P6 Professional has a quick way to insert finish-to-start (FS) relationships between activities, and now there is an efficient way Unlink Activities in P6 r24.12.
In P6 Professional, schedulers can insert relationships between tasks in the Relationships bottom details tab or the Assign tool group. In the Relationships tab, the connection is from one activity to one or more. If you select several activities in the activities table and want to connect them to a predecessor or successor, then the Assign tool group works but not the Relationships tab.
Because the FS relationship should be the most common in a quality schedule, P6 Professional provides an efficient way to connect a series of selected tasks with FS relationships between them in the order chosen. Now with P6 r24.12, there is an unlink button to remove relationships between one or more tasks.
This article demonstrates a quick way to insert FS relationships between tasks ordered by selection and remove relationships of any type between two or more selected activities.
Demonstration
Figure 1 displays our demonstration schedule with no relationships connecting between Lay Roadway, Lay Stoning, and Substantial Completion.
Figure 1
Link Activities
We can connect these tasks with FS relationships in the order chosen. To do this, in Figure 2, we click to select a series of three activities: Lay Roadway, Lay Stoning, and Substantial Completion, and then select Edit | Link Activities.
Figure 2
(Note further in Figure 2, that the Assign buttons in the Relationships tab Predecessors and Successors frames are inactive because we have more than two tasks selected in the Activities table.)
This Link Activities operation puts an FS relationship between the Lay Roadway and Lay Stoning, Figure 3.
Figure 3
Further, it inserted an FS relationship between Lay Stoning and Substantial Completion, Figure 4.
Figure 4
Our link activities demonstration confirms that FS relationships are linked between tasks in the order they were selected in the activities table.
Unlink Activities
To remove these relationships, we select Lay Stoning, Lay Roadway, and Substantial Completion in any order and choose Edit | Unlink Activities, as shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5
Figure 6 confirms that no relationship exists between Lay Stoning and Lay Roadway.
Figure 6
Figure 7 shows no relationship between Lay Roadway and Substantial Completion efforts.
Figure 7
Our Link Activities and Unlink Activities operations brought us full circle.
Summary
The Link Activities operation is a quick way to insert FS between tasks. After you convince yourself that FS relationships are inserted in order of task selection, this becomes a handy FS relationship insertion tool. Until r24.12, there was no unlink activities in P6 option to remove relationships connecting one or more tasks. Now, the Unlink Activities in P6 feature provides this ability.