How to Publish Projects in Primavera P6 EPPM for Reporting
Once your Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM) schedule is cost loaded you may want to view the resource allocations in team usage. But before you can inspect resource allocation in team usage you must first publish the project.
Realistic resource scheduling requires an analysis of resource allocation to confirm that the labor required to do the work is available. Primavera P6 EPPM has a team usage page to support a resource allocation analysis.
Important note: This team usage page only displays data for published projects. So, a team usage review requires schedulers to first publish the schedule in P6 EPPM.
Publish Projects
This article demonstrates the steps required to publish projects in preparation of team usage analysis.
Here’s a look at the necessary steps to setup for viewing team usage data. In the Projects | EPS page select the respective project and click the Actions drop down menu, Figure 1, and choose Publish Projects.
Figure 1
If your Publish Projects feature is dimmed or “ghosted out” like our example you must first enable publication. Again, highlight your project left click the gear and choose Set Project Preferences from the menu, Figure 2.
In project preferences click the Analytics & Services page, Figure 3.
Figure 3
In the Publication frame toggle on Enable Publication, Figure 3. Continuing go to Administration | Application Settings and Services page, Figure 4.
Figure 4
In the Services page and Publication Period enter the start date of your earliest project then enter a finish date in years. Our start date is 2013-12-01 and the finish date is 20 years later or 2033-12-01, which is a sufficient time frame to cover all our projects of interest. Also, set the time distribute interval to Day, so we can view both daily and weekly resource allocations. Finally, toggle on “Publish resource and role data” to make certain your resource data is published.
Now we are ready to publish project data. Continuing in the EPS page choose the Actions menu and Publish Projects feature, Figure 5, which is now active.
Figure 5
When you publish project data the following Publishing Projects dialog appears, Figure 6.
Figure 6
Select OK and view the progress of the publishing service request by choosing Welcome, ## | View Service Status, Figure 7.
Figure 7
Your service request report should appear on two lines: one for Publish Resource and Role Assignment Spreadsheet and on for Publish Project, Figure 8.
Figure 8
Now we are ready to view team usage data. We continue with our demonstration and select Projects | Team Usage and the Customize View feature, Figure 9.
Figure 9
In Customize View, Figure 10, we leave the Display in units, set the timescale to Week/Day, and toggle to display for open projects.
Figure 10
Then we enter the date range display to capture our entire schedule duration. Continuing we select the Heavy Equipment Operator (HEO) resource to view its resource allocation, Figure 11.
Figure 11
Finally, we click the right double arrow to scroll forward through the schedule to find the HEO’s allocation on the project, Figure 12.
Figure 12
The team usage profile of the HEO is displayed in Figure 13.
Figure 13
The Team Usage allocation profile indicates that the HEO is over allocated January 17th through 25th. We are asking the HEO to work 11.5-hours on these days or 1.5-hours overtime. At this juncture we can exert resource leveling efforts to eliminate the HEO over allocation or accept the overtime additional costs. In our demonstration we elect to have the HEO work overtime and conclude our analysis.
Summary
An optimized schedule may present well, but may be far from reality in execution. If your resources are over allocated the schedule will not go according to plan, and will delay.
The Primavera P6 EPPM Team Usage page supports the review and adjustment of resource allocations to properly distribute resource efforts across the schedule. Before resource allocations can be inspected in Team Usage the project must first be published.
Publish reports in Primavera P6 EPPM, requires a few important steps and settings. Having a good handle on these publishing procedures opens the door to better resource allocation efforts.