Project Naming Convention & EPS Structure

How to organize your EPS and Project ID’s.

OK, call me a “neat freak” but after years of working with P5/P6, I eventually settled in on an EPS Structure and Project naming convention that works for me. Of course, I’m sharing my personal procedure, if you have other preferences, feel free to incorporate them.

In the illustration above, the Top Node is the Project. I have other Nodes above such as Region/State and Company.

Below the Project Node, my subset includes:

  1. A Node to contain the latest or “Current” Update. This Node usually contains only 1 Update.
  2. A Node for Previous Updates. For very long Projects, I occasionally include Nodes grouped by Year so that there is no more than 12 Updates in each Node.
  3. A Node for the Baseline Project Schedule. If there are multiple Baseline Project Schedules, I’ll create a separate Baseline Node for previous Project Baselines.
  4. When necessary, I’ll include Project Node subsets for “What-if Studies”, “TIA’s”, “Sandbox”, etc.

For Project ID’s and Project Name, my naming convention is in the format: “PPP-BL#-UP## – Project Name – Update ## – DD dd-Mon-yy” where:

  1. PPP: is a 2 or 3 character code that is unique to each Project.
  2. BL#: References the source Baseline Project. i.e., the Baseline Project that the current Update was derived from. Unfortunately, the reality is that “re-baselines” can occur especially on multi-year projects. In the example below, if a re-baseline situation occurs, that schedule will be designated as “MST-BL2” all future Updates will be prefixed by “MST-BL2-UP##.
  3. UP##: Represents the Update Number which increments by 1 from beginning to the end of the Project. The Update Number ## does not reset.
  4. The Project Name references, the Project Name, Update Number and the Data Date (DD).

Note that Project Updates are NOT embedded as “Maintained Baselines”. When it’s necessary to perform baseline variance analysis, I’ll select the baselines from the Updates or Baselines node, then “assign” the appropriate schedules as “Project”, “Primary”, “Secondary” or “Tertiary”, then “Restore” when the variance analysis is complete.

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