A recent request asked for an efficient way to move activities from one deliverable to another in P6 Professional. Let’s take a look at how to do this.
P6 Professional is about displaying deliverables and their associated activities on a table and Gantt chart. Sometimes, you want to move an activity associated with one deliverable, i.e., the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) element, to another. Because moving an activity between WBS elements is a common operation, P6 Professional provides a quick way to do this.
This article demonstrates a quick tip on how to move activities from one deliverable association to another.
Figure 1 shows our demonstration schedule.
The Insulate Piping task, Figure 1, is mistakenly linked to the Thrust-block deliverable; we want it connected to the Piping deliverable. We must move it from the Thrust-block WBS element to the Piping WBS element, as indicated in Figure 2.
A copy-and-paste procedure will work but requires clicking through several dialogues that ask what attributes you want to include. There is a more efficient way to move a task between deliverables. Let’s demonstrate this. We select the Insulate Piping effort and hoover the mouse over the vertical grouping band for the project, Figure 3.
This is the blue vertical band in the Figure 3 schedule. When your mouse hovers over the project’s vertical band, you will see a white rectangle appear beside the mouse arrow, Figure 3. When the rectangle appears, left-click and drag the mouse and white rectangle to the Piping WBS element, Figure 3, and release. The final schedule appears in Figure 4.
The activity table and Gantt chart look good; they have the proper task associations for the WBS elements.
Summary
There often is more than one way to perform an operation in P6 Professional. The good news is that the P6 developers provided an efficient way to move activities from one deliverable to another as it is a common schedule modification request.
As demonstrated, select the respective effort, hover the mouse over the vertical grouping band till a white rectangle appears, then left-click and drag the arrow and white rectangle to the other WBS element, and release.