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Activity Steps Overview

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How can I use activity steps?

Activity steps make it possible to describe and report progress for activity work at a more granular level of detail. If you have privileges to edit activities, you can add individual steps to activities, or you can add predefined groups of steps based on templates that have been defined for your organization.

In addition, to quantify the portion of an activity's total work that each step represents, you can specify a value called a step weight. Optionally, on a project per project basis, step weights can be used to calculate Activity Percent Complete.

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Activity Step Templates

Step Templates enable an organization to define groups of steps that can be shared by many projects. By creating templates for groups of activity steps that are relevant in many projects, an organization can streamline data entry and ensure that work is identified consistently throughout the organization. Step templates can be created in the Project Management module only, but can be used in P6 Web Access to add predefined steps to activities.

In P6 Web Access, when adding steps to an activity, you can choose from a list of available templates. You can use more than one template, but you can add steps from only one template at a time.

If you use a template to add steps to an activity, you can edit the step details except for the step name.

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Weighted Activity Steps

To indicate the portion of activity work that a single step represents, you can assign it a numerical value, or Step Weight. Once work for a step is underway, Primavera can use the step weight and the reported progress of step work (Step Percent Complete) to calculate the percentage of total work that has been completed for the activity (Activity Percent Complete).

How does step weight affect Activity Percent Complete?

Because weight represents a percentage of the total work for an activity, a step that has more impact on the finish of an activity should be given a higher weight than other steps in the group. Primavera converts the weight of each step into a percentage, referred to as Step Weight Percent.

Step Weight % = (Step Weight/Sum of Weights for all steps) *100

Step name Step Weight Step Weight %
step 1 1 10% = (1/10)*100
step 2 2 20% = (2/10)*100
step 3 3 30% = (3/10)*100
step 4 4 40% = (4/10)*100

Because it reflects a larger portion of the overall work for an activity, when a step with a higher weight is complete, it has a greater impact toward the finish of the activity, or Activity Percent Complete.

Activity Percent Complete = the sum of (Step Weight % * Step % Complete) for each step/100

Given the following progress reported (Step % Complete) for our sample steps, Activity Percent Complete would be calculated as follows.

 28% =[ (10% * 100%) + (20% * 50%) + (30% * 0%) + (40% * 20%) ] /100

Step name Step Weight % Step % Complete
step 1 10 100
step 2 20 50
step 3 30 0
step 4 40 20

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Requirements for using weighted steps to calculate Activity Percent Complete

All of the following must be in place

Tip: When using weighted steps to calculate Activity Percent Complete, if you mark the activity complete, but do not mark all of the steps completed, the Activity Physical Percent Complete will total less than 100%. For example, assume an activity that has four steps, each with a step weight of 1, equaling a step weight percent of 25. If you mark only three of the steps complete, but the activity is marked complete, the activity physical percent complete is calculated as 75%: .25 * 100 ( for 3 completed steps) + .25 * 0 (for the step not marked complete) = 75/100 = 75%.

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