100% Activity Late Finish different from Actual Finish

If the schedule was run using progress overide or actual dates options, the late finish field for completed activities should be blank.

If retained logic was used (and it sounds like it was), the late finish will still be shown. This is because retained logic method still needs to calculate the late dates for completed activities, so as to be able to retain the logic of any incomplete but out of sequence activities.

In this scenario, the late finish would show the latest date the activity could have finished without delaying project completion / breaking a constraint, so it would normally only be the same as the actual finish for completed activities that are driving the first incomplete activity on the critical path. (there are some other factors such as resource levelling which can impact on late dates, but i don't think you need to worry about that for now)

For completed activities, Late finish is largely a meaningless date to the planner, so just ignore it.

Example:

Harold,

All activities have their early and late dates calculated during a CPM calculation, even completed ones.  This is true no matter which calculation mode is used. 

Unlike with P3, P6 does not blank out the early and late computed date columns for completed activities afterward.  If you find this too confusing to look at, then just show the Start and Finish columns which show early dates until an actual is entered and then shows the actual dates. 

This is the subject of a paper I presented in 2009 titled, “Understanding P6 Dates.”  You can find it on-line at http://www.ronwinterconsulting.com/published.htm.  Good luck!

Ronald,

P6 seems to blank out late dates for completed activities on my machine, if the schedule is run using either progress overide or actual dates options -see below

Cheers,

G

Thanks for the replies, I'm an old P3 man coming out of retirement & making the transition to P6. I suspect my forum activity will dramatically increase!

Thanks again

harold

Gary,

Well, hush my mouth if you aren’t correct!  I wonder if I just missed that when writing my research paper in 2008 or if Primavera has changed this after that time.  I wrote the paper using Version 6 and only have Version 7 & 8 now.  Version 7 P6 does indeed blank out the calculated dates for completed activities using Progress override or Actual Dates (and so does Version 8.)

I remember having a conversation with Joel Koppleman at a long-ago (pre-2005) AACE convention about P6 going to the effort of blanking out the calculated dates and Joel expressed his shock that they were hiding the information.  I did not think anything of our conversation until later when P6 Version 5 came out and low and behold, the computed dates were no longer blanked out.  They also did not blank out the float for completed activities.  That caused such a stir that two months later Service Pack 1 came out with the sole purpose of blanking out the float for completed activities.  I guess that that qualified as ‘too much information’!

I have a problem like this with early and late dates for completed activities.

A couple of days ago I noticed that one of the precedessors of my activity has a driving mark on it, However, that activity had completed almost 1 month ago from data date. From that day on, when I want to choose my driving precedessor of any activity ,which has same relationship as I mentioned above, I have to examine all my predecessors and find out which is my original driving activity. It is a little bit annoying you know.

I researched a lot and got tired. Do any of you know a way to get rid of this trouble ?

Note that: I don't want to remove any relationship to solve this problem in case there is any out of sequence relationship exist.