We all know how versatile Primavera P6 is as a planning, scheduling and project resource management tool. P6 can handle incredibly detailed project schedules where you can plan and track thousands of work tasks by the hour.
But Primavera P6 is also an ideal tool for creating high-level project plans and schedules. High-level resourcing is the process of planning your resource needs across a high-level project plan.
What is a high-level project plan?
You’ve probably hear the term Level 4 schedule or Level 5 schedule. According to AACE (American Association of Cost Engineering), Engineering and Construction projects (other types too) adhere to different schedule levels of detail. AACE defines Levels 0 through to 5, where a Level 0 schedule is essentially a single bar and a Level 5 schedule is a very detailed work task schedule broken down by categories like phase, discipline and work area. It is possible, and sometimes necessary, to go beyond Level 5.
A high-level project plan (or schedule) is usually a Level 1 or a Level 2 schedule. The detail of the work remains at the gross level, showing only the major components of the project (eg: Design, Engineering, Procurement, Construction, etc.).
Why resource-load a high-level project plan?
Resource-loading a high-level project schedule can help you assess your overall resource demands and can be an aid in the resource planning process.
By performing high-level resourcing you can start to better assess when teams are going to be needed, where there might be lulls in work and how many resources you are going to need.
And of course a high-level resource plan will also help you forecast your costs and cash flow at a high-level as well.
How can I resource a high-level project plan in Primavera P6?
Performing high-level resourcing is a fairly straightforward process, especially if you’re simply resourcing a Level 1 plan. Simply assign resources or resource teams or crews to the high-level activities.
What’s a resource team or crew?
When performing high-level resourcing, to help you save time and manage the data better, you might want to re-create some resources as teams or crews. Rather a resource like “Electrician”, you might want to create high-level resources like “Electrical Crew” or “Earthworks team” where a single resource represents the team or crew that may be made up of a several trades.
NOTE: It’s interesting to note that Primavera P6 EPPM (the web-version) has a high-level resourcing tool as of version 8.x. Using the P6 EPPM high-level resourcing tool, you can build a high-level resource plan without building a schedule. You can assign resources to a project without actually assigning them to an activity. The effect is that the resource’s availability shows that he/she is booked for the duration of the project. Then after you’ve built a schedule, you can tell P6 to use the schedule’s resource assignments and ignore the high-level resource plan. It’s a nice feature that IT companies especially love.
How do Level of Effort Activities help with high-level resourcing?
Level of Effort Activities can be used to help you with high-level resourcing as well. Since a Level of Effort summarizes many activities, you can use a Level of Effort activity for a single resource assignment, rather than assigning the same resource to multiple activities.
For example, in the screenshot below, I’ve used a Level of Effort to represent some specialized equipment, a Crane who will be used to assist in the steel, roof and windows work. This approach can be handy if you really want to highlight this assignment on task list as well – it’s very clear.
Level of Efforts are usually used on projects to represent “non-critical” supportive tasks, but in a high-level plan they are equally useful for crew or equipment assignments that span across large sections of the plan.
WBS Summary activities can also be useful in high-level planning in much the same way.
Wrap-up
High-level resourcing goes hand-in-hand with high-level planning and can be a really useful process to help you do a rough assessment of manpower needs and budgetary spending. The nice part about working at a high-level is that you can put a quick schedule together in minutes, not days. If you’ve resource-loaded and cost-loaded your plan, then you can use Primavera P6’s Resource Usage Profile graph or Activity Usage Profile graph to get a rough cost curve and resource demand chart.
Nice post, but disagreed.
Resource loading schedules into the future is BAD practice. Role loading schedules into the future is the correct method. Don’t freeze a resource availability for high level unknowns into the future, define the role, essentially the Need / or Product being sold pre-execution, then staff the resource by replacing the available resource just prior to execution. That’s why the High Level planning tool in P6 Web allows roles only. Replacing a role with a resource takes the management role of staffing off the planners hands and gives it to the right reason, the project manager…
I guess it depends what you want to do with the future resource. I use resource units to assess labor needs for entire project phases using past ‘actual’ hours in FTEs and finding the variance from the ‘planned’ FTEs. Then with a 4-week (or 6 or 8) look-ahead we can look to see if ‘actual’ FTEs are trending toward planned and thus staying at burn rate
Nice post… I’ve done this a few times to keep track of our Project Controls staff across our portfolio of work. For future work I’ll assign a Role and switch that to a Resource once I know who is allocated to the job. Current work gets a Resource, of course! Definitely helpful to visualize when we have people coming available and when we’re going to need to start hiring.
One thing I’m struggling with (being a manager and not a scheduler) is the best way to allocate resources. Once I have a portfolio of 40, 50 or more projects set up (each as a simple one-liner) is there an easy way to switch over to a Resource view and enter their activity assignments from there? I’ve found the Resource Usage Spreadsheet, but it doesn’t seem like I can add assignments from that screen.
Cheers!
Corey
Ack! Always seems I find my own answer 5 minutes after I post something! I was trying to add things from the wrong view. Switched to the Resource Assignments view (via the Projects menu) and all is good now!
Corey
Yep – that’s the view you want Corey – Resource Assignments page.
Good Morning – I’m trying to find out the details of having cost-loaded resources on a LOE. I have a 96 hour Fire Watch that is an LOE. How is the cost spread across the 96 hours on a 5×10 calendar. Do I use a simple linear curve if the fire watch is there for every shift with no sense that the fire watch will be front- or back-end loaded.
Costs are by default spread linearly on an activity. If you goto the Resource Assignments screen, you can set up the columns to see the spread: https://www.screencast.com/t/197nyv81KKoX