Projects that have weekly status meetings requiring broad attendance of resources will incur costs for those meetings. How can schedulers model these meetings in Primavera P6 Professional?
Primavera P6 Professional does not have a weekly event feature similar to Microsoft Project, but schedulers can implement its Level Of Effort (LOE) activity type to track the cost of weekly meetings. LOE activities are not associated with any one particular event or task. Instead they span the life of the activities over which they are linked.
This could be the entire project or a subset of activities within the project. They connect from the start of the first activity to the end of the last activity in the chosen range. LOE activities can have resource assignments and associated costs and it is this fact that makes them different to the so called hammock activity: an older term for a linked activity that is strewn between two points.
These characteristics make LOE activities helpful for tracking administrative, overhead, project management, and other costs within the project, and not task specific. LOE activities can also model meetings that occur weekly for the life of the project, but they do this as a single continuous bar that stretches the likely duration of said meetings.
This article explains how to track the cost of weekly project meetings for the entire duration of the project lifecycle in Primavera P6 Professional.
Below in Figure 1 is our demonstration project.
Figure 1
This is a short installation project. It has three activities. It also has two LOE activities: project management and weekly meetings. We still have to assign resources to the weekly meeting LOE. In the bottom details select add resource, Figure 2.
Figure 2
In Figure 3 the foreman resource is assigned.
Figure 3
But the 120-hour budgeted units is significantly beyond our meeting estimate for the whole project. In Figure 4 we enter the more reasonable budgeted units 6-hours.
Figure 4
We continue and do the same for the pipe fitter, Figure 5.
Figure 5
Note the updated budgeted units/time 0.4 value for both the foreman and pipe fitter.
Now we want to inspect our resource usage profile to confirm resources are not over allocated. Select the resource usage profile icon, Figure 6.
Figure 6
In Figure 7 we find that our foreman is over allocated because of the meeting.
Figure 7
We need to adjust the budgeted units/time of the foreman and pipe fitter, accordingly. In Figure 8 we set the default units/time of the foreman and pipefitter to 7.6 hour/day.
Figure 8
At this juncture we have three options: 1) remove and reassign the foreman and pipe fitter, 2) excluding the meeting activity manually change the budgeted units/time of the foreman and pipe fitter to 7.6 hour/day, and 3) create global change routines to make the foreman and pipe fitter updates automatically. In Figure 9 we manually change the budgeted units/time of the foreman and pipe fitter.
Figure 9
The global change routine to update the foreman budgeted units/time would be similar to Figure 10.
Figure 10
The updated resource usage profile of the foreman is in Figure 11.
Figure 11
We prefer keeping the duration type of the meeting activity to fixed duration and units/time. Unless the schedule proceeds according to plan you will have to update the weekly meeting actuals for the foreman and pipe fitter. In Figure 12 the project updates one week.
Figure 12
Activity A only progresses three days, so the actual units of the weekly meeting is only 1.2-hours. Well, the project may not have a week’s progress, but the meeting still lasted 2-hours. We update the meeting actuals to 2-hours for each resource, Figure 13.
Figure 13
The project updates for week two in Figure 14.
Figure 14
The weekly meeting actuals, again, require attention. After two weeks the project progressed 8-days. As displayed in Figure 14, the weekly meeting actuals are 3.2-hours or 0.4-hour/day for 8-days. As before, the meeting lasted two hours, so we update the meeting actuals, accordingly, Figure 15.
Figure 15
Somehow the project miraculously completed on the original planned completion date. Well, this time the meeting actuals do not require an update, Figure 16.
Figure 16
Summary
Similar to administration and project management, Primavera P6 Professional LOE activities distribute weekly meetings as a daily effort. If you are used to Microsoft Project you may not like this approach, but to its advantage. It actually avoids the leveling efforts Microsoft Project weekly meeting events require to eliminate the associated resource over allocations.
Yes, the meeting attendees may require an updated default budgeted units/time value to avoid resource over allocations. And the weekly meeting actuals require attention during updates. Despite these negatives the LOE modeled weekly meeting is a fairly straight forward approach to implement.