Question

Primavera P6 Questions

1. How can you define critical path in Primavera P6? Provide a short paragraph of description.
2. What is the Leveling tab in Primavera P6 used for? Describe how it works using the Botanical Garden example.

Answer 1

1. How can you define critical path in Primavera P6? Provide a short paragraph of description.

Critical Path is a longest continuous path of activities from the Progress Data Date to the Final Completion Activity, which determines overall completion date of the Project. The activities that typically comprise the Critical Path are those activities with the least amount of Total Float.

How do you find the critical path in Primavera p6?

4 Easy Ways to Show the Critical Path in P6

1. Press F9, and then click the Options button.

2. Find the setting “Define Critical Activities as”. Choose Longest Path.

3. Reschedule your Project.

4. Notice the Gantt chart now. You should see a red Critical Path now.

4 Easy Ways to Show the Critical Path in P6

1. Check the Gantt Chart

By default, the P6 Gantt chart will show your project’s Critical Path activities in bright red. This makes it easy to have a quick glance at the Gantt Chart et voila!, your Critical Path stands-out like a safety vest.

2. Use the Critical Path / Longest Path Columns

Edit your columns and go digging for one called “Critcal” and another called “Longest Path”. Add one or both of these nifty columns to your Activity Layout to show clearly which activities are Critical.

3. Turn On a Filter

Using a Filter can also be a quick and effective way to manifest your Critical Path. Click the Filters button to turn on the Critical Path filter. This will show only the Critical Activities. There’s also a filter for the longest path.

4. Check the Schedule Log

Lastly, you can always check the P6 Schedule Log. The Schedule Log is a log file that gets updated every time your project is scheduled. Press F9 and make sure the box labeled “Log to File” is checked on. Then, click the “View Log” button to open the Schedule Log.

Once you have the log file open in Notepad, you’ll have to scroll down to the section labeled “Exceptions”. But you should see in the log a list of your project’s Critical Activities.

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2. What is the Leveling tab in Primavera P6 used for? Describe how it works using the Botanical Garden example.

               The first step in the levelling process is to determine priorities. You can do this at the project level, activity level or both, depending on your particular situation. Primavera P6 Professional provides built in fields for prioritizing your projects and activities.

About the Leveler

The Leveler tool allows you to schedule activities in a way that reduces or eliminates overloads for resources assigned to more than one activity within a project or across many projects. It can do this based upon the priority parameters you define at the activity or project level. This provides for prioritization of activities based upon the project they are in and also their ranking within a single project. When the leveler is used, it attempts to move activities to reduce or remove an overload for a particular resource. Used effectively the Leveler can be a powerful tool for capacity planning, running what if scenarios and helping you determine the impact of resource over-allocations.

Setting Up for Resource Leveling

The first step in the leveling process is to determine priorities. You can do this at the project level, activity level or both, depending on your particular situation. Primavera P6 Professional provides built in fields for prioritizing your projects and activities.

Project Leveling Priority – in the Projects view of P6 Professional you will find a column below the General category of the Columns dialog named Project Leveling Priority.

This allows you to set a number against a project that indicates its priority with regard to other projects; the lower the number, the higher the priority. By including this field in the Leveler’s settings, the Leveler will calculate and move activities based upon the project’s priority over other projects being leveled.

Activity Leveling Priority – in the Activities view, P6 Professional provides a field named Activity Leveling Priority in the General category of the Columns dialog.

The priority rankings range from Top to Lowest and can be set against activities within the schedule to guide the leveler as to which activities it should move, or not move.

Note: you can also create numeric activity codes to define your own priority levels if the presets are not to your needs.

Once you have entered priority values for your projects and/or activities within a project, you are ready to use the P6 Leveler.

USING THE PRIMAVERA P6 PROFESSIONAL RESOURCE LEVELER

Primavera P6 Resource Leveler Usage

Click on the Level Resources icon on the toolbar.

This will run the Level Resources dialog. In here you can define the parameters for the leveling process. Look at each of the options carefully and decide which options you wish to select. In this example we are going to level our project using both its project and activity leveling priorities.

Using the Add button, you can add each of the required leveling priority fields into the table area and then determine an ascending or descending sort order for each one.

Running the Primavera P6 Resource Leveler

Once you have selected the required options for leveling, click the Level button to start the process.

P6 Professional will move activities in order to eliminate or at least reduce the resource overload issue

Going Forward

The resulting dates represent the optimum positioning for the activities based on current resource loadings. However, if you reschedule the project without telling P6 Professional to use the resource leveling option, the dates will return to their original position. In order to maintain the new dates for the schedule going forward, you have a few options:

Select the “Automatically level resources when scheduling” option in the Level Resources dialog.

Set the “Level resources during scheduling” option in the Schedule Options dialog prior to scheduling the project…

Apply a start constraint to the adjusted activities using the Status tab of the Activity Details view. This will fix the start date for the activity in its new location allowing the typical scheduling options to be used.