Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016 Advanced.
In this section we’re going to start to look at Outline Numbering and WBS Codes.
You may not have come across these before so I’m going to start by explaining Outline
Numbering.
For this section and the next one I’m going to use this house build project.
There’s not a lot of detail in it at the moment but there’s enough for our purposes
in terms of outline numbering.
Now something like building a house is a pretty structured kind of project and will very often
have a very similar structure to other house build projects.
Now behind the scenes Project 2016 maintains a set of outline numbers for you.
What I want to do first of all is to show you the outline numbers for this particular
project.
So I’m going to insert here to the left of the Start column in the table the Outline
Number column.
So there it is, Outline Number.
And the outline numbers that are assigned to the tasks follow the structure of the tasks
themselves.
So for instance, here we have summary tasks Site, Base, Lockup and their outline numbers
are one, two, three.
And within each of those summary tasks the next level of task has a dot and then the
second part of the outline number.
So Clear site is 1.1, Set out is 1.2 and so on.
If I introduce subtasks within Clear site, for example, so let me put a task in there,
then that task gets an outline number of 1.1.1 and so on.
Now the good news about all this is that Project 2016 does all the work on maintaining those
numbers for you.
So what’s the point of these outline numbers?
Well they’re used to be able to uniquely identify a task within a schedule.
And the kind of purpose you may put that to is, for example, if you wanted to relate materials
to a particular task.
So if you were say ordering some steel to use for the structural steel frame here task
ID 21 which has an outline number of 4.3.
When you ordered the steel in order to make sure that people knew which particular project
and task the steel was for then you might provide the name of the project and the outline
number of the specific task that that steel was to be used for.
So it’s a way not only of identifying tasks within a project but also to adding some structure
to that identification.
Now on the face of it that sounds like quite a good idea.
But in practice the use of these outline numbers is a little bit fraught with problems.
If you have a very, very fixed structure in your projects and possibly you’re reusing
the same structure over and over again and there is rarely, if ever, a need to vary that
structure then this approach can work.
But if in fact what you need is to have something that can deal with variations with the addition
of new tasks then it doesn’t.
Let me quickly show you the sort of problem you get with this approach.
When I started here Site had outline number 1, Clear site had outline number 1.1, Set
out had outline number 1.2.
They still have those outline numbers.
When I introduced Trim it was a subtask of Clear site and became 1.1.1.
Supposing that Trim had to go in but it wasn’t a subtask of Clear site.
It was a subtask of Site.
So in other words it wasn’t indented to that third level.
Let me out dent it again.
And what happens is that the outline number for Set out has changed.
It started out with an outline number of 1.2.
It now has an outline number of 1.3.
So you can see that as you change the structure, particularly if you insert or delete tasks,
then outline numbers potentially can change.
If I inserted a new summary task between Base which has outline number 2 and Lockup which
has outline number 3 that summary task would get outline number 3 and everything from Lockup
onwards would have its outline number change.
So Lockup will become 4 and so on.
So although outline numbers work and as I say Project 2016 looks after them for you,
they are very prone to change if you either introduce tasks into a project, remove tasks
from a project or indeed if you just move the tasks around.
Now as we’re going to see later on there is a way of getting round this problem by
using Outline Codes.
But before we look at that I’d like to look at another feature that is in effect built
into Project 2016 and that is the use of WBS Codes.
WBS stands for Work Breakdown Structure.
Now the default set of WBS Codes like the Outline Numbers are maintained by Project
2016.
So let me just make a little space here, insert another column.
The column I’m going to insert is WBS.
And as you can see the WBS Codes are the same as the Outline Numbers by default.
One of the major differences though is that you can customize the WBS Codes.
Now in order to explain at least in part why you might want to customize the WBS Codes
let me explain a little about where WBS Codes came from.
WBS Codes originated in government work.
In fact I believe they originate in the U.S. military, possibly specifically the U.S. Navy.
And the idea was not only to be able to identify the task activities in a project using a coding
system that was understood by everybody involved but also to do things like relate WBS Codes
in one project to WBS Codes in another project.
And what generally happened back then was that when you’re dealing with some kind
of government project, military project, and this system soon spread pretty much around
the world, you would be given WBS Codes to use and you would need to set up in your project
schedule WBS Codes so that your project conformed not only to government requirements but often
to international standards in terms of identifying the elements within a project.
Now WBS Codes are still used today.
They are still very commonly used in government public sector type programs and projects.
And in fact I’ve used them relatively recently on some of the government projects that I’ve
worked on.
But one of the key aspects of WBS Codes is that they don’t often look as simple as
this.
The coding system is normally a lot more complex and a lot more specific to the type of project
or situation that you’re working in.
So if you were given a set of WBS Codes to use in a project you would need to know how
to customize these standard WBS Codes and that’s what I’m going to show you now.
The example I’m going to use is a fictitious example.
These aren’t any real WBS Codes from anywhere.
But once you’ve seen how to do this in a relatively straightforward case you should
be able to do it more generally.
So let’s see how to set up some custom WBS Codes.
Go to the Project tab and then within the Properties group WBS and Define Code.
That brings up the WBS Code Definition dialog.
Now first of all we choose a project code prefix.
Bear in mind of course what I said just now.
You’ll normally be given all of this but let’s put our own values in here.
Our project code prefix will be HB01, perhaps standing for House Build 01.
We might use the same coding system when building a whole set of houses.
And then we decide how many levels of code we need.
Now I’m going to have three levels of code.
The first level is going to be a numbering level.
So click in Sequence here, click on dropdown and I’m going to use Ordered Numbers.
The length of the numbers, well I’m going to say the numbers are three digits long.
And then I’m going to have a separator of a slash character.
You’ll see what all this means in just a moment.
The next one I’m going to use is going to be uppercase letters, ordered, just maybe
one character there.
And then for a separator there I’m going to use a full stop, a dot.
And then for the third level I’m going to go back to ordered numbers again.
I’m going to say a length of two digits and the separator there, leave that at dot.
Now I then have two checkboxes towards the bottom of the dialog.
Generate WBS Codes for new tasks.
So that means when I insert new tasks into my schedule does Project 2016 generate the
code for me?
I’m going to say yes.
If I uncheck that box I would have to put my own codes in there.
And then the second checkbox, Verify uniqueness of new WBS Codes.
Do I want Project 2016 to make sure that when I put a WBS Code in it’s unique, it’s
not already been used?
I’m going to say OK.
Now those last two choices are actually very important and particularly if you think about
the first one.
Do you want Project to generate WBS Codes for you or are you going to enter your own?
If you’ve been given all of these WBS Codes and they may not follow a very specific sequence
then it’s important that you uncheck that because you’re going to need to put your
own WBS Codes in.
But as you can see I’ve got both of those boxes checked, click on OK, watch what happens.
Now all of the tasks in my project have now been given WBS Codes.
Let me bring up that dialog again and just look at those three levels that I set up and
let’s look at this task here, Trim.
First of all, HB01, project code prefix.
Note I didn’t put any separator after HB01.
It runs straight into the code itself.
And the code itself is three numbers in sequence.
So 001 is the first.
The separator is a slash.
Then it’s a single uppercase letter, in this case A, then a full stop, and then an
ordered number 01.
So that’s two numeric digits or numbers length two.
Now although I specified a separator at the third level because there was no fourth level
component for this particular WBS Code because it’s only going down to the third level
then I’m not getting that separator at the end.
Project 2016 knows whether it needs to put a separator in or not.
The next task in the plan, of course project prefix the same, HB01.
The first outline level is the same.
So I get 001 again, slash again, but the second level is different.
So the letter is B. There is no third level for this particular task so its WBS Code is
empty.
So it finishes with the B. If you look at this Lockup task here notice how the numbering
goes to HB001, 003, /A, /B, /C, and so on.
So you can see how that numbering system works.
If I wanted to separator between the project code and the specific task all I’d need
to do would be to put it in here.
Perhaps I’d put a hyphen in there, for example.
Click on OK and all my codes have now got hyphens in them.
So that’s an example of how to set up WBS Codes.
And in the Sequence column there in the dropdown we’ve used a couple of the options, numbers
ordered and uppercase letters ordered.
You can also specify lowercase letters ordered or characters unordered if you want things
to be in a more sort of random or manually determined sequence.
And then with whichever option you choose in the sequence column you can say how many
of that particular type of thing you have.
So in the case of our first level numbers ordered, we’ve said the length of the numbers
is three.
So for example, you have 001, 002, 003, and so on.
In the case of uppercase letters or indeed lowercase letters if you specify a length
of one as we did here you’ll only be able to go up to in the case of uppercase letters,
uppercase Z.
So if you need more than that you may need to go for two or more uppercase letters.
So that’s how you set up your WBS Codes.
And in the next section we’re going to start by looking at how well WBS Codes work in terms
of giving you a consistent and reliable way of identifying the tasks in a project.
But that’s the next section.
I’ll see you then.