How to Audit Your Primavera P6 Global Activity Codes

I had a very simple question posed to me in the Plan Academy Member’s Community area recently about auditing P6’s Activity Codes. It was this:

How can I prepare a report to see which projects use my Global Activity Codes? ie: Can I prepare a report where I can see all the “Global Activity Codes” used in each project in my Primavera P6 database?

Posted by one our P6 trainees, it was a question I’d been asked before and so I was ready with my standard answer….

“It sucks, but you can’t really do that in P6.”

I think I give that answer fairly often, and it highlights the need for more flexibility and features to be added to our dear Primavera P6 software, but that’s a whole separate blog post ;).

But once in a while, I do get very curious to see if something can be solved, somehow.

Recently I’ve been listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent podcast “Revisionist History” and it’s got me thinking alot about challenging assumptions and the status quo.

True, I’m not yet ready to buck the status quo on a lot of things, but maybe I could improve how quickly I am prone to give my pat answer “P6 won’t do that.”

Activity Codes really do rock

One of the best features in Primavera P6 are Activity Codes.

They let you get majorly categorizical with your projects 10,000 activities. They let you filter, group, slice, dice and puree your project data in umpteen ways.

Activity Codes help in oh so many circumstances to add an additional layer of organization to a P6 project. Some of us would be lost without them.

They’re great, but also they can get truly unruly.

To be fair, Global Activity Codes are the problem.

Since they can be used across multiple projects and new entries are easily imported with an xer file, Global Activity Codes can seemingly spread like locusts in your P6 database, making a big mess.

(Ok, maybe locusts is not the right analogy, but I think you get the idea).

How to Build a Report to Audit P6 Global Activity Codes

So I got curious, dug in and figured out how to generate a report that tells you which Global Activity Codes are used on which projects.

Want to try it yourself?

Here’s how to build the P6 Global Activity Codes Audit Report.

0) Understanding the Data first

Just wanted to mention that this report runs only on projects that you have opened.

So if you want to audit which P6 Global Activity Codes are assigned to a group of projects, you’ll have to open them all first simultaneously, then run the report.

If you want to audit ALL Global Activity Codes, then you’ll have to open ALL of your database’s projects and run the report.

Don’t worry. P6 should be able to handle it.

I have over 250 projects in my database and I can open them all at the...

For the remaining steps click here to continue reading...

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