Use Primavera P6 Reflections To Merge Scenario Projects

Reflection projects are a little-known but very handy feature in Primavera P6 Professional. A Primavera P6 Reflection project is essentially a copy of a project but with one snazzy built-in trick – the ability to merge the copied project back into the original at any time. If the genius of this trick hasn’t struck you yet, it will.

This merging ability was designed to help planners work with scenario projects.

Let’s say you’re the planner for a large capital project that is a falling behind schedule. The boss wants you to assess the impact of adding an extra shift to the work schedule. How much time can be caught up with this approach (ie: scenario)?

The thing to do here is to create a Reflection of the project in Primavera P6, add an extra shift and verify the finish date. If the boss approves the extra shift, then you can merge this scenario project into the original project along to keep the changes you made.

Primavera P6 reflections save you the time of renaming projects, resetting permissions and copying and pasting changes from one project to another. There are also some nice options to help you create a backup of the original project in case you need to reference it again in the future.

Step 1 – Creating a Reflection project in Primavera P6

From the Projects window, right-click on the original project and select Create Reflection from the menu.

If the original project has any baselines you will see pop-up window where you can select whether or not to copy these baselines into the reflected project. Simply mark the checkbox in the Copy column if you want to preserve any baselines in the Reflected project.

You should now see a copy of your project in the Projects window. The copy will have the same Project ID with “-1” appended. This reflection project will also be marked with a Status of “What-If” which is Primavera’s way of indicating the project is a “scenario” project and not a real project plan.

Step 2 – Open the Reflection project and Activity Layout

You Primavera P6 reflection project is now created and ready for editing.

Now it’s time to run your scenario – ie: you can now make changes to the Reflection project to run your scenario, test out a hypothesis, etc.

In this tutorial, we’ll make a small change to the reflection project’s resources.

Open the Project and then Open the Activity Layout provided the tutorial downloads section.

Before we make any changes, you’ll need to make sure a key setting for working with resources is set correctly in User Preferences. Go to Edit -> User Preferences, and click on the Calculations Tab.

Set the “Recalculate the Units, Duration, and Units/Time for existing assignments based on the activity Duration Type” option. This will make sure that Primavera will perform the necessary recalculations when resources are added or removed from an activity. Close the User Preferences window.

NOTE: this step isn’t necessary when working with Primavera P6 Reflections, but I like to set this option when I’m doing resource-based scenarios.

Step 3 – Making changes to your Primavera P6 Reflection project

Find Activity A1020 – Convert Legacy Data. You’ll be adding another resource to Activity A1020 to see how this will affect the project’s overall finish date.

Since the activity’s Duration Type is set to “Fixed Units”, adding an additional resource will have the effect of reducing the activity’s duration and spreading the units equally over the 3 resources assigned. Let’s give it a try.

 I’ll now add resource Tom Bell as a new resource assignment to A1020 and reschedule the project using the current data date and check the project’s finish date.

The project should now finish on Dec 20, 2010 whereas before it was scheduled to finish on March 1, 2011.

Step 3 – Reviewing the Reflection Differences Report

One of the best features of working with Primavera P6 Reflections reveals itself when you initiate a Merge – the differences report.

The differences report will show you specifically what has changed in your Primavera P6 reflection project.

Go back to the Projects window and right-click on the Reflection project – “Billing-1”.

Choose “Merge Reflection into Source Project” from the menu. You should now see the Differences Report window.

This screen is really nice. It provides you with a report on the differences between the original project and the reflection at the activity level. You’ll see the value for say Remaining Duration from the Source Project, and the updated value from the Reflection project.

From here you can choose which changes you want to merge into the original, or leave out by checking the box in the “Merge” column next to the item. Don’t like the updates on a particular activity? Just leave them out.

Primavera P6 also gives you some options to archive the original project, either as a baseline or as an .xer export file. This is *essential* as you’ll likely need to keep the original project around. And you can also choose how to handle the reflection – keep it, delete it or replace it (update it) with the new merged project.

Step 4 – Merging the Reflection into the original project plan

If you agree to merging the projects, you can go ahead and set the options as above, and click “Merge Changes” to finalize the merge. You may want to print this differences report first, or you might even copy and paste it into a text document before you Merge. You can do either of these by clicking the Display bar.

With your scenario complete, don’t forget to communicate the results.

Merging Primavera P6 Reflections – Limitations

The merging process between a source project and a reflection project has some limitations that I’ll do my best to outline here. Click here to continue reading....

This post was originally posted on PlanAcademy.com. Check out our Blog for more related articles.