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Primavera P6 – Assigning Resources From A Large Pool 03/22/11 by Ten Six Consulting

If you’re using Oracle’s Primavera P6 enterprise project management tool suite and are like most other organizations, you probably have a large resource pool. You’ll also find that assigning resources from that pool to your project can be time consuming, as scrolling through the large resource list is an extremely tedious affair.

Trying to solve this problem by using Primavera P6′s search capabilities still results in searching for an individual resource every time you try to add one to an activity. It’s laborious and doesn’t save that much time and effort.

This simple, time saving tip offers project management practitioners using Primavera P6 a work around to this problem.

First, create an activity in your project; this will be a dummy activity that will be deleted later. Then go through and assign all the resources that you’re going to be using on your project to this dummy activity. This of course, doesn’t save you any time yet. Also, remember that you can use CTRL Click to select multiple resources at one time.

When they are all assigned, you can then change the filter on the Resource Assignment dialog to show just the projects resources (see picture below).

Now, only the Primavera P6 resources that you need for your project are displayed in this considerably shorter list. When you’re done creating activities and assigning resources, simply delete the dummy activity. If you need to add more activities after you’ve deleted the dummy activity, then resources that you’ve already assigned to your project are still available in the filtered list.

This tip may appear basic to seasoned Primavera P6 users, but time and time again our clients find this very useful.