It may be difficult to track schedule changes in Primavera P6 when multiple users are simultaneously updating your schedule. Let’s explore how to find the source of schedule updates in Primavera P6.
Primavera P6 provides a notebook feature, which schedulers can use to document and/or explain changes to the schedule at the project level and down to the activity level. Schedulers can use default notebook topics or create their own notebook topic to provide more details about the schedule. More specifically, they can note schedule changes. But what do you do when someone changes the schedule and does not leave any ‘change management’ or similar documentation notes?
This article provides a simple tip for locating the person responsible for undocumented changes to your schedule.
The key to source change identification is the columns feature in the activities tab, Figure 1.
Figure 1
Simply add the following columns to your activities layout: ‘Added By’, ‘Added Date’, ‘Last Modified By’, and ‘Last Modified Date’. By adding these columns you can locate the user that initially added the activity and the user that last modified the activity, and the associated dates. That’s it! You’ve located your change source. And you can send an email or meet in person to find out the reason behind their activity changes.
Let’s go one step further. If you suspect a user has made several changes to your schedule activities you can simply create a filter. This filter can use the ‘last modified by’ parameter, ‘equals’ equivalency, and [user name] value. This provides you a list of all activities last changed or modified by a particular user.
Summary
Primavera P6 supports users documenting their changes to the schedule. If a particular scheduler, however, does not follow company practice, regarding documentation of schedule changes, you are not without hope.
It is possible to locate not only the user that added the activity, but also the user that last modified the respective activity. And you can even create a filter to list all activities ‘last modified by’ a particular user.
This is a simple feature in Primavera P6 that may come in handy. Particularly when you have a large number of users and a project that many users have write privileges to.