Deltek Open Plan Help

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Activities Overview

An activity is the smallest self-contained unit of work used to define the logic of a project. Think of activities as the building blocks of a project.

Their definition, therefore, constitutes one of the most important aspects of project planning. While Open Plan supports almost any activity numbering system, most organizations use activity IDs that have some significance built in, such as a prefix that refers to the project.

Guidelines for Planning Activities

Since projects can vary considerably, there are few hard-and-fast rules about the contents of activities or how long they can last. Activities in a plant maintenance turnaround, for example, might last less than an hour; activities in a long-range development project might have durations of many months.

In general, most activities will share the following characteristics:

  • They have a finite duration.
  • It is possible to estimate the progress of activities that have started but are not yet finished.
  • There is a single point of accountability for accomplishing the activity.

It is a good idea to keep these characteristics in mind when defining activities. By breaking a project down into a set of discrete tasks with relatively short durations, it is possible to establish more objective, and thus more accurate, estimates of progress.

Many times an activity will have a defined cost associated with it and one or more resource assignments. In the strictest sense, however, these assignments are not necessary. In fact, it is possible to define your activities first and then return at a later date and enter resource information.

It is possible to define an activity as an internal subproject in Open Plan. You can also define an activity as an external subproject. Both types of subprojects allow you to use a relatively low level of detail when breaking down the work of a project but roll up schedules and costs to high-level summaries for reporting purposes. In Open Plan, an activity representing a subproject is identical to a standard activity except for the fact that the duration and the progress status of the subproject activity is based on its child activities and is recalculated each time you perform time analysis.

Attention: For information about internal and external subprojects, see Hierarchical Projects and Subprojects.

When entering activities for a project, you may want to give some thought to how you want to number your activities. Although you can use other forms of activity information (such as codes) to identify activities, activity IDs are the only identifier that Open Plan validates as being unique for each activity. As a result, the activity ID serves as the default sort order for most views and reports.

Although Open Plan supports almost any activity numbering system, most organizations use activity IDs that have some significance built in. One of the most common approaches is to use the activity ID to associate activities with logical flows of work or phases. This type of approach, however, is not required.

If you are building an Integrated Master Plan (IMP) along with the Integrated Master Schedule (IMS) then the summary activity IDs may include the IMP hierarchy.

Activity IDs in Open Plan do not imply a sequence, and can be entered in any order. Thus, the activity 0002 can be entered before its successor, activity 0001. However, IDs do imply hierarchical relationships, so that activities 0001.1 and 0001.2 are interpreted as being the children of activity 0001. As a result, the use of the period in an activity ID is restricted to indicating project hierarchies.

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