Date Difference between MSP and P6

Hi Ron,

It looks like you’ve missed something in both tools, or there’s something else you haven’t told us.

1. As you’ve described it, if the activity starts at the beginning of the day on Friday 27Mar’20, then it should end at noon on Wednesday 22Apr’20.  That’s 225 hours (22.5 days at 10 hrs/day) working from 07:00 to 18:00 (with an hour off at midday) each Monday through Saturday.
2. The P6 dates are incorrect.  They are exactly what you get if you fail to change Hours/Day from 8.0 to 10.0 in the Time Periods dialog of your 6dx10h calendar specification – then enter 22.5 days as the activity duration.  (P6 takes that 22.5 “days” as 22.5 x8 = 180 hours duration.)
3. The MSP dates are also incorrect, but there is no easy explanation for what you’ve got.  Possibilities:

• In the project’s scheduling options, you’ve set the hours/day definition to a higher number like 11 instead of 10.  Then entering “22.5 days” gets stored as 247.5 hours instead of 225 hours.
• Your 6dx10h calendar specification includes around 20 hours of unintended non-working time between the start and finish dates of the activity.  Verify that the workweek shifts for each day are exactly as intended.  Also check for unintended calendar and workweek exceptions.
• Seems unlikely, but certain combinations of resource assignments can also seem to change the effective calendar of tasks that are not fixed-duration.

Good luck, tom

Hi Ron

How are you transferring the data from MSP to P6?  Try using XerTransfer to import between MSP and P6 and see what you get.  XerTransfer is an add in to Microsoft Project and you can open an XER file in Microsoft Project and save a Microsoft Project file as and XER file for import back into P6.  XerTransfer will translate your calendars correctly between both platforms so if you still get the same issue after using it you can rule your calendar out as the issue.  You can download a trial copy from here https://xertransfer.com/ .  

As far as the date variance it could be any number of things and its hard to comment without seeing your file.  Other than your calendar (most likely the culpret), the other thing to check is that your MSP file has been statused properly and there isnt any retained logic in MSP that P6 accounts for when you F9.

Happy to have a look at your file and provide comment if your interested.  You can email me at scheduling@optusnet.com.au if you are interested.

Kind Regards

Sterling Gallagher

it all has to do with hours, calendars and durations

why are you using factions of a day as a planning unit.

Usually frations of day are hours and are generally used for a very granular schedule like in an outage schedule