Primavera P6 Professional has a nice feature to position activities and relationships in a preferred network diagram. These layouts can be saved so that it is retrievable.
A network diagram is good at highlighting the true relationships between activities. The nature of these relationships becomes apparent when activities in the network diagram are relationally connected. And an activity’s position on the network chart is important to achieve the best perspective of activity dependencies. In Primavera P6 Professional you can position and layout activities on the network chart, accordingly, and then capture this layout to provide a unique and insightful dependency driven network diagram that is retrievable.
This article provides a Primavera P6 Professional quick tip for capturing a suitable network diagram layouts of a respective schedule.
Our demonstration project is in Figure 1, which displays the activity table and Gantt chart of the schedule.
Figure 1
We want to show a network diagram of the schedule, so we select activity network from the top layout tool group, Figure 2.
Figure 2
Figure 3 presents the schedule activity network when grouped by work breakdown structure (WBS).
Figure 3
As you can see we do not have a complete picture of our schedule on the screen.
We want to remove the WBS grouping of our schedule, so we select the group and sort icon and customize, Figure 4.
Figure 4
We choose to group by none in Figure 5.
Figure 5
The resulting network diagram is exhibited in Figure 6.
Figure 6
We now have a complete presentation of our schedule, but we want to adjust activity positions for a better perspective. In Figure 7 we begin adjusting activity positions, i.e. drag and drop, for a more insightful activity/relationship layout.
Figure 7
Finally, in Figure 8 we have a clear network diagram representation of our schedule.
Figure 8
To keep us from losing our personalized layout we select view | activity network and save network positions…, Figure 9.
Figure 9
We provide a descriptive filename in Figure 10.
Figure 10
Note the file extension *.anp to denote an activity network layout file. When we then view the Gantt chart and return to the network diagram, we find that we have lost our preferred activity and relationship layout, Figure 11.
Figure 11
That’s OK, because we have saved our network diagram layout in an *.anp file.
To read in our saved activity and relationship network layout select view | activity network and open network positions…, Figure 12.
Figure 12
We select the respective *.anp file and open it, Figure 13.
Figure 13
In Figure 14 we once again have our desired network diagram layout.
Figure 14
Summary
When it comes to understanding activity dependency relationships the network diagram is a compelling tool. Primavera P6 Professional supports personal network diagram layouts that are retrievable once the preferred layout is captured in an *.anp file. But these *.anp files are only recoverable in the schedule file, in which they were created. For more details on the P6 activity network diagram refer to the following blog The Primavera P6 Professional Network Diagram.