Managing P6 updates with partner companies

Brian,

What you describe is very complicated to manage. Ideally you would have everyone using a single P6 database and using security profiles/privileges manage who can do what and what they can see edit etc. But appreciate that this is not always possible.

With the above, which I think you describe as your first option, the key is to ensure everyone updates at the same time, that is, they all move to a consistent datadate for each project, down to the same hh:mm in the scheduling option. Where there are interfaces between projects, you have two options

• Create physical relationships across projects. This is the easiest option, but can create issues if someone copies a project and transfers the relationships to the copy that later affects the schedule dates. Unfortunately P6 makes it difficult to easily identify Inter-project relationships, you can see my page here with a report you can download that helps: Listing P6 Inter-Project Relationships | Australasian Project Planning (austprojplan.com.au) . If one user can only access one project, it can also be difficult for them to then create these interface relationships
• Each project has a interface milestone that represents the handoff point, these can be constrained to represent the dates fro the matching handover milestone in the other project. The role of managing the master schedule is to the compare the dates that each of these interfaces are sitting at and adjust them accordingly.

If you export/import projects from one database into another, you'll have to deal with issues such as the importing of global data from each database. Overwriting existing data (can be fatal if calednars are being adjusted). When P6 exports relationships to other projects, these are turned into "External constraints" so if you import them back in, you're again stuck with having to re-build these relationships if you want the master schedule functioning as a single schedule.

Thank you Santoshl this is very useful.

Brian,

No problem, It's one of those paradoxes, to keep things well controlled you need to increase the administrative burden of managing the database, but then loosening the restrictions can end up causing more chaos in the long run.

But my suggestion would be to try to keep everyone working in the same database at aleast, even if you have to create distinctly different portions of the EPS for each projects or even each user.

Thank you Santoshl this is very useful.

Thank you Santoshl this is very useful.

What if the requirements for schedule updates are different in different subprojects?

For example, engineering activities must be updated once in a week, but on construction site it must be done every day.

What if one of the users wants to play what if (changing resource assignments and activity durations, dependencies and calendars) and to compare different versions of the project schedule to select the best option?

Could you please explain the ways of managing this in P6?