You can edit the planned resource or role allocation per assignment in the timescale unit you choose (days, weeks, months, quarters, years, or financial periods). You can compare the planned future period resource distribution to actual units and costs in the Resource Usage Spreadsheet, Activity Usage Profile, and time-distributed reports. If you plan your project work in defined financial periods, after you store period performance, you can compare the resource distribution you planned to the past period actuals of the project.
For example, let us assume an activity has a planned duration of 28 days and planned units of 80 hours. For this activity, you know that the actual work will not be spread evenly across the duration of the activity; instead, the planned units will be spread as follows:
Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 |
|---|---|---|---|
10h | 30h | 15h | 25h |
By editing the planned resource or role distribution in future periods, you can create an accurate baseline plan to measure against current project progress. Edited future period values are stored in the baseline when you save a copy of the current project as a new baseline. When you restore a baseline, the edited future period values are also restored. As the current project schedule progresses and you apply actuals, you can track how the project is performing by comparing the planned future periods of the project or baseline to the current actuals.
If work on an activity is not proceeding according to plan, you can update the remaining units for the future periods of an assignment. Then you can measure the remaining work for an assignment without changing the original plan. Alternatively, if you choose to change the estimates for future work based on changes to the project schedule, you can edit the future period planned units for an assignment while the activity is in progress. If you need to change the estimates for many assignments, you can create a new baseline plan based on your changes.
Notes:
- You must have the Edit Future Periods and Add/Edit Activities Except Relationships project privileges to edit period data.
- Activity costs, including earned value and planned value, are calculated using the planned future period resource distribution you define for activity assignments.
- P6 includes only stored data in spreads. To see up to date spread data, select Actions, Run, Store Period Performance before summarizing the data.