In this chapter we start with the big picture – how will you organize your projects and your people, and how will you organize the work within the projects themselves? This organization may be quite simple for a small company that is only managing a handful of simple projects. However, for larger companies, organizing can become quite complex. Fortunately, P6 can handle a wide range of user needs. In this chapter we will go through the basic elements of project structure:
- Organizational Breakdown Structure (OBS)
- Enterprise Project Structure (EPS)
- Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
By the end of this chapter readers should feel comfortable designing and setting up EPS, OBS, and WBS for their own systems.
If you come from a background where you work with projects individually, the concept "enterprise" may seem foreign. Simply put, "enterprise" means information that is shared across all projects. For example, people are resources in P6 and resources are defined at the enterprise level. While an individual may work on only one project, they may be assigned to other projects as well. So having them at the enterprise level allows you to allocate people across projects.
Another quite different example of enterprise data is screen layouts. These are customizations of the various screens in P6, such as the view of activities in a Gantt chart. Layouts can be stored and shared globally, so are enterprise data.
Project data, in contrast, is limited to a single project. An activity, for example, belongs to one and only one project. Likewise, project work and reference documents are specific to projects.
However, some data can be stored either at the enterprise level, or at the project level. One such example is activity codes. Some activity codes may be enterprise, perhaps CSI codes to identify the type of work. Others, such as the specific floor in a multi-story construction, are particular to one project and meaningless in others. As we go through the various features of P6 we may sometimes refer to enterprise data as global. Let us begin with the top level of enterprise data, the Organizational Breakdown Structure.