When working on a new project in Primavera P6, it’s useful to create a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The WBS is a hierarchical structure that lets you break your project down into different phases. As you add activities to the project, you can use the WBS to organize them into their specific categories. This makes it a lot easier to navigate through a schedule – especially one with thousands of activities.

In P6, you can create the Work Breakdown Structure on the WBS screen. Once created, you’ll want this structure to display on the Activities screen. This way, as you add activities to the project, you’ll be able to organize them directly into their associated layers. The purpose of the WBS is to show an outline of your project on the Activities page in order to assist with adding and organizing activities.

However, even with this structure created, it may not show immediately on the Activities screen. The visibility of the WBS layers on the Activities screen depends on the layout that you’re using. By default, P6 will open the Activities screen with the Classic Schedule Layout – which is a layout that doesn’t display the WBS grouping bands. This often leads to a lot of confusion for new users.

In this article, we’ll take a look at how to display the WBS on the Activities table in P6. The following screenshots are from Primavera P6 Professional 18 – but these same tools are available in all versions of P6.

Grouping Activities by WBS

In this example, we’ll be starting with a project with a Work Breakdown Structure already created, as seen from the WBS page. For a full guide on how to create a WBS within Primavera P6, please refer to this article here.

Even with this structure created, however, it won’t necessarily display on the Activities screen. To return to the Activities screen, select Project > Activities. On the Activities screen, the table is currently blank. This is how the screen will display when using the default Classic Schedule Layout, which is currently applied. In order to display the WBS layers, you will need to either switch to another layout, or make adjustments to the current one. In this example, we’ll make some changes to the current layout to allow the layers to display.

WBS layers display in the table as grouping bands. Grouping bands allow you to group activities by a wide variety of values, such as Type or Calendar. To adjust the grouping bands that display in the table, first select the Layout menu…

…and then select the Group and Sort button.

In the Group and Sort window, you can customize activities grouped in the table. Grouping activities will create colored grouping bands, organizing activities by specific values. To add grouping bands for the WBS layers, select the first cell under Group By.

The dropdown menu will display all the variables that you can group activities by. In this case, select WBS to display grouping bands for your Work Breakdown Structure layers.

If desired, you can also adjust the appearance of the grouping bands by selecting Font & Color. For each individual band, you can choose a custom font type, style, size, and color. Once done, press OK to apply the settings to the Activities screen.

Just like that, the WBS layers are now displayed on the Activities table. If you add additional layers to the structure in the WBS screen, they will automatically appear accordingly in the Activities screen. Now, you can begin adding activities to the project and organize them directly into their specific layers. Not only will this make it easier to add activities, but it will also make it easier to navigate through them as well.

Summary

When using Primavera P6, the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) makes it easier to navigate through your project schedule. The WBS is a hierarchy that breaks your project down into phases. Using this structure, you can organize your activities into different categories of work. Even after creating this structure, however, it won’t always display on the Activities screen by default. Whether or not the WBS displays depends on the Layout that you’re using. If your WBS is not currently displaying, you can always add it to the screen using the Group and Sort function. Using this tool, your WBS layers will display as different colored bands on the Activities screen. With the WBS displaying, you can now organize and categorize your activities accordingly. 

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