A veteran scheduler sent us a quick tip about the often-overlooked P6 Professional Activity Code color field that he’s found particularly helpful in his years of scheduling work.
Activity codes are important to an executable schedule. Schedulers often find themselves in situations where they need to confirm the activity code assigned to a respective activity is correct.
You can filter by activity code as one way to verify activity code assignments. Utilizing the color field in the activity code definition provides another efficient way to check your activity code assignments.
This article provides a quick tip, explanation on why the often-neglected color field in the activity code definition is a helpful quality check on activity code assignments.
In the Activity Codes dialogue, Figure 1, we have our demonstration Activity Code, Discipline, which represents sample disciplines one would find in a respective organization.
Figure 1
In general, each practice has its own unique color. The exception is differing disciplines that have a common manager. Above, Operations & Maintenance, Quality Assurance, Operator Training, and Procedure and Programs all have a single overarching manager; they are all assigned the color light blue. These colorings are assigned with the project team’s best interest in consideration and not necessarily the scheduler. We have the Responsible Person’s in the organization displayed in the Activity Code dialogue, Figure 2.
Figure 2
Note the engineers are orange, the Environmental people are green, the Project Management Office (PMO) are white, and so on. In Figure 3, we click the header for color column in the Activity Codes dialogue to organize the labor resources by Discipline.
Figure 3
You can also copy and paste these Responsible Person’s directly from the Activity Codes dialogue into Microsoft Excel where the colors are converted to color codes for easy sorting, Figure 3.
Figure 4
Example Report for Discipline Managers
Summary
Color coding the Discipline and Responsible Persons is an additional step, but it is worth the effort because:
- It provides a quality check.
- It helps the scheduler efficiently spot resources missing an assignment.
- Schedulers can more ably count Responsible Persons in a Discipline.
- When copied/pasted into Excel the colors convert to code values, which helps the scheduler better organize the data.
Further, you can color code by plant system classification, such as, class 1, class 2, primary, and secondary. System types of Mechanical, and Electrical, or Information & Communication (I&C) may also be easily distinguished by assigned colors.