"S" curve in P3

Hi Don,

[Rude comment deleted by Moderator.] The best way is to create your curves in excel and update them from the P3 curves. I wish somebody from Primavera would join PP and fix these little problems.

Regards

PS Bill,

My e-mail is acting up, will try and help you with that spreadsheet in the near future, however it is a tricky one.

I too feel that P3 fails on the presentation of curves part..its been taken care of in P3e/c but still it leaves much to be desired for.It’s always better to transfer the data to excel and then prepare the curve.

Better to plot S Curve in excel as repeatedly said in this forum.

You may get better results in Excel for S -curve than P3

For those that are keen to use P3 for Earned value there are a couple of methods using P3 to produce S-Curves.

1. You may open the resource profile window and select the required data from the Resource Profiles Display Options form. You will need to have a baseline project and check that your Tools, Options, Summarization options are set correctly.

2. The second method is using Graphical Reports. You will need two Targets to produce three curves. The Current Schedule will give you the ACWP and EAC curves, Target 1 could be the Baseline schedule which would give you the BCWS and then Target 2 needs to be a copy of the Current schedule with a global change to set the Actual Cost to equal the Budget x Percent complete and make the Cost to Complete zero. This curve will give you the BCWP. You may overlay the S-Curves on summary bars to give you a report like the one on page 16 of my paper "Practical Application of Earned Value Performance Measurement Using P3" on my web site. You will need to read up on the report writer to achieve this output.

I do not use the P3 report functions very often for a number of reasons including:
1. The graphics are poor quality.
2. The difficulty of getting the cost information back into P3.
3. The difficulty of getting people to book to Activity Codes correctly.

Therefore I use Excel to produce curves normally at a summary level.

Paul E Harris
Eastwood Harris Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Australia
Planning and Scheduling Book Publishers, Training & Consulting
www.eh.com.au

Hi,

This issue is interesting and I have some questions about it:

1) If you wish to display Schedule/Cost Variance in the column area, you can select the Schedule/Cost Variance fields from the drop-down list in the Format->Columns option, but how do you get the Schedule/Cost Performance Index?

2) Many organizations don’t do cost control using P3, they don’t get the earned value from P3, so does it make sense to track these indexes (variances and performance indexes) from P3?

Bye.

Dear All,

Reading from the original question, to display
Budget(Plan), Actual $, and Earn Value in a Graphical Formate is easy. You only need to display it in the histogram layout formate with 1 baseline schedule (TARGET) setted. That it;
All you need to do next is to use a PDF writer to generate a pdf S-Curve that you can paste it in any report.

In my last job, I have a team of 12 schedulers produce S-Curve for each project & regions every month without any issues.

If anyone want to have a copy of the PDF please pm me

Cheers

Alex

Felipe

To answer your query, it is true that you can use the column to display the variance but P3 do not have the function to display CPI & SPI only P3e have that column to select.

In addition, the power of the graphic report is far better than only display the column, because

1: in a graph you can see trend
2: in a graph you can see time diminson
3: in a graph you can do analysis without a calculator
4: in a graph you can see history and future
...


these are only some of the advantages using a graphical representation of the variance. you can simple use the graph to tell how many months is the project going to be late.

So it is nessary to display these information in a S-Curve to gain indepth information about a project.

Cheers

Alex

Hi Alex,

It seems to be that you have a different approach from Mr. Paul Harris. Yours seems to follow the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) philosophy because you say that with just ONE target you get everything, but others find it difficult to get graphs like the one posted here. Could you please explain how you get your graph so easily?

Bye.

Everyone PM me about the S-Curve:

I send the copy of the S-Curve in PDF file format to everyone that send a Private Message to me.

Cheers

Alex

Hi alex,

Can i get a copy pls. emaile me at rsunilr1@yahoo.co.in

Thanx

Sunil