In the previous two articles I covered “Starting a New Project in P6” and “How to Create the WBS in P6”. If you’ve followed along with those two articles the next thing you will need to do is create and add activities.
Activities have several key components: Activity ID, Activity Name, Planned Duration, Activity Calendar, Relationships and Resources. This article will cover only the first 3 components.
Let’s get started.
Step 1: Find the Activities tab
To create new activities within a Primavera P6 project the easiest way to do this is to open your Project and go to the Activities tab.
If you don’t already see the Activities tab you can get to through the main toolbar or through the green icon on the left-hand ribbon as shown here:
Figure 1
Step 2: Add your first activity
Click on the WBS level you would like to add an activity to, then select the + symbol on your toolbar or use the main menu as shown below.
Figure 2
Once you click the + symbol the tool will create a new generic activity within the WBS level you have selected. Go ahead and click the + symbol twice to create 2 new generic activities
Step 3: Naming & Numbering Your Activity
Next you can name and number your new activity by typing directly in the Activity name & Activity ID columns below. Alternatively you can update the name in the General tab in the activity detail pane.
Figure 3
There are a few things to keep in mind when entering Activity ID’s and Activity Names:
The Activity ID you chose should be unique. No two activities may have the same Activity ID; P6 will not allow this. The length of the Activity ID is generally limited in length by the administrative preferences in P6.
Your organization may have a specific nomenclature that you need to adhere to when numbering activities. If there isn’t a previously specified nomenclature, I recommend using a project specific prefix followed by 4-5 digits. For example: EBD1000 for project name “East Bank Development”. For the purposes of this article, we will just use a generic numbering system where all activities start with A.
The Activity Name you chose should also be unique. P6 will not prohibit activity names being duplicated, however I recommend always using a unique descriptive Activity Name so the scope of one task isn’t confused with the scope of another.
Step 4: Review Activity Settings
When a new activity is created, P6 will generally default to a "Task Dependent" activity type with "Fixed Duration & Units” Duration type. If you are working on an existing project rather than a new project the default Activity Type may differ from this. The default settings for new activities are established at the project level.
You should review the default settings for new activities by going to the Projects screen, selecting your project and finding the Defaults in the details pane at the bottom of the project screen. You can set a unique Activity ID prefix & suffix for all new activities on this screen as well.
Figure 4
Since you’ve already created a couple of activities in Step 3 you can review the settings for those specific activities by selecting an activity & clicking on the General Tab in the lower portion of your screen. If you don’t see a General Tab or any further details at the bottom of your screen you should enable that in your view by using the following menu options.
Figure 5
I generally recommend using the below settings when you are just getting started creating activities.
There are many other options you can choose from however those will be the subject of future articles & posts.
Figure 6
Step 5: Adjusting the Activity Duration
In order to adjust the Planned duration of your new activity you can either update it by typing in the blanks in the Planned Duration column (if your layout contains that), or in the Status tab of your new activity. The Status tab is generally located right next to the General tab.
Figure 7
Duration can be entered in days or weeks or hours. I recommend using days because that is a generally acceptable unit of time. If you use activity durations shorter than 1 day, for example: 2 hours or .25 days this will result in far more activities in a schedule than will be useful or manageable. Entering durations as weeks may be helpful for early drafts of a schedule and for proposal schedules, but for the purposes of this article I will use the generally accepted unit of days.
A Task Dependent activity’s start & finish dates are driven by its predecessor finish date, plus any lag (which you should always try to avoid), plus the activity’s duration. The start and finish dates of a Fixed Duration & Units activity will not change during the schedule build process unless the finish date of its predecessor has changed, or if you update the planned duration or start date manually.
I hope this article has been helpful. This article covered how to create new activities, the next thing you will need to do is create relationships between the activities.
Stay tuned for a future post explaining how to do this!
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