Activity steps

Activity steps provide a way to break activities down into smaller units and track the completion of those units. For example, the activity Prepare for System Integration and Testing might contain the following steps:

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

You can add as many steps to an activity as you need: some activities will require more steps to complete than others and some activities might require no additional steps at all. If progress occurs on the step, enter a percent complete in the Step % Complete column, or mark the Completed checkbox to indicate the step is 100% complete.

You can assign additional information to steps, such as cost, start and finish dates, and text. Define user-defined fields for activity steps in the User Defined Fields dialog box (choose Enterprise, User Defined Fields), then add fields as columns in the Steps tab of Activity Details.

You can also create activity step templates (using P6 when P6 Professional is connected to a P6 EPPM database) that capture a group of steps common to multiple activities, then assign the step group to activities.

Weighted steps

Weighted steps enable you to track the progress of an activity based on the number of steps completed. When you mark the Activity Percent Complete Based on Activity Steps checkbox in the Calculations tab in the Projects window, and choose Physical as the activity's percent complete type in the General tab in the Activities window, activity percent complete is updated based on the weight you assign to each activity step.

For example, in the activity Prepare for System Integration and Testing mentioned above, the steps are assigned weights of 3.0, 2.0, and 1.0 respectively. When you mark the Completed checkbox or enter 100% in the Step % Complete column for the step Establish Test Cases and Test Procedures, the activity’s physical percent complete is updated to 50 percent (because the total weight for the steps in this activity is 6.0 and the weight for this step is 3.0; therefore, half the work on this activity, according to the weight of the steps, has been completed).

Related Topics

Activity step templates