We know people out there love to a good challenge.  So test your knowledge of Scheduling and Primavera P6. Try this 4 question quiz with a bonus scenario. Let us know how you did in comments below.

Planner Tutorials Hub

There are many different methods for calculation of actual progress in Primavera P6.  These methods involve using many fields and settings, including:

• Duration % Complete
• Units % Complete
• Physical % Complete
• Percent Complete Type
• Activity % Complete
• Performance % Complete
• Earned Value settings of the WBS Elements

I will explain Duration % Complete in this article. Other fields and settings will be explained in future articles and we will finally have a complete picture of the whole actual progressing system in Primavera P6.

Primavera P6′s 3 Types of Activity Percent Complete

Each activity has three percent complete fields that are calculated all the time:

1. Duration % Complete
2. Units % Complete
3. Physical % Complete

Only one of these values will be selected by the user as the activity’s progress, even though all of them are calculated all the time. I will explain how to choose the appropriate activity percent complete in future articles.

Duration % Complete Calculations

The most common problem with Duration % Complete is that Primavera P6 uses a counterintuitive formula. You may expect it to be something like Microsoft Project’s formula:

Duration % Complete(MS Project) = [Actual Duration] / ( [Actual Duration] + [Remaining Duration] )

But this is not the P6 formula. Duration % Complete is calculated with this formula:

Duration % Complete(P6) = ( [Original Duration] – [Remaining Duration] ) / [Original Duration]

This formula uses Original Duration, which may be different from the current duration. We will check this on the following sample.

Sample: We have an activity with original duration of 20 days. 15 days have passed and we estimate it to finish in 18 days (yes, it’s much longer than we expected initially).  The Original Duration does not change automatically after activity’s start.

Original Duration: 20d
Actual Duration: 15d
Remaining Duration: 18d

[Duration % Complete] = (20-18)/20 = 10%

Intuitive or MSP-like Duration % Complete = 15/(15+18) = 45.45%

The following figure shows the initial state of this sample activity (named A1):

Let’s say that the activity has started in May 8th. We’ll check the Started checkbox and enter the actual start date in its date box.

Learn Primavera P6 Duration Percent Complete

Suppose that it’s currently May 27th; we will reschedule the plan for this data date.

The Actual Duration is automatically calculated based on Actual Start Date and the Data Date, as follows:

[Actual Duration] = [Data Date] – [Actual Start] (P6 formula for in-progress activities)

Unfortunately, you cannot change the Actual Duration field manually.

Now we can enter the remaining duration. In this example, we estimate that A1 requires 18 more days to be completed.  We’ll enter 18d in remaining duration field.  By entering a remaining duration, Duration % Complete will be calculated automatically.

In this case, Duration % Complete is calculated as 10%.

We could have entered the Duration % Complete instead of the Remaining Duration and P6 would have calculated Remaining Duration automatically .
Now, take a look at the Gantt chart.

When you look at the Gantt chart, you see that about half of the current duration is actualized and you may expect a Duration % Complete of around 50%. The exact number of the intuitive formula is 45.45% in this example, which is not equal to our Duration % Complete.

Changing the Original Duration

Primavera P6 uses the following equation for Original Duration is used when an activity is not yet started:

[Original Duration] = [Early Finish] – [Early Start]

However, after the activity has started, Original Duration will not be automatically calculated by Early Start and Early Finish, and you can change it manually.  The At Completion Duration represents our current duration, calculated as:

[At Completion Duration] = [Actual Duration] + [Remaining Duration]

In our example, the At Completion Duration is calculated to be 33d.  We will enter the same value for the Original Duration field and this would be the result:

The activity’s schedule is not changed, but Duration % Complete is recalculated based on the new Original Duration; and yes, it’s the intuitive value that we calculated before.
When Original Duration is equal to the At Completion Duration, the Duration % Complete will have the intuitive value. The following equations show how the P6 formula would become the intuitive formula, when the Original Duration is equal to the At Completion Duration:

[Duration % Complete]* = ( [Original Duration] – [Remaining Duration] ) / [Original Duration]

= ( [At Completion Duration] – [Remaining Duration] ) / [At Completion Duration]

= [Actual Duration] / ( [Actual Duration] + [Remaining Duration] )
* this equation is based on the assumption that Original Duration is equal to the At Completion Duration.

If you would like to have the intuitive Duration % Complete (for any reason), you can create a global change to set the Original Durations of in-progress activities. The following figure shows the appropriate global change setup.

This global change checks each activity’s status; if it’s “In Progress”, then the At Completion Duration would be copied to the Original Duration.  We will then have the intuitive Duration % Completes for all activities.

Duration % Complete for WBS Elements

The previous explanation was focused on Duration % Complete for Activities.  Duration % Complete is also calculated for WBS Elements, but I strongly recommend you not to use Duration % Complete to track a WBS Element’s progress.  Thus I have not included an explanation of the calculations here.

You should always think of Duration % Complete as an intermediate field and use Performance % Complete to track activities and WBS Element’s actual progresses.

I will explain the calculation and usage of Performance % Complete in a future tutorial.

Summary

This tutorial has demonstrated the internal calculations of Primavera P6′s Duration Percent Complete field.

The most common problem in this area is that Primavera P6 does not use the intuitive formula for Duration % Complete which confuses some planners and project managers. We explained the Primavera P6 calculations and the intuitive formula side by side, to show the differences and create a better understanding of the P6 method. Finally, if you absolutely need to use the intuitive formula, try the Global Change described above.

Remember, Duration % Complete does not provide a final result; it is used in a system which provides the actual progress. You should use Performance % Complete to read the actual progresses.  We’ll cover that in an upcoming tutorial soon.

Planner Tutorials Hub

It’s not easy to find Relationship Lag in Primavera P6 project schedules. There aren’t really any features to highlight lag. But understanding how leads or lags are used on your project is an important part of really knowing your schedule.  We need a process to root out any relationship lags in P6.

What’s wrong with using Relationship Lag in my schedule?

The use of Relationship lag is widely discussed on Scheduling and Project Controls discussion boards. The concensus and best practice is that the use of relationship lag should be minimal if it’s used at all.   Why?

According to the Practice Standard for Scheduling, a document prepared by scheduling experts at the Project Management Institute, using Relationship leads or lags add significant schedule risk to a project.    The main reason is the lack of visibility of lag delays on project schedules.  Lag time is hard to identify and document – it isn’t obvious when looking at the Gantt Chart or when analyzing a schedule’s dates.   When lag time is used on a schedule, it is very rarely documented why the delay was added,  causing construction managers to scratch their heads.  Time IS money, after all.  As a best practice, any lag should always be documented in a Notebook topic on the activity.  Or better yet, follow PMI’s standard and use full activities to represent lead/lag delays.  This approach makes leads/lags very visible on a schedule and also allows for more flexibility.

It’s common for less experienced planners to submit schedules with lag.  In Primavera P6, we really need to be able to find out if a schedule uses relationship lag.

Unfortunately, inside the Activity screens in P6, there seems to be no way to sort or filter activities by Lag.  So we’ll need another approach, one that is easy and reusable.

Building a Reusable Relationship Lag Report in Primavera P6

It’s pretty easy to build reports in Primavera P6.  And the reporting features are able to report on a project’s relationships.  Using Filters, we can create a nice report that shows only Activities that have relationships with leads or lags.  Here’s how:

Step 1 – Create a New Report

Navigate over to the Primavera P6 Reports screen.   Click the Add button on the Command Bar to add a new report to your database.

Step 2 – Choosing the Report Subject

When the Report Wizard comes up, click Next to create a new Report.  On the following screen, select the “Activity Relationships” subject area and click next.

Step 3 – Choose Columns

Select the columns as shown.  Click OK.

**NOTE: I’ve discovered that both the “Predecessor ID” and “Successor ID” columns will always be renamed by Primavera to “Activity ID”.  If you click OK after selecting columns and go back to the column choosing screen, these two columns are renamed to “ID”.  I can’t change them either….c’est la vie!

Step 4 – Turn Off Group and Sort

Click the Group and Sort button and set it to <none> or leave the Group By field blank.  Click OK.

Step 5 – Setting a Custom Filter for Lag

Click the “Filter…” button.  In the Parameter dropdown, find and select “Lag”.  Set the conditional dropdown to “is not equal to” and type ’0′ in the Value column.  This combination will filter for both leads (ie: negative lags) and lags.  Click OK to save your Filer.

Step 6 – Saving the Primavera P6 Lag Report

Click Next.  On the following screen, name your report “Relationship Lag Report“.  Click Next.  Before you click Run Report, click Next again and Save your report.  Click Finish to close the Wizard.

It’s ideal to Save your report first before running it.  It may not run if you do not have a project open first.

Step 7 – Open a Project and Run the Primavera P6 Lag Report

Open a Project and then run your report.  You should see some output similar to the above.

Wrap-up

Having this report pre-built will help you be prepared anytime you need to run some analysis on a schedule, perhaps even a schedule a contractor has submitted.  So keep it in your arsenal of analysis tools.

It’s worth mentioning that another approach that works is to export your project data to Excel, including the relationships table.  You can then use the filtering tools in Excel to zone in on relationships that have lead or lag delays.  I prefer to avoid Excel in this case because the export takes too many clicks to produce the proper dataset.  This report can be run with 3-4 mouse clicks max with the same end result.

Now remember to follow the best practice mentioned in the intro.  Avoid using lag or lead altogether in your schedules.  Instead you should use a well-defined activity to represent any lag or lead delay in your project plan.   Everyone will be much happier for it!

Planner Tutorials Hub

If you missed Part 1 of Schedule % Complete in Oracle Primavera, go back now and have a read through.  Then come back here.

The Proper Setup : Baselined and Cost-loaded

Now let’s see how Schedule % Complete works in action on a sample Primavera P6 plan.

Since Schedule % Complete is based on both Project Baseline fields and Earned Value Cost  fields, to calculate it properly, your schedule should:

• be cost-loaded at the Activity-level
• have a project baseline set

Examine the sample plan below. This plan has four WBS Elements in two levels and seven Activities. Activities have sample durations and relationships and you can see the current schedule in the Gantt chart. Each Activity has a resource assignment and that’s why we have costs in the plan. Some Activities have uniform resource curves, while others use At-Start, At-Finish or Bell-Shaped resource curves.

The project baseline is maintained and assigned. The baseline schedule is shown by the yellow bars in Gantt chart. The current schedule and the baseline are the same now.

Examining Schedule % Complete for Activities

I will reschedule the plan for the second day, moving the Data Date forward 1 day.

There are no actuals entered, but as we saw in Part 1, Schedule % Complete has nothing to do with the current schedule or actual data.  The Schedule % Complete column shows the current values; for example, take a look at A4:

The Data Date has passed half of the baseline schedule of A4, which would be the Schedule % Complete of 50%.

Sometimes you have nonworking days in the schedule; in this cases, those days would not be counted in passed and total baseline days (as usual).

Schedule % Complete for WBS

Let’s examine WBS E-2.

WBS E-2 has the following values:

• PV (Planned Value Cost column) = $240
• BAC (BL Project Total Cost column) = $400

The WBS Schedule % Complete is calculated as PV / BAC = $240 / $400, or 60%.

How BAC and PV are calculated for WBS?

1. BAC – Budget at Completion

BAC for the WBS  Element E2 is the sum of the A6 and A7 BACs.  Think of this as the sum of the Total Cost for each Activity (see diagram above) but taken from the project baseline.

2. PV – Planned Value

Planned Value (PV) is bit trickier as it related to how your schedule is cost-loaded in a time-phased manner.

The Activity Usage Spreadsheet, shown in bottom half of the screen below, is handy for analysing planned value for Activities.

The bottom layout is set to show timephased values of the Cumulative Planned Value Costs using the Activity Usage Spreadsheet.  Why use the Cumulative Planned Value Cost field?  Because it’s essentially a running total.  With that in mind, in this view we can quickly see a running total PV for the WBS at any day in the project.

Planned Value….elaborated

Planned Value taked into account Resource Curves.  Let’s explore Activity A6.

A6 has a uniform curve and it has only two working days, $80 planned for each one. $80 for the first day, and the cumulative value remains 80$ for the next two nonworking days, then increases to $160 in the last day.

ActivityA7 has an “At Start” resource curve assigned.  All of A7′s planned cost will be loaded to the first day and the cumulative value of the next days would be the same.

No matter how the Activity planned values are distributed over time, the WBS’s planned values are the total of the Activities’ planned values.

The Data Date in the previous sample was the second day of the project and PV of the last WBS Element is 240$ in that day. If we change the Data Date to the sixth day, its PV would be $320. The following figure shows the values with the Data Date set to day six of the project.

When Things Don’t Add Up – A Scenario using Resource Curves

Before wrapping up, let’s look at a tricky scenario; I made some changes and re-baselined the schedule. Check the values for WBS E.1.1.

As you see, WBS E.1.1 and all of her underlying Activities have costs.  Two Activities have Schedule % Complete values that are greater than zero and the WBS Element’s value is still zero. Why?

I believe you can say; when Schedule % Complete of the WBS Element is zero, you should expect that the PV is also zero. How is it possible for the PV to be zero when Data Date has passed half of the baseline duration? The answer is simple: the Activity costs are not uniform…. because of Resource Curves.

All of these three activities’ costs have “At Finish” curve. The following figure is focused on the A2:

Many planners use Resource Curves in their schedules to properly distribute labor hours and costs across an activity’s duration.  But keep in mind that Resource Curves can cause scenarios like this one to confuse and puzzle you, if you are calculating and finding strange values for Schedule % Complete.  Here’s another reason to know your schedule intimately.

Wrap Up

To conclude, you should never expect WBS Element’s Schedule % Complete to be a rollup of the underlying Activities’ Schedule % Complete, because they are calculated in two completely different ways.

That’s the whole story of the Schedule % Complete. In every control period, you will enter actual data (actual start, actual finish, and at least one element related to the progress of the in-progress activities) and receive planned and actual progress. Planned progress is to be read from Schedule % Complete as percentage values or Planned Value Cost as monetary values (based on your preference). Planned progress of the whole project is read from Schedule % Complete of the project row (lowest level of EPS or highest level of WBS). It’s sometimes necessary to also report on planned progress of the first two or three levels of WBS, which can be done by reading the Schedule % Complete of the appropriate WBS Elements. You might not find it suitable to read the planned progress of the activities from Schedule % Complete, because it’s not based on their assignment curves, unless your method of calculating the actual progress is not using the assignment curves too.

Download my new ebook on Primavera P6 Percent Complete fields to learn more.

Planner Tutorials Hub

Schedule % Complete is one of the many percent completes you have in Primavera P6 and we’re going to have a complete look at what it is and how it is calculated.  Two important products of maintaining schedules are planned progress and actual progress of a given time; you want to know how much you’ve done so far and compare it with how much you were supposed to do so far, in order to reach project targets.

The first thing to mention is that Schedule % Complete deals with planned progress. As a result, it is calculated based on the Project Baseline and the Data Date; it has nothing to do with the current schedule.

The second thing is that this field is calculated differently for Activities than for WBS Elements. This is the source of the most common problems people have with this field.

Schedule % Complete for Activities

And now, let’s start the story with how Schedule % Complete is calculated for Activities. It’s simple; just take a look at the following figure.

When the Data Date is earlier than the Baseline Start date, Schedule % Complete is zero, when it’s after the Baseline Finish data, Schedule % Complete is 100%. Otherwise, Schedule % Complete would show what percentage of the Baseline duration is passed by the Data Date. Here’s a formula to calculate Activity Schedule % Complete:

Schedule % Complete(Act) = ( [Data Date] – [Baseline Start] ) / ( [Baseline Finish] – [Baseline Start] )

The following diagram shows the Schedule % Complete of a single Activity for different Data Dates:

And that’s all for the activities; it has nothing to do with the current schedule, the resource curves, the costs, etc. For Activities, Schedule % Complete is strictly calculated based on:

1. Data Date
2. Activity’s Baseline Start
3. Activity’s Baseline Finish

Schedule % Complete for WBS Elements

And now, the story of how Schedule % Complete is calculated for WBS Elements. Let’s start by reviewing 2 possible scenarios:

Scenario 1

How are these calculations possible? The Sample WBS Element has three Activities, they all have Schedule % Completes greater than zero, but the value for Sample WBS Element is 0! Before I reveal the answer, here’s a contrasting scenario.

Scenario 2

In this scenario, the Sample WBS Element has three Activities with Schedule % Completes less than 50%, but the Schedule % Complete of the WBS Element is 75%.

What is going on here? How is Schedule % Complete calculated in each scenario?

A WBS Element’s Schedule % Complete is calculated in a completely different way. You might expect it to be the rollup value of the underlying Activities (a weighted average for example). But, as in scenario 2, the three Activity values which are all less than 50% could never have a weighted average more than 50%.

As you saw before, the Schedule % Complete of the Activities is time-based. However Schedule % Complete for WBS Elements is:

1. Depended project costs and…
2. Does not factor in any Activities’ Schedule % Complete values

How Schedule % Complete is Calculated for WBS Elements

When you assign resources and expenses to activities, each activity will receive a calculated Total Cost. Resource assignment hours and costs are, by default, spread uniformly over the duration of the activity (but you may apply a Resource Curve to alter this). Oracle Primavera will show you how costs are then planned for each day of the Activity. These costs are aggregated to the WBS level, and the time-phased cost of the WBS Element will be calculated automatically.

The Schedule % Complete of the WBS Element will be the ratio of the Baseline Costs before the Data Date to the Total Baseline Cost.

In the world of Earned Value, the costs before the Data Date are called the Planned Value, or PV for short (Also called BCWS – Budgeted Cost of Work Scheduled). The total baseline cost is called Budget At Completion or BAC for short. We can now formulate the calculation of Schedule % Complete for WBS Elements as:

Schedule % Completed (WBS) = PV / BAC

Please have this in mind that all the mentioned parameters are derived from baseline and not from current schedule; the WBS bar shown in these figures is the baseline schedule of the WBS Element and the costs are the baseline costs of the WBS Element.

The following diagram shows Schedule % Complete of a sample WBS Element for different Data Dates:

The above descriptions show that the Schedule % Complete of the WBS Elements depend on the following:

1. Data Date
2. Baseline Costs before the Data Date (PV)
3. Total Baseline Costs (BAC)

To summarize, Schedule % Complete for Activities is based on time, while its value for WBS Elements is based on costs.

Pulling Schedule % Complete together for WBS and Activities

The following diagram shows Schedule % Complete of a sample WBS Element with two Activities in different Data Dates.

In Part 2 of the Schedule % Complete Guide, I’ll show you an example of using Schedule % Complete on a project in P6.

Download my new ebook on Primavera P6 Percent Complete fields to learn more.

Planner Tutorials Hub

• Do you always document your scheduling methodology BEFORE building a project schedule?
• Is your schedule littered with relationship lag?
• Do all of your Activities have a verb in their name?
• Are you cautious when using Level of Effort activities?
• Do you know what a “dangling” activity is? Does your project plan have any “danglers”?

Don’t worry, it’s not too late!

Nader Khorrami Rad, PMP, is an expert scheduler and the author over 13 books on project management, including his latest ebook titled “Project Scheduling Rules: Generally Accepted Rules According to PMI and DoD.” Nader has combed the PMBoK and DoD standards documents to compile a unique and essential guide for project managers, schedulers and planners alike. His guide sums up some the most important practices in building organized and accurate schedules that are easy to manage.

Nader writes,

“The audience I had in mind when I was writing this book was mainly the project planning and control engineers, leaders and managers. This information would also be helpful for other project management team members. Applying the rules might increase the length and effort of your initial planning, but trust me, it would buy you back a lot of time in schedule maintenance and control.“

Get clicking to download a free copy of
“Project Scheduling Rules: Generally Accepted Rules According to PMI and DoD“.

Have you read this ebook?  How would you rate it?  Was it helpful?  Drop us a line in the comments.

Featured image by Tom Woodward.

Planner Tutorials Hub

Featured this week is a great way to use Primavera P6 Reflection projects.  If you’ve perused our other Primavera P6 tutorials, you may already know reflection projects are great for working with and managing scenarios.  But they can also provide a way to preview and selectively approve activity updates from sub-contractors or other groups.

The key to getting project updates to merge back to a master project is in the setup.  Make sure you’ve created your reflection projects before you export them to .xer and send them off for an update by the subcontractor.  However, if you missed this key setup piece, I’ll walk you through a workaround so the reflection merge will still work.

Approving and merging updates is ideal for larger projects where there might be multiple subcontractors providing updates.  This video tutorial walks you through exactly that situation and walks you through some of the pitfall as well.

We’d love to hear your feedback.  Is this approach helpful to you?  How else are you using Reflections?  What did you learn?  What’s missing?

Drop us a line in the comments! Enjoy!

Planner Tutorials Hub

Order is important!  Last post, we showed you the nuances of shading non-work time on the Primavera Gantt Chart.  Today we’re uncovering some more nuances of that essential Gantt Chart.

Ever come across this situation where the relationship lines on your Gantt Chart point to the baseline bars?   If so, things can look a bit off.

The Gantt Chart bars can be reordered to fix this mishap and I’ll show you how in this quick video tip.

Got a tip to share? Drop it in the comments and have your say!

Planner Tutorials Hub

It turns out that people like pictures.  Yes, that’s right, we love pictures….and we love the Gantt Chart.  What makes the Gantt Chart so essential is that it simplifies something that is complex.  It gives us a snapshot and a trend that our brain can digest rather than just text and numbers.

Getting the Gantt Chart to look the way you need it is a really key skill for Primavera users.

Recently someone asked me how to shade non-work time on the Activity Gantt Chart in Primavera P6.  They wanted to show clearly what days are workable and which are non-working on the Gantt Chart in P6.

It turns out it’s pretty simple to set but not terribly intuitive in Primavera, as some things are, which is why we post tutorials.

You can control how the Gantt Chart is shaded by setting the appropriate “Default Calendar“.

1. From the “Enterprise” menu, select “Calendars“.
2. Ensuring you have “Global” selected at the top, pick a default calendar from this screen by placing a checkmark next to it.

Although the Default Calendar serves a few purposes in P6, it’s also used to set the shading on the Gantt Chart.  Of course, what is shaded as non-work on the P6 Gantt depends on what level of zoom you have set your timescale.  Set the timescale to “Week / Day 1” or ”Week / Day 2” and you will see shading on the Gantt chart (as long as the default calendar has non-work days set). For most cases you will likely have a Global Calendar in the list that is similar or matches your project’s main calendar.

But what if your project uses a “Project Calendar”?

There’s no easy fix in this case.  You could create a copy of your Project Calendar and convert it to a Global Calendar, then make it the Default Calendar.  Otherwise, you’ll have to pick a Global Calendar to use for shading.   You can also turn shading right off by choosing a 24 x 7 calendar with no non-work days.

Now you have one more tool to paint a pretty picture of your project plan.

Planner Tutorials Hub

Although using a Windows PC has been the time-tested and traditional way to run Oracle Primavera for years, nowadays there are more options available to you.  I recently heard of a construction company rolling out tablets to field surveyors to capture pictures and data on the spot for statusing their progress on the build.  It’s an innovative idea whose time has come.

Here’s a short demo video of an iPad running Oracle Primavera P6 8.1 using Teamviewer HD.   Oracle Primavera is actually running on my desktop pc and I am connecting to it remotely.

Sorry for the poor resolution on the video. It’s the best I could to with a FlipMino recorder.

Let us know if you’ve been able to get Primavera working on your tablet and what steps you took.

Planner Tutorials Hub