Primavera P6 Time Stamps are used to make sure that activities begin and end during working hours. You may have set a date set for your activity but without a time stamp, your activity could be scheduled to commence an 8 hour day from 4 pm until 12 pm. If your schedule is reliant on activities working by daylight then you will want all activities to start in the morning and finish in the afternoon at the close of business.
Primavera P6 Professional provides time stamps so that schedulers can ascertain not only what day an activity starts, but at what time of the day and duration; whether a 6 hour or 8 hour day is required.
So how do you display Primavera P6 Time Stamps that will confirm the start and finish times of all your scheduled activities? Let’s take a closer look.
Below, we have our ‘Global Calendar: Corporate- Standard Full Time’ First of all we toggle off the ‘Total work hours/day’, at the top left-hand side of the dialog box. The effort that we require for our activities is 8 hours a day, which we note from the ‘Work hours /day’ drop-down menu on the right-hand side as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1
Next, we toggle on ‘Detailed work hours/day’ in the top right-hand side of the dialog box. For each workday, in the ‘Work hours’ drop-down menu we highlight our start and finish times which are 8 am to 4 pm, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2
And when we ‘OK’ our start and finish times, our workdays are specified in our calendar.
By turning on the time stamp, we can check that all of our activities begin at 8 am and finish at 4 pm. We select ‘Edit’ and scroll down to ‘User Preferences’ as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3
In the ‘User Preferences’ dialog box, under ‘Date Format’ we toggle ‘Day, Month, Year’, and under ‘Options’ we select to display a ‘4-digit year’ and ‘Month’ name. In the ‘Time’ section of the ‘User Preferences’ dialog, we toggle on ‘12 hour’ and ‘Show minutes,’ as shown below in Figure 4. Under ‘Sample’ there is a date with time stamp displayed.
Figure 4
Our schedule is ready to display the date and time stamps. We proceed and enter all our activities into our schedule and check that they all start at 8 am and finish at 4 pm.Our resulting schedule is displayed in Figure 5.
Figure 5
Our schedule is correct with our desired start and finish times, but we need to check that our project planned start and data date are the same as our schedule. We select our schedule from our projects and notice that both our ‘Project Planned Start’ and ‘Data Date’ are set for 12 am as shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6
Although our schedule has the correct start and finish times in our activities view we need to alter our ‘Project Planned Start’ and ‘Data Date’ to 8 am, so that if we implement a look ahead filter or activity start filter months or weeks ahead we won’t miss capturing any activities.
Summary
By activating Primavera P6 time stamps, you can be sure that your activity start and finish times conform in your schedule with your intended task durations. Time stamps will erase all unknowns with start and finish times as they specify your working hours for each activity.
It’s also important to set the times on any constraints that you may use. For any start constraints, use the earliest start times in your calendars (i.e. 8:00 am) and, for finish constraints, use the latest finish times in your calendars (i.e. 5:00 PM).
Finally, we recommend that your project planned start and data date match the calendar start times to prevent missing any activities if you use a week or month look ahead filter.