Primavera P6 Professional is about displaying project deliverables and associated tasks in the activity table area, but this requires the proper table Group By settings. Let’s show you how.
After one of our P6 Professional Fundamentals classes, a student asked if I could walk him through entering deliverables and associated tasks in P6 Professional on his company’s database. He successfully entered deliverables, but nothing appeared when he displayed the table activity area; we couldn’t see his deliverables.
I had to troubleshoot this mysterious disappearance of his deliverables to explain what happened when my student proceeded from the project’s Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) to the activity table area.
This article presents a quick tip ‘Group By’ troubleshooting recommendation for the novice P6 Professional scheduler.
Figure 1 displays our P6 Professional demonstration project schedule, showing the project deliverables in the WBS tab.
Observe in the Total Activities column that this schedule currently has no tasks. The WBS code and WBS Name columns look good. No deliverables appear on the Gantt chart even after left-clicking the scroll bar because their durations depend on the underlying tasks which are currently not included in the schedule.
We proceed, click on the Activities tab, Figure 2, and display the activity table.
Nothing appears in the activity table in Figure 2. This is disconcerting. Also, no Gantt chart appears even after we left-click the scroll bar for the Gantt chart frame, Figure 2.
As you plan and status schedules in P6 Professional, keeping a list of troubleshooting ideas handy is good. If your activity table looks askew, the first item on your troubleshooting list is to check the Group By setting for the activity table. In Figure 3, we left-click on the Group and Sort by button icon in the layout tool group.
The field directly below the Group By column header in the Group By table of the Group and Sort dialogue should be populated with a grouping option; it is not, Figure 4.
So, we look to assign a Group By option. When we select the Group By field, a dropdown menu appears, and we choose the WBS grouping option, Figure 5.
In Figure 6, the Group By fields are set to display the WBS for all levels in the WBS hierarchy.
This organizes the tasks by WBS element, i.e., deliverable. We then click OK and get the activity table displayed in Figure 7.
Our deliverables display as expected, and the layout is Classic Schedule Layout. No Gantt chart graph appears, and when we click on the scroll bar for the Gantt chart, there is still no graph. Then we check the filter and find it is set to All Activities, meaning no activity filter is enabled, so all activities display.
The question arises again: why do no deliverables appear on the Gantt chart? None appear because the deliverables’ duration depends on the underlying tasks, and the schedule has no tasks. If there are no tasks, the deliverables are of zero duration and, therefore, do not display.
The Gantt chart shows tasks and WBS elements (or deliverables) when we insert activities into the activity table, Figure 8.
Returning to the WBS tab, we have the WBS with activity sums in the Total Activities column and a Gantt chart, Figure 9, now that the schedule contains the underlying deliverable activities.
Summary
In P6 Professional, there is a clear demarcation between the deliverables and the tasks required to produce those WBS elements. The deliverables are entered in a separate tab, where you define and can move them in the WBS hierarchy.
These WBS elements are viewed in the task table area to show their relation to associated tasks, but they only appear here when the Group By field in the Group and Sort dialogue is set to WBS. With the proper Group and Sort dialogue Group By setting for the table area, the schedule is organized into deliverables and efforts (or tasks) required to produce those deliverables.
Because deliverables are inserted first, before considering the needed tasks, P6 Professional adheres to the well-known principle of beginning with the end in mind. The deliverable is the final product or service delivered to the project sponsor/customer. It is only after full consideration of the project deliverables that schedulers ask themselves how to define the efforts required to produce these deliverables.
This is the foundation on which P6 Professional schedules are built—one of the main reasons many agencies prefer P6 schedules and want submitted projects to be in the P6 XER format.