The Progress Spotlight feature in Primavera P6 EPPM offers schedulers the opportunity to create look ahead reports and highlight upcoming activities in a project. It allows consistent project controlling and reporting, focusing on activities scheduled for a defined period. This can be the upcoming week, the next two weeks, month or quarter depending on the duration of the project.
Although the Spotlight is a standard feature in Primavera P6 Professional software, utilizing it in Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM) version can be a little more challenging. The Spotlight Look Ahead tool is only available in the legacy classic view and usually has to be activated. Let’s take a closer look.
In Figure 1, we have our schedule in legacy classic view. Our schedule has a baseline and has been progressed a few weeks. We want to highlight upcoming activities using the Spotlight tool which is the fastest way to report upcoming events.
Figure 1
As the Progress Spotlight is not activated in our classic view, we make it available by selecting ‘View’ from the toolbar. We scroll down to ‘Toolbars’, select ‘View’ and click on ‘Progress Spotlight’, as in Figure 2.
Figure 2
The Progress Spotlight icon now appears in the toolbar directly above our Gantt chart, as in Figure 3.
Figure 3
By clicking on the Progress Spotlight icon and hovering the cursor over the right edge of the yellow spotlight on the Gantt chart, we can select a range of upcoming activities. These are then highlighted on both the Gantt chart and activities table, as shown below in Figure 4.
Figure 4
We can click and drag the cursor left or right to compress or expand the date range of our highlighted activities.
Summary
Using the Progress Spotlight in Primavera P6 EPPM is the quickest way to highlight upcoming activities in a project, on both the Gantt chart and activities table. It offers schedulers consistency for reporting and controlling a project.
In Primavera P6 EPPM version 16.1, the Progress Spotlight is only available in legacy classic view and it usually has to be activated. If you are working in the standard view simply switch to legacy classic view by clicking on the top right above the Gantt chart to access this feature.