Renumber Activities Sequentially
After you have moved activities in a P6 Professional schedule, how can you have all the scheduled activities sequentially renumbered? Let’s take a look.
When you have a list of tasks, you expect them to be numbered sequentially and ascending from the top to the bottom of the list. In P6 Professional, however, when you move activities in your schedule, the software does not assume the task to renumber the Activity IDs in a sequential order. It takes a little editing, but you can efficiently renumber activities sequentially and ascending for the entire schedule, which is preferable.
This article demonstrates a quick tip to renumber a schedule’s Activity IDs sequentially and in ascending order in P6 Professional.
Figure 1 shows our demonstration schedule.
Note that the activities for the Piping deliverable in Figure 1 are out of sequence with the rest of the schedule. This could make assigning activity relationships a more convoluted process.
Let us first attempt to renumber all the activities sequentially in a single renumbering operation. We proceed as follows:
- Choose Edit | Select All
The selected tasks appear in Figure 2.
- Choose Edit | Renumber Activity IDs
For the Auto-number section in the dialogue, we renumber our activities using a new prefix (the letter A) so there are no duplicate Activity IDs in the resident memory. We use the same suffix (1000) and increment value (10).
- Click OK
The schedule appears as displayed in Figure 4.
Observe that the Piping deliverable activities have a new prefix but still need to be ordered according to the rest of the schedule. Our first attempt to achieve a schedule with sequential Activity IDs for the entire schedule has failed.
Let us try again. This time, we break up the auto-numbering into sections to isolate the numbering of the out-of-sequence tasks.
- Select the activities from the top down to just before the out-of-sequence activities.
- Choose Edit | Renumber Activity ID.
- Change the prefix to the letter K and renumber with the previous suffix and increment.
The selected tasks and Activity IDs renumber settings are displayed in Figure 5.
- Click OK.
This generates Activity IDs with a new prefix but the same suffix and increment value up to the Piping deliverable. Continuing, we renumber the out-of-sequence tasks.
- Select the out-of-sequence activities.
- Choose Edit | Renumber Activity IDs
- Change the suffix to resume after suffix 1050, which is suffix 1060.
The selected out-of-sequence activities and suitable Auto-numbering settings for these activities appear in Figure 6.
- Click OK.
The Piping deliverable now has the correct sequence of Activity IDs. Following along…
- Select the remainder of the activities in the schedule.
- Choose Edit | Renumber Activity IDs
- Change the suffix to resume after suffix 1080, which is suffix 1090.
The selected activities and Renumber Activity IDs dialogue appear in Figure 7.
- Click OK
The final schedule appears in Figure 8.
As displayed in Figure 8, the Activity IDs are numbered sequentially and ascending for the whole schedule, which is what we want.
Summary
Primavera P6 Professional works to display WBS elements and the respective efforts to produce these deliverables in an activity table and Gantt chart. The P6 software does not presume to renumber your Activity IDs when you move a group of activities in the schedule.
To achieve sequential activity IDs for this situation, you must separate the operation to reassign activity IDs into several so the procedure to renumber out-of-sequence activities is separate. In this way, your whole schedule’s activity IDs are sequential and ascending, making for a more workable schedule Activity ID nomenclature.