Project Planning and Control Using Primavera Contractor Version 6: Including Versions 4.1, 5.0 and 6.1

It is often considered best practice to update a project between 10 and 20 times in its lifecycle. Some companies update schedules to correspond with accounting periods, which are normally every month. This frequency is often too long for projects that are less than a year in duration, as too much change may happen in one month. Therefore, more frequent updating may identify problems earlier.
Statusing a project with resources employs a number of preferences and options, which are very interactive and will require a significant amount of practice by a user to understand and master them.
After reading this chapter and before working on a live project, inexperienced users should gain confidence with the software by:
Creating a new project and setting the Defaults, Preferences and Options to reflect the method you wish to enter information and how you want Primavera Contractor to calculate the project data.
Creating two or three activities and then assigning two or three resources to each activity.
Update the Activities and Resources as if you were updating a schedule and observe the results.
Alter the preferences and defaults if you are not receiving the result you require. Re-update and note the preferences and defaults for future reference.
You should still go through the statusing process in a test project with dummy data similar to your real project data and be prepared to change those settings to which you do have access, as required.
Statusing a project with resources takes place in...