Figure 1Project templates in Primavera P6 EPPM are used to create new projects based on pre-defined Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) elements, activities, steps, and roles or resource assignments. If your organization has repeated projects or schedules similar to each other, you can save the schedule as a template and use the template as a starting point for a new project.
From the dashboard in Primavera P6 EPPM, we select the Projects tab and enter the ‘Enterprise Project Structure’. We scroll down to ‘WELLMONT01’ (our Wellmont Substation Project) and after observing that the file icon is closed (depicting that the project is closed) we click on the gear adjacent to it and from the drop-down menu, we select ‘Add Project’ as shown below in Figure 1.
Figure 1An ‘Add Project’ dialog box appears and under the general tab, in the Project ID box we type “My New Project 01”. In the ‘Project Name’ box we call it “My New Project from a Template”. We set the date to “01-Jan-2024” in the ‘Project Planned Start’ box at the bottom left in the dialog box. Finally, we leave the ‘Must Finish By’ box blank, as shown below in Figure 2.
Figure 2We select the ‘Advanced’ tab in ‘Add Project’ and the ‘Select Project or Template’ dialog box appears. We select ‘Templates’ at the top of the dialog box and open Project Templates and scrolling down we select ‘Assisted Living Facility’ as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3We return to the ‘Add Project’ dialog box and when we select the ‘Advanced tab’, we can select the components we require in our template. At the top of the list is ‘Project & WBS Data’ and using the slide bar on the right-hand side we scroll down the list selecting our items. We select ‘Activities, WBS Milestones and Reports, as shown below in Figure 4
Figure 4The second half of the scroll-down list is where we can select the ‘Activity Data’ we require for our template. We select ‘Activity Codes, Relationships Steps, and Financial Period Data’, as shown below in Figure 5.
Figure 5Lastly, we select create and when we ‘OK’ the Information message in the top right-hand side of the screen we can see our ‘My New Project from a Template’ displayed below ‘Wellmont Substation’ as shown below in figure 6.
Figure 6Project templates in Primavera P6 EPPM can save project professionals hours of unnecessary work if they are creating a similar project. With Primavera P6 EPPM, users can create templates of schedules defining the project WBS data and Activity data to suit their needs.
Care should be taken when defining data as you won’t want to use all the data in the creation of your template. For example, expenses usually differ from project to project therefore we recommend that this element is omitted.
