Deleting Activities Vs. the Dissolve Activities Feature in P6 EPPM
There are many occasions, during the planning of a project, when schedulers have to make changes because the scope of work has changed and an activity is no longer required. Some users may just simply delete activities which no longer fit into the current project. By deleting activities, this will often lead to open ends in logic, because you might delete the only successor to another activity in the schedule. Or you could delete the only predecessor to another activity.
Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM) supports dissolving activities, which allows schedulers to remove activities and bridge the gap in logic at the same time. So how does this feature work? Let’s take a closer look.
In Figure 1, is our ‘Pipe Repair & Improve’ Primavera P6 EPPM schedule. The Project Manager has decided to install pre-insulated piping and has informed us that the ‘insulate piping’ activity is no longer required. Therefore, we must remove the ‘insulate piping’ from the schedule.
Figure 1
By right-clicking on the ‘insulate piping’ we can select dissolve from the pop-up menu. As shown below in Figure 2.
Figure 2
When we recalculate our schedule after dissolving ‘insulate piping’, we notice (Figure 3) the inserted FS relationship between ‘test piping at pressure’ and ‘write quality assurance report’.
We have successfully removed ‘insulate piping’ and bridged the gap in logic to maintain our continuous critical path through our schedule.
Figure 3
Summary
By deleting an activity in Primavera P6 EPPM any associated predecessor and successor relationships will be removed, which could result in a schedule discontinuity.
However, by using the dissolve activities feature in Primavera P6 EPPM, when an activity is removed the dissolved activity joins the predecessor and successor activities to retain the schedule’s network logic.