Checking Your P6 Schedule and Formatting your import Resource File

In the many Project Control Roles that I have performed over the years, one of the tasks that is always of substantial importance to the P6 Customer is managing the consistency of project data within an Enterprise Database.  As most of you may have experienced, when a P6 environment lacks the guidance for maintaining project integrity across all projects in the EPS, the pristine data that was present when you first set up your environment becomes a faint image of times past.  One of the easiest ways to manage these issues is found in P6 R8 and is called “Schedule Checker.”  Now, many of the tasks that were too time consuming to manage or just not available in a refined singular tool format, are at your fingertips.  Rather than setting up Schedule Logs, QC Filters, QC Layouts and Reports, you now have a simple 14 point checkup to provide a concise report where the QC results are determined by the configurable thresholds defined by you.  Items such as long lag and large durations are especially helpful if you are running Risk Analysis against your project.

The first  thing to do is set up the 14 Configurable User Thresholds.  The Schedule Checker can be run against one or multiple projects.  You can save the thresholds to run again for the project that is open.

Shown below is the top half of the Schedule Check Summary Report.

Reference below the lower half of the Schedule Check report. A detailed summary for all activities that fall outside of the thresholds can be displayed in each section.  Note the expanded Soft Constraint and Invalid Progress Dates sections.

Of course, analyzing the results is just the beginning for schedule maintenance, but the quick access to the QC data is great!!

Next up – Using P68.2 Web to import Resources from Excel