Do your activity start and finish date time stamps fall in line with your intended task original durations? If not check your calendar’s detailed work hours your calendar’s detailed work hours.
The global calendar dialog in Primavera P6 Professional provides the options to set the ‘total work hours/day’ and ‘detailed work hours/day’. If your project planned start time does not match your defined daily workweek start time then your activity finish time stamps may be off. And if your constraint time stamps do not match your defined daily workweek finish time then the associated activity’s total float and finish times may be off.
This article demonstrates what project start and detailed workweek mismatched times may have on your schedule’s total float, and start and finish times.
In Figure 1 we have our demonstration project schedule.
Figure 1
Note that activities start at 8:00am in the morning and conclude at 6:00pm in the evening. This makes for a ten hour day. The corresponding calendar workweek detailed work hours/day is 8:00am through 6:00pm, Figure 2.
Figure 2
This matches the project start time of 8:00am.
Now let’s observe what happens when we offset the start time of the project to 9:00am, Figure 3.
Note: if you wish to see dates with time-stamps you can enable them in the Dates tab of the User Preferences dialog.
Figure 3
The data date updates to 9:00am, Figure 4, and we recalculate the schedule.
Figure 4
In Figure 5 we see that our activity finish times are not 7:00pm as we would expect.
Figure 5
Also the total float of Install Fence, as per the ‘finish on or before’ 6:00pm constraint is 4.9 days. Again, not what we want.
If the start time of our project and workweek days is 9:00am then we need to update our calendar ‘detailed work hours/day’. In Figure 6 we observe that the respective global calendar dialog is toggled to ‘total work hours/day’.
Figure 6
In Figure 7 we toggle ‘detailed work hours/day’.
Figure 7
Select the workweek button and make the work hours for Monday through Thursday, 9:00am to 7:00pm, Figure 8.
Figure 8
In Figure 9 we set the ‘install fence’ ‘finish on or before’ constraint to 7:00pm, and recalculate the schedule.
Figure 9
As you can observe in Figure 9, our activity start and finish times now match the ‘detailed work hours/day’, and our install fence total float now is in line.
Summary
As demonstrated, it is important that your project start date time-stamp matches the ‘detailed work hours/day’ of your calendar. Also, it is important that the constraint dates time-stamp match the ‘detailed work hours/day’ of your project calendar.
It is possible to include an hour lunch time in the ‘detailed work hours/day’. If you include lunch make certain your calendar ‘total work hours/day’ is in line with your calendar ‘detailed work hours/day’.