Advanced Planning & Scheduling with Primavera P6 (11.5 PDUs)

Explore how to clarify project scope using bill of quantities, drawings, and contract priorities through a practical case study of a 12-unit duplex project, reinforcing key planning concepts.

Follow the complete construction sequence from excavation through raft foundation to roof slab, including PCC layers, waterproofing, steel reinforcement, masonry, and MEP first fix.

Explore how the CSI formats—assemblies (uni format) and master format—organize building scope for planning and cost estimation, using RS Means data for preliminary and detailed estimates.

Define a work breakdown structure to break the project into work packages and activities, ensuring complete scope, preventing scope creep, and enabling clear schedule and cost tracking.

Explore deliverable oriented and process oriented work breakdown structures (WBS), and learn when to apply each, including a hybrid approach for efficient planning and control.

Learn guidelines to create a 100% scope WBS that prevents scope creep and links deliverables to activities, costs, and resources. Explore hybrid and deliverable- or process-oriented structures with team involvement.

Explore a standard WBS for large-scale construction projects, detailing seven level-one elements—such as key milestones and enabling works, project management, engineering, procurement, execution, testing and commissioning, and closing—and their sub-deliverables.

Generate a multi-level WBS in Primavera P6 for a case study project, creating six top-level elements and scope subdivisions, using keyboard shortcuts to speed setup and reuse.

Learn to export a project WBS from Primavera P6 to Microsoft Excel, building WBC codes, using copy-paste, trim formulas, and conditional formatting to color-code WBS levels.

Learn to generate project WBS in Primavera P6 using MS Excel with a downloadable cheat sheet. Draft WBS codes and names in Excel, then import updates into P6.

Publish the work breakdown structure (wbc) for approval in Primavera P6, choosing between chart view and list view, and enrich it with a wbc dictionary to align with scope baseline.

Explore how to manage global, project, and resource calendars in Primavera P6, customize work weeks, hours, and holidays, and implement naming strategies for enterprise calendar consistency.

Explore time periods in Primavera P6, defining work hours per day and per period (week, month, year), using signed calendars to calculate calendar vs work time and adjust schedules.

Understand how summary durations are calculated from global default and project default calendars, and how activity calendars influence project durations and WBC bands in Primavera P6.

Explore how finish-to-start relationships and calendars in Primavera P6 with different work hours misalign start and finish dates, and apply a workaround by aligning times through adjusted breaks.

Identify risks, assess probability and impact, and apply responses to bring them within tolerance, then add schedule contingencies and a risk register to keep the project on time.

Explore risk planning in Primavera P6, including creating risks, assigning owners, calculating exposure costs and cost contingencies, and deriving risk scores from probability and impact.

Predict and incorporate weather uncertainty in Primavera P6 by analyzing historical rainfall data, creating calendars for highly and moderately weather sensitive activities, and mapping rainy days to non-work days.

Explore how engineering and procurement integrate with the project schedule through submissions, approvals, and long lead items, including shop drawings, bar bending schedules, and owner-furnished materials.

Learn how to plan engineering and procurement with the submittal processes, procurement logs, and detailed item specifications, integrating ordering, fabrication, and delivery into the Primavera P6 schedule.

Integrate engineering and procurement submittals and approvals into the project schedule, start early, and link them to execution, using prioritization, submittal packages, milestones, and a procurement log for coordination.

Identify and document long lead items, assess lead times, and map procurement steps; implement RFPs, vendor lists with alternatives, and flexible milestone payments to ensure on-time delivery.

Create effective activity IDs and descriptions to enable smart scheduling in Primavera P6, using structured IDs (scope, location, CSI division, subcontractor), action-oriented names, and 20-character limits.

Identify activities and list them in an MS Excel WBS sheet, define milestones, and generate unique activity IDs for each WBC element to enable import into Primavera P6.

Learn to exchange data between Primavera P6 and Excel by exporting activities to a spreadsheet, updating details, and importing back under the correct WBC codes to streamline large schedules.

Learn how to load costs and resources in a Primavera P6 schedule, including labor, non-labor, and material, and use histograms and s-curves for forecasting and earned value.

Learn to conduct quantity and cost analysis in Primavera P6 by assigning labour, equipment, materials, overheads and profits to activities, including one-to-one and multi-item scenarios.

Explain crew composition, crew size, and resource productivity, showing how resources and hours drive excavation and concrete work. Highlight how productivity varies with conditions and crew size.

Learn how man hours quantify labor effort for tasks, calculate hours from crew productivity, and develop a man hours distribution curve to support cost, wage calculation, and project performance.

Calculate excavator productivity for bulk excavation by combining cycle time and average bucket payload, apply a correction factor from published data, and validate with field observations.

Estimate activity durations using labor hour productivity and daily production rate methods, guided by productivity data and rounding up estimates.

Create a resource database in Excel using IRS means data, recording divisions, parameters, daily output, labor and equipment hours, and crew composition for precise resource analysis.

Estimate activity durations and resource requirements for a sample project using a quantity analysis sheet and resource database in Excel, including labor hours per day, daily output, and control IDs.

Import activity durations, costs, and man hours from Excel into P6. Use pivot tables to summarize data and templates to export and import durations, costs, and resource assignments.

Discover how to import quantities from Excel to P6, create and price material resources, and use Mass XL with templates to manage resource assignments and costs.

Import individual resources from Excel into Primavera P6 to determine exact resource requirements. Create labor and non-labor resources, export and import templates, and verify allocations with pivot tables.

Update durations and assign man hours to all work breakdown structure components in Primavera P6. Set calendars and default units per time to reflect percent distribution, then apply resource assignments.

Learn to organize project data in Primavera P6 using activity codes to group by CSI divisions and responsible party, enabling filters, targeted reports, and multi-level grouping beyond the WBS.

Group resource assignments by cost accounts to enable KPI chart data, then assign cost accounts to block work, concrete forming, PCC, RCC, and reinforcement activities for analysis in Excel.

Develop a realistic logic strategy to integrate schedule data, optimize resource use, and meet milestones across scope elements, by detailing intra-element, inter-element, and WBS connections.

Learn to identify and fix missing logic in critical path method scheduling by examining predecessors, successors, and open ended activities, and applying start-to-start and finish-to-finish links with lag.

Apply four relationship types to craft a logically correct schedule, prioritizing finish-to-start and avoiding start-to-finish. Use leads, lags, and discrete activities to control floats and tracking.

Explore how to manage schedule logic in Primavera P6 using hard and soft constraints, mandatory start/finish, and various constraint types to preserve CPM calculations and dynamic project timing.

Develop project logic in Primavera P6 by linking activities for initial scheduling, setting start times, and applying FS, FF, and other relationships with lag, while optimizing resources and avoiding leads.

Link enabling and engineering activities by tying site possession, mobilization, and architectural, electrical, and plumbing submittal approvals to execution, using finish on or before constraints in Primavera P6.

Learn to link procurement activities in Primavera P6 by interconnecting material submittals, approvals, PO issuances, and deliveries with their predecessors and successors, using export/import relationships and floats.

Create and connect multiple scope elements in Primavera P6 by duplicating the first unit, renumbering activity IDs, and linking units with FS and SS relationships.

Learn to optimize resources by applying resource leveling and smoothing, identify overlaps, shift activities to reduce peaks, and balance monthly resource usage in Primavera P6.

Complete the schedule by duplicating units, linking execution with WB components, and using P6 export/import to establish cross-unit relationships and optimize external plaster activities to reduce float.

Analyze formwork to optimize usage, cut costs, and choose plywood or steel formwork for efficient reinforced concrete projects; align reuse across slabs with concrete setting and build a utilization plan.

Explore how critical activities, zero total float, the longest path, and the critical path shape schedule integrity in Primavera P6, including multiple float paths and practical definitions.

Explore who owns the project float in planning with Primavera P6, examining contractor, employer, and project ownership, and learn to negotiate a clear float clause to manage delays and costs.

Review the schedule log to assess readiness, identify errors and warnings, and flag out-of-sequence activities. Examine predecessors, successors, milestones, calendars, data date, and constraints for a reliable schedule.

Explore DCMA's 14 checks for schedule assessment and learn how high duration, hydration percentage, invalid dates, resource assignments, and missed tasks impact baseline and updates in Primavera P6.

Learn to apply DCMA's 14 metrics for project schedules, including the critical path test, CPLI, baseline execution index, and earned value insights to monitor milestones and schedule health.

Explore how to run DCMS metrics with the XDR toolkit, assess schedule integrity through configurable checks and metrics like missing predecessor, positive lags, and high total float, and export results.

Apply a detailed schedule review using the downloadable checklist to ensure all parameters are covered before submission or by the reviewer, and tailor it to project requirements.

Identify and remove resource overallocation in Primavera P6 by inspecting the resource usage profile, adjusting maximum units per time, and ensuring available resources meet demand for baseline schedule publishing.

Generate cumulative resource requirements from project data in P6 and create S-curve and labor versus non-labor graphs. Export as PDF or Excel with adjusted time scales and clear presentation.

Develop detailed individual resource requirements with histograms, then convert monthly units to average daily counts for labor and non-labor resources using the resource usage spreadsheet.

Create a stacked histogram to compare resource data and visualize trends in the resource usage profile by filtering resources and assigning colors, then export to pdf for project-wide distribution.

Develop the project cost requirements by generating monthly and cumulative cash flows to track progress and forecast completion. Derive early and late costs and craft the cost s-curve.

Develop KPI charts for material resources in Primavera P6 by grouping resource assignments by cost account, setting quarterly time scales, and building combo charts to track cumulative monthly values.

Craft and submit the complete planning package, detailing the schedule narrative with scope, duration, budget, milestones, calendars, risks, and codes, plus integrated logs and resource data.