Primavera P6 Calendar 10 Tips and Tricks

We all use calendars in our schedules using oracle primavera P6. However, from my experience, there are some tips and tricks while using the calendar that will impact your schedule quality and might cause for your some problems later on if not considered.

In this article I will give you some useful tips and tricks for P6 calendar to consider while creating or assigning your calendar. After you read this article, share your opinion with a comment so we can make the subject more valuable.

P6 Calendar tips and tricks:

1. Do not underestimate the importance of the calendars. Take your time to prepare an accurate calendar that includes public holidays and working hours.
2. Specify the working hours in your calendar. In my opinion, don’t plan to use all your weapons at the beginning. In other words, don’t define 10 working hours per day for your baseline schedule. Alternatively, make it 8 working hours, and later on, if you need to do a recovery schedule you can do it by simply changing the working hours from 8 to 10.
3. Reduce the working hours in the month of Ramadan ( Muslim countries) by at least 30%. If your standard working hours during normal months are 8, make it 5 or 6 in the month of Ramadan. If you ignore this step, your project will be impacted and will show delays this month.
4. Some countries (especially gulf countries) have a summer break. It means during certain months the workers are not allowed to work on the direct sun from 12:00 to 3:00 pm. If you have a similar case, reduce the working hours in your calendar in these months.
5. It is important to have a calendar for government-related activities in your schedule. You might be working 6 days a week on your project, but in the end, you will need to deal with governmental organizations that are working 5 days a week. Accordingly, assign different calendars for these activities.
6. The same point above applies if your consultant/client working days are different from contractor working days. Create a separate calendar for important stakeholders such as clients, consultants, and authorities.
7. Sometimes, we need to create a special calendar for an important portion of the work. For example, if we have equipment in the project and the installation team is coming from outside the country, it is a good idea to have a special calendar for this activity/ team.
8. Materials delivery uses a 7 working days calendar. When we say that this material needs 3 months for delivery, it means 7 calendar months. Therefore, it is important to have a 7 working days calendar for materials delivery.
9. If you want to show the project’s overall duration as calendar days, just set the default calendar as 7 working days. The WBS summary will show the days as calendar not working 😉
10. I prefer making the calendar of any project as the project calendar not global. This will avoid problems when you export the project and import it in another pc and avoiding problems if you change the global calendar for any reason where all shared projects will be impacted by this change.

I hope you will find this article useful for you. Please let me know in the comments below if I missed any point so I can add to the above tips and tricks.