When creating a project in Primavera P6, it’s generally a scheduling best practice to first create a Work Breakdown Structure, or a WBS. The WBS is a hierarchical structure that let’s you create different layouts for different stages of your project. With the WBS created ahead of time, it’s easier to add activities to your project, as you can break them up into logical chunks of work. Although the WBS is created within the WBS tab, the purpose of it is to create an outline that will be loaded into the Activities screen.

The most common question I receive when teaching our Primavera P6 Fundamentals course is in regards to how to add that WBS structure to the Activities screen. The visibility of the WBS bands on the Activities table is determined by the layout you’re currently utilizing. By default, Primavera P6 will open the Activities screen with the Classic Schedule Layout, which does not display the WBS grouping bands. This often leads to a lot of confusion for new users.

In this article, we will go over how to add the WBS layers to the Activities table. Currently, I have a project open where I have fully created my Work Breakdown Structure, as can be seen from the WBS tab.

However, when I return to the Activities screen, the table is currently blank. I don’t have any activities created yet, so that makes sense, but I would like to have the WBS layers visible here to assist me in adding activities.

To add the WBS layers to the Activities screen, first select the Layout menu above the table…

…and then select the Group and Sort button.

In the Group and Sort window, you can adjust how the Activities table displays, such as adding grouping and sorting orders or adjusting fonts and colors. To add the WBS grouping bands, we will first need to create a grouping order by selecting Group By.

The dropdown will display all of the variables that you can group activities by. I’ll select WBS to group my activities together by WBS layers.

Press OK to apply the settings to the Activities screen.

And just like that, the WBS layers are displayed on the Activities table. As I add layers to the Work Breakdown Structure in the WBS tab, the Activities screen will automatically adjust accordingly. Now, I can begin adding activities directly into specific WBS layers.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please use the comment section on the bottom of this page, and don’t forget to subscribe to our blog to get more Primavera P6 tips & tricks directly in your inbox!

Lauren Hecker is the Primavera P6 Professional instructor for Taradigm. To see her next open enrollment course, please visit our calendar. To schedule an onsite or custom course, please contact us!