Weekly project meetings that require the broad attendance of resources, will incur costs that are not always measured. Modelling weekly project meetings in Primavera P6 can be done quite easily, as a Level Of Effort (LOE) activity.
LOE activity in Primavera P6 has been designed for representing work which does not directly contribute to the deliverables of the project. They typically summarize work progress for activities like safety meetings or the maintenance of equipment. LOE activities are not associated with any particular task or event but instead, they span the whole life of activities over which they are linked.
So how do schedulers assign LOE to model weekly project meetings in Primavera P6? Let’s show you how.
In our small demolition project, shown below in Figure 1, we have three activities and two LOE activities: project management and weekly project meetings. We have to assign the resources to the weekly meeting LOE. In the bottom details, select Add Resource.
Figure 1
And, as in Figure 2, we assign our ‘Foreman’ and ‘Pipe Fitter’. We enter 6 hours for our ‘Budgeted Units’.
Figure 2
In Figure 3, we select our ‘Resource Usage Profile’ icon, to check that our resources are not over-allocated.
Figure 3
In Figure 4, we find that our foreman is over-allocated because of the meeting.
We need to adjust the budgeted units/time of the ‘Foreman’ and ‘Pipe Fitter.’
Figure 4
In Figure 5, we set the default units/time of the ‘Foreman’ and ‘Pipe Fitter’ to 7.6 hours/day.
We have a couple of options; we can remove and reassign both the ‘Foreman’ and the ‘Pipe Fitter’ or we can exclude the meeting activity and manually change the budgeted units/time for both the ‘Foreman’ and ‘Pipe Fitter’ to 7.6 hours/day.
Figure 5
We decide to manually change the budgeted units/time of the ‘Foreman’ and ‘Pipe Fitter’, shown below in Figure 6.
Figure 6
When we re-check our ‘Resource Usage’, in Figure 7, we can see that the Foreman isn’t overallocated.
Figure 7
We prefer keeping the duration type of the meeting activity to fixed duration and units/time. Because unless the schedule proceeds according to plan, we will only have to update the weekly meeting actuals for the ‘Foreman’ and ‘Pipe Fitter.’
In Figure 8, our project updates one week. Activity A, ‘Demolition’ only progressed three days because there were some issues with the explosive charges. The actual units of the weekly meeting are only 1.2-hours, but the meeting lasted 2-hours.
Figure 8
Therefore, we update the meeting actuals to 2-hours for both the ‘Foreman’ and ‘Pipe Fitter’ (Figure 9).
Figure 9
Below in Figure 10, our project updates for week two. The project has only progressed for eight days. The weekly meeting actuals are 3.2-hours or 0.4-hours/day for eight days, again the meeting lasted two hours.
Figure 10
Once again, in Figure 11, we update the meeting actuals.
Figure 11
Our project completes on time as seen in Figure 12 below, therefore we don’t need to update the meeting actuals.
Figure 12
Summary
Like administration and project management, Primavera P6 Professional LOE activities distribute weekly meetings as a daily effort. The meeting resources may need an updated default budgeted units/time to avoid resource over allocations. And, the weekly meetings may require attention during updates.
That said, the LOE modeled weekly meeting is a straight forward approach to implement in Primavera P6.