The Project Status field in Primavera P6 Professional is found in the ‘General Tab’ and it can be added as a column in your ‘Project Activity Window’, but not in the Resource Assignments Window. There are four types of Project Status, Active, Inactive, Planned and What-If and depending on where you are in your project life cycle will determine what status to select.
When to Apply the different types of Project Status
- An Active Project Status is assigned to a project that is live and requires regular progress updates.
- An Inactive Project Status is given to a completed project or a project that has been shelved.
- A Planned Project Status is used when a project is being designed and developed in the planning stages, which may start in the future.
- A What-If Project Status is assigned to a live copy of a project where through, for example, the addition of activities and relationships, or analysis of the impact of changes to the scope is being reviewed.
When your project completes you may want to change the project status from ‘Active’ to ‘Inactive’ so that the project team is aware that the project has completed. So, let’s take a look at how do use the Project Status field.
By entering the Project Status tab which is found in ‘General’ or on a column in your activities table you can filter your projects by the four types of project status, as shown below in Figure 1.
Figure 1
In our scenario, we would select ‘Active’ which would bring up all the ‘Active’ Status Projects. By opening our completed ‘Active’ project we can change the status to ‘Inactive’, thus informing any team member that the project is completed.
Project Codes v Project Status
Project Codes
Project Codes can be used to determine the status of a project (Active, Inactive, Planned and What If) which can be defined by the user. For example, we could use the following code values to define the status of our projects:
- Active- Repair & Improvement Projects
- Planned Repair & Improvement Projects
- Active – Construction Projects
- Inactive – Construction Projects
- What If- Sandbox Projects
Project Codes can be customized for the users’ preference and the code values are flexible as you don’t have to open a project to change its values.
Project Status
If your company uses Primavera Team Member (timesheets and progress reporting system) where users view and update his or her work assignments then Project Status becomes significant. All projects In Primavera P6 when they are first created, have a default of ‘Active’ status. Updating work assignments and booking time to a project can only proceed if a Project Status is ’Active’ therefore this works great for a user.
However, if a project is still in the development planning stages and the project Status isn’t changed to ‘Planned’ then the default (of ‘Active’) could lead to users booking time to new projects which haven’t got off the ground or are still awaiting approval.
All newly created Primavera P6 projects should have their Project Status field set to ‘Planned’, when using Primavera Team Member, to prevent errors.
What- If Status Projects are the only projects which do not have their resource data summarized in the Tracking Layout. If a project is genuinely a ‘What- If’, project and the Status field isn’t changed from the default, ’Active’ to ‘What –If’ then incorrect Resource Loading can occur in the Tracking Layout.
Data can be displayed with the Resource histogram in the Activities area from ‘All Projects’ or ‘Open Projects Only’ If you select ‘All Projects’, Projects with the ‘What If’ status can be included or excluded. Whereas if you select ‘Open Projects Only’ all resource loadings, regardless of project status will be displayed.
Summary
There is less chance of accidentally changing a project status field as the project has to be open to change its values. The ‘?’ on the folder icon is useful for defining ‘What-If’ Projects and these projects are not included in the summarized data, Tracking Layout. When using Primavera Team Member the status has to be ‘Active’ to be able to implement timesheets etc., therefore you can prevent accidental use of Team Member by changing the project Status.