If you’ve ever picked up a P6 schedule and noticed that the “original duration” doesn’t match the “BL Project Duration” and wondered how that happened and what can be done about it this post is for you!
Previous posts have been geared towards those learning P6 for the first time. I’ve covered how to start building a new project and many of the various activity level settings available to you when establishing new activities. If you’ve missed any of those posts they are still available here.
Today’s post is for those that are a little further along in handling and managing P6 schedules. You may have inherited a freshly baselined schedule and noticed that the Original, Remaining & BL Project Durations are all out of sync and wondered why?
First off, it’s important to understand what “Original Duration”, “Remaining Duration” and “BL Project Duration” mean in terms of P6.
BL Project Duration stands for Baseline Project Duration. The BL Project Duration will generally be the duration shown in the Remaining Duration field of the activity in the assigned Project Baseline. This is a bit counter intuitive for most as a person would more naturally assume that the BL Project Duration would represent the Original Duration.
Remaining Duration means the duration remaining to be performed. If a project is built using the appropriate project settings before it is baselined the Remaining duration will be equivalent to the entire duration of an activity. After a project is baselined, the Remaining Duration will represent the duration that is remaining to be performed.
Original Duration is a bit peculiar. When you first add a new activity to a schedule the “Original Duration” is auto generated by the specified default activity duration established by your P6 Administrator.
In a stand-alone environment the default can be found in the Admin Preferences per Fig 1. In an Enterprise Cloud environment the default will be located per Fig 2.
Figure 1
Figure 2
When you insert a new activity its Original Duration will be 5 days per the default settings. To modify this you would then go to the Original Duration column in an activity layout to edit the duration. Easy peasy right?
Unfortunately depending on the Project level calculation settings you might notice that the “Remaining duration” doesn’t stay in sync with the “Original duration” when you modify the original duration.
This might not sound like a big problem however it's very important because we've already learned that the BL Project Duration will be based on the "remaining duration" in the project once baselined.
Figure 3
To ensure the original duration and the remaining duration stay in sync while you are developing a new project you should review the Project level calculation settings here:
Figure 4
During project development you will always want to select the box that says “Link Budget and At Complete for not started activities” and choose either of the “Reset” options to go along with it.
When “Reset Original Duration and Units to Remaining” is selected along with “Link Budget and At Completion for not started activities” the Original Duration will always be kept in sync with any changes you make in the remaining duration columns. The same is true for units.
When “Reset Remaining Duration and Units to Original” is selected the Remaining Duration will always be kept in sync with any changes you make to the original duration column. As you can see it really depends on which column or fields you intend to work in or update during project planning.
We find it works best to select "Reset Original Duration and Units to Remaining" and work in the remaining duration or units columns rather than in the original duration or original units column because it offers consistency.
During execution, you will always be updating remaining duration or remaining units. If your settings are per the above, then you can work in the remaining duration during project planning phase as well.
There is one caveat to all of this. After planning and baselining your project, you must unselect “Link Budget and At Complete for not started activities”.
Figure 5
You'll need to unselect this box no matter which of the “Reset” options you’ve been working in, otherwise once you begin statusing your project and updating the remaining duration the Original duration will also change and that is how the Original Duration begins to get out of sync with BL Project Duration.
If you’ve inherited a project that has inconsistencies between the baseline durations and the original durations, and you’ve verified that the correct baseline has been assigned as the Project Baseline, we recommend double checking the project level calculation settings and then taking the time to manually update the Original Duration to match the BL Project Duration.
End users of a schedule will tend to equate Original Duration with the term Baseline Duration even though in P6 the two fields aren’t technically the same, so ensuring they match will avoid confusion later down the line.
One easy way to do this if you have the project security privileges to do so is to create and utilize a very simple global change. Do not attempt this on a live schedule if this is your first time performing this type of action. We recommend always making a copy of the live schedule first and running new global changes in the copy before doing so in a live schedule.
The parameters for the Global change to sync the Original Duration to the BL Project Duration are shown below in Fig 6.
Figure 6
Running this simple Global change will spare you from having to make wide-spread manual updates to the Original Duration in an out of sync project you’ve inherited.
Now that you understand the ins and outs of Original Duration & BL Project Duration you’ll be able to prevent this from happening in the future.
I hope this article has proved useful. If you have any questions or need assistance, feel free to reach out.
Stay tuned for the next post!
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