P6 Activity Won’t Schedule On Time
We received a call at 4pm on Friday afternoon (the obligatory Friday Afternoon Construction Emergency) concerning a scheduling issue: in spite of all attempts, a 10 day P6 activity with only 2 days remaining was showing a disconnected duration, a gap of 2 months between its Actual Progress and its Finish date. Worse, important Successor Activities were linked to the delayed Activity , so the whole logical path was being held hostage by the rogue activity. Try as I might, using all the tricks I know for manually controlling & updating progress, every time I scheduled the project, the Activity would disconnect from its progressed status, and show the same 2 month gap. I changed Duration type to Physical, manually edited Remaining Early Start, all to no avail. It looked like a classic case of Out of Sequence Activity, but all its Predecessors were 100% complete, so that seemed illogical. I should have run the Schedule Log report to check for Out of Sequence, but I kept thinking that if I kept at it, the solution would reveal itself. As usual, I should have listened to that little voice. Any time a progress bar displays a disconnect between Actual Progress & Remaining Duration, it’s bound to be a case of Out of Sequence work.
The Solution: One of two methods: 1) in Schedule Options, change the default setting from Reatained Logic to Progress Override. or 2) Change the Predecessor-Sucessor logic to reflect the new relationships by. Out of Sequence work cannot be scheduled until all its Predecessors have bee n satisfied. Even if Predecessors are Completed, an Activity can’t logically finish if those Predecessors have unsatisfied logic prior. We opted for option 1, a simpler course of action. And it worked! We were out of the office by 5. Let the weekend commence!
