How do you create a night shift calendar for work, split over 12 am midnight?
A client needed to schedule a traffic system project at night. What makes this difficult is that each eleven-hour shift spanned 12 am midnight; it began at 7 pm and continued until 6 am the next day. This can be done in P6 Professional but requires detailed hour specifications for the four-day, eleven-hour-per-day workweek. Also, a holiday exception day is required.
This article demonstrates how to create a night shift calendar comprising of four-day, eleven-hour night-shift workweek, including holidays.
Demonstration
We demonstrate how to add a new calendar, use that calendar to create a new project and then display a sample schedule with our newly created calendar.
Create a New Calendar
We begin by choosing Enterprise | Calendar. Figure 1 displays the resulting Calendars dialogue.
The toggle is set to display global calendars, which are available to any user accessing the database. The default calendar is currently Corporate – Standard Full Time, which comes standard with P6 Professional when the sample data is loaded during installation. This global calendar has a five-day, eight-hour-per-day workweek. We want to create a four-day, 11-hour-per-day workweek global calendar.
We click + Add, Figure 1. Then, in the Select Calendar to Copy from pop-up menu, we choose Corporate – Standard Full Time.
We type in a suitable name for our new global calendar, ‘4×11 Night Shift & Federal Holidays’, Figure 3.
We then check-mark our newly created calendar to make it the default calendar for the database, Figure 4.
There can be only one default calendar for the database, and the default calendar is important as it determines the shading of Standard/Nonwork/Exception days on the Gantt chart. In the Calendars dialogue, we select Modify, Figure 4, to set up our new calendar’s Workweek and Time Periods. We toggle Detailed work/hours/day; this toggle displays the workday in half-hour increments, Figure 5.
Then, with the Detailed work hours/day setting toggled on, we click the Workweek button in Figure 5 to specify our calendar’s standard weekly hours. We could include a half-hour lunchtime, but this level of detail is unnecessary. Work begins Sunday night at 7 p.m. We highlight from 19:00 through 23:00 and click the Work button, Figure 6, to make these half-hour increments worktime.
Figure 7 displays the Work Hours specification for Sunday.
In the Day of the Week navigator pane, we select Monday, Figure 7. Then we highlight 12 am to 6 am and click Work, Figure 8 to conclude the first night shift’s work period specification.
Figure 9 displays the morning work.
In Figure 9, we select the 8:00 through 15:00 increments and click Nonwork to define the afternoon as nonwork time. Then, in Figure 10, we begin to define the second day’s work as 19:00 through 23:00, starting Monday night.
In Figure 10, we chose 19:00 through 23:00 increments in the Work hours section, then clicked Work. Figure 11 displays the work hours for Monday.
We select Tuesday in the Day of the Week navigator pane, Figure 11. Then we repeat the Work and Nonwork hours for Tuesday through Thursday morning. Figure 12 displays Thursday with the morning work.
We then click Friday in the Day of the Week navigator pane. We highlight the current Friday work hours and click Nonwork to make Friday a day off, Figure 13.
Friday’s day-off status is shown in Figure 14.
Now we want to set the Time Periods; in Figure 15, we click the Time Periods button.
In Figure 16, we enter 11 in the Hours/Day field to make each eleven-hour period one day.
Continuing, we need to enter the Fourth of July holiday for our nightshift workers. July fourth is already a day off, so we plan to make Sunday night through Monday morning off time. We choose Sunday, July 6, 2031, and click the Nonwork button to mark it as a day off, Figure 17.
Sunday, July 6, 2031, then becomes a non-work holiday. Note that our schedule is for the year 2031, so to affect it, we had to define the Fourth of July holiday for that year. In Figure 18, we choose Monday, July 7th, 2031, and select Work hours 0 through 5, then click Nonwork to set this period from 12 am to 6 am as nonwork time.
The work hours for Monday are displayed in Figure 19.
Monday then becomes an Exception day (Figure 19). Our calendar creation is complete.
Creating a New Project
Now we want to create a new project and assign it the ‘4×11 Night Shift & Federal Holidays’ calendar. We proceed and choose File | + New. In the Create a New Project dialogue, Figure 20, we click the ellipse in the ‘Select EPS’ field to choose a Node where we want to locate our project within the Enterprise Project Structure (EPS).
Figure 21 shows the ‘Select EPS to add into’ pop-up dialogue when the sample data is loaded into P6 Professional during the installation.
We locate our project within the E&C Node, as shown in Figure 21. (Note: your organization likely has a different EPS location for storing projects.) In the Create a New Project | Project Name dialogue, we enter a suitable Project ID and Project Name, then click Next, Figure 22.
The Project Planned Start date is June 8, 2031, which we enter in Figure 23 and click Next.
We then must choose the Responsible Manager associated with the Node, i.e., the folder where we stored our project. In Figure 24, we click the ellipse to choose the Responsible Manager.
The Responsible Manager associated with our Node, i.e., the folder where we store our project, will be E&C, as shown in Figure 25.
Note that your project may have a different Responsible Manager than the one assigned to its parent Node, but standard practice is to assign a single Responsible Manager to all projects within the same Node. After selecting the Responsible Manager, we click Next, which takes us to the dialogue where we choose the Assignment Rate Type, Figure 26.
We go with the Standard Rate for resource pay rates and click Next, Figure 26. The final dialog box, displayed in Figure 27, says ‘Congratulations.’ We click Finish to complete creating our new project, which is assigned the default ‘4×11 Night Shift & Federal Holidays’ calendar.
In Figure 28, we check Projects | Defaults and confirm that our project calendar is the current database default calendar ‘4×11 Night Shift & Federal Holidays’.
Project Schedule with 4×11 Night Shift & Federal Holidays Calendar
Figure 29 displays a sample schedule we created using our new ‘4×11 Night Shift & Federal Holidays’ calendar.
Observe the shading on nonwork days, Friday and Saturday.
Summary
A night shift calendar is possible in Primavera P6 Professional and the shift can span midnight. When it spans midnight, you should define the workweek with the Detailed work hours/day toggled on. Then you will specify each day’s work, Sunday through Saturday, in half-hour increments.
Ten Six recommends that you set the user preferences to display the date and time stamp and confirm the start and finish times for each task assigned to your night shift calendar. Because holidays span midnight, they will include an exception day.