This article looks at a simple and quick way to expand levels in Deltek Acumen of a project in the S1 // Projects and S3 // Risk tabs of Deltek Acumen.
Since we started offering training for the Deltek Acumen suite, we have had a number of frustrated customers who were looking for a way to expand the WBS for their project to specified levels. This capability is available in Deltek Acumen, but somewhat hidden it would seem. For example, if you are a Primavera P6 user, you would be looking for something similar to the Expand All, Collapse All or Collapse To… features. A Microsoft Project users would be looking for an Outline | All Subtasks style option. In Deltek Acumen however, you actually need to be looking for this functionality as part of the Grouping features.
So, if you do find yourself spending a lot of time clicking on plus buttons to drill down into the details of your project in Deltek Acumen, you will probably appreciate the following:
In the S1 // Projects tab, click on the bottom half of the Activity View button.
Select the Grouping menu and in the submenu, use the slider in the Display Level option to expand your project’s WBS levels to whatever value you want.
The slider dynamically adjusts to the depth of the structure for the project you have loaded in your Workbook. In the above example the project had 7 levels in its WBS. Using this feature you will be able to expand your project to whatever level you want in just moments – rather than endlessly drilling on plus signs.
As I mentioned before this also works the same in the Activity View button in the S3 // Risk tab too. So if you are working on assigning risk events to various activities in the schedule, you can expand the entire project in here too.
Summary
If you are a Primavera or Microsoft Project user, you will be looking for a dedicated feature in plain site to expand and collapse your project’s WBS Structure. In these tools such functionality is just a right-click or ribbon button away. I think we tend to overlook this feature in Deltek Acumen because it has been included in the Grouping features. This makes sense of course, but it does cause us to overlook it when we are focused on trying to figure out how to expand and collapse our project. Therefore we hope this article showing hot to expand levels in Deltek Acumen has just saved you a bunch of time going forward.