I was watching a crime drama on BBC television the other night where a rising young detective was explaining to his superiors during dinner the need for “bold delivery of sanctions to the stakeholders”.
“Stakeholders?”, one of his superiors asked.
“Five years ago we just called them criminals”, the young detective replied.
Big laughs all around the table. And I suppose sometimes we feel that project stakeholders are somewhat criminal in what they expect from us. Limited resources paired with unrealistic expectations can be a little maddening for the scheduler who is supposed to create a miracle in the project schedule.
So today we are going to discuss what it means to own an activity. Specifically, we call this the “owner” in Primavera P6. The owner of a task does not have to be a resource, which means that any schedule can take advantage of this feature.
So who exactly can be the owner of an activity? The owner is a Primavera P6 user. If only one person is maintaining the project schedule it probably makes little since to assign owners to activities. In a more complex schedule, however, this feature is quite useful, especially in P6 EPPM.
Knowing how to assign an owner to an activity is the only real trick. You need to add a column to the Activity Table. Owner is found under the General category of columns, as seen below:
How we use the owner depends on which version of P6 that we are using. In P6 Professional the owner is primarily a way to filter out activities in the Activity Table. We can then give each user an idea of which tasks they need to take ownership of in terms of monitoring or updating progress.
In P6 EPPM we can go quite a bit further. To begin with, users can see the activities they own in the Dashboard. As we drink our morning coffee (hot chocolate for me) we can quickly scan all the activities we are responsible for – without having to open up the project schedules. For someone assigned to activities across multiple projects this is a tremendous tool.
Because the Dashboard is typically filtered to show only a portfolio of projects, we must keep in mind that not all of our activities will appear unless they are part of the portfolio currently being viewed. The Dashboard can take a long time to load if you have a large portfolio of projects, so I advise having one portfolio of projects limited to ones with activities that you own.
In the screenshot below you can see the My Activities portlet in the EPPM Dashboard, which is where the activities that I have been identified as the owner reside:
Here are two other benefits of P6 EPPM. When I click on the project in the portlet it automatically opens the project and takes me to the Activities page. When I click on one of these activities I am taken to a screen that shows me details of that activity. I can also edit progress on this activity:
The user will need access to the Projects module in P6 EPPM and have permission to edit activities. P6 Progress Reporter (a separate module in P6 EPPM) also utilizes owner to assign users to activities. This module is a simplified interface that can be run on tablets and much cheaper than a full P6 EPPM license.
Even on a smaller schedule we might have one person responsible for updating progress on submittals while someone else handles field activities. Quite a few of my clients have no desire to set up resources so this is an easy compromise for assigning activities to different people. Moreover, it may be practical to have just a few people reporting progress on activities without expecting every resource to provide this information.
Bottom line: if you do not want to assign resources to activities you can still use the owner field to track progress on activities.