repair & Improve’, Figure 1.
Figure 1
In Figure 1 we have our ‘Pipe Repair & Improve’ project where all activities are assigned a ‘4×10 Work Week’ calendar. Note that activities may be assigned different calendars in the same schedule. Also, despite the fact that all our activities are assigned a ‘4×10 Work Week’ calendar, which is a 4-day and 10-hour per day schedule, our Gantt chart is only shading Saturdays and Sundays. Friday, which according to our calendar, is a non-work day, but it is not shaded out. So something is not quite right with our schedule Gantt chart.
Let’s troubleshoot to find out why our Gantt chart is not displaying a 4 day work week. In Figure 2 we view the default settings for our project.
Figure 2
In the bottom details we select the Defaults tab to view all the default settings for our project. Note that the default calendar is ‘4×10 Work Week’, which is what we want. However, this default setting simply means that all new activities in the schedule will be assigned the ‘4×10 Work Week’ calendar.
In Figure 3 we continue our inquiry and select Enterprise | Calendars and toggle Project in the resulting Calendars dialog.
Figure 3
This dialog list all the calendars currently assigned to our project. We highlight ‘4×10 Work Week’ and click the ‘used by’ button. Up pops a dialog displaying all the WBS Codes used by ‘4×10 Work Week’. When we do the same for ‘7×24 Work Week’, Figure 4, we see that no WBS Codes are used by ‘7×24 Work Week’.
Figure 4
This is all useful information, but it still does not solve the mystery of our Gantt chart non-work day shading.
In Figure 5 we again view the Calendars dialog.
Figure 5
This time we toggle Global to view all calendars that are global in the system and, therefore, available to all users. In this calendars dialog setting we note that ‘5×8’ is checked as the default global calendar. Well, ‘5×8’ stands for 5-day and 8-hour per day schedule, so we found a discrepancy. In Figure 6 we investigate what happens when we change the default global calendar to ‘4×10’, which stands for 4-day and 10-hour per day work week calendar.
Figure 6
When we make ‘4×10’ the default global calendar, which is the default calendar for the database, the Gantt charts shades Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, as desired. So the mystery is solved Primavera P6 Professional shades the Gantt chart according to the default setting of the global calendar, the database default calendar.
Summary
When it comes to defining the shading of non-work time in Primavera P6 Professional’s Gantt chart, assigning all activities a particular calendar does not directly correlate to shading on the Gantt chart.
The assignment of the default project calendar also does not correlate to shading on the Primavera P6 Gantt chart. No, the Gantt chart non-work day shading links directly to the default global calendar, the database default calendar. The resulting implications of this are
- The Gantt chart non-work day shading is the same for all projects in the database.
- If you want a project calendar to define the Gantt chart shading then you must convert the project calendar to a global calendar, and, additionally, make it the default global calendar.
- If you do not have privileges to set the default global calendar in your database you may have to coordinate with your system administrator, accordingly, to obtain your Gantt chart non-work day shading preference.
Now with this knowledge, you should be aware of your P6 Gantt chart non-work day shading limitations when you are working in an enterprise project management environment and shared database.