A workspace contains projects. A project contains schedules. Each schedule contains activities, a WBS, relationships, calendars, and progress. You can show the same schedule through different views without making copies of its data.

Workspace → project → schedule

Imagine a contractor with a “North Region” workspace, a “North Building Renovation” project, and three schedules: “Approved baseline,” “Working schedule,” and “August update.”

The workspace is where the team and reusable assets belong. The project is the real-world job. Each schedule is a particular plan or record of that job. Importing a P6 project into Syncify creates a schedule inside the Syncify project you choose.

A program groups projects for workspace organization. A folder groups schedule files in a project. The WBS organizes the work within one schedule. These are separate structures.

Current, Baseline, and Update

A project has at most one Current and one Baseline designation. Update numbers describe a sequence across files. A status date is a date stored in a schedule; an update number is a label that orders reporting files. Setting one does not automatically establish the other.

These designations do not copy the data. Before using a working file as a historical reference, preserve an appropriate version or copy.

Working schedules, versions, and copies

A normal working schedule can be edited when your role and the file’s state allow it. A saved version is a snapshot nested beneath its parent in Files. A copy is a separate schedule for independent editing.

Use a version to record a review or issue point. Use a copy to try an alternative sequence, build a recovery plan, or start from an existing schedule. Completing a progress cycle also creates a version. See Schedules and versions for the differences and restrictions.

WBS, activities, and milestones

The work breakdown structure (WBS) is a hierarchy of summary rows. Activities live beneath it. A WBS row rolls up its children’s dates; it is not an ordinary activity to which you attach construction logic.

An activity represents work, with a duration, calendar, and often predecessor/successor relationships. A milestone represents a point such as “Permit received” or “Substantial completion.” A Level of Effort activity spans related work, such as ongoing supervision.

A P6 WBS Summary activity is a special activity type. It is different from a structural WBS row. See Activities and WBS.

Dates and progress

The status date is the schedule’s reporting boundary. Actual dates record work that happened. Remaining durations and logic determine the forecast for work still to do.

A progress cycle adds two separate dates:

• Updates Through: the cutoff for the work the team is reporting.
• Due Date: the deadline for submitting that report.

For example, you might collect actual work through Friday and ask for submissions by Monday. Monday is not automatically the schedule’s status date.

Schedule dates retain their meaning in the project’s scheduling timezone. A colleague opening the same schedule in another timezone should see the same schedule dates. Calendar working hours also matter: a five-day activity is not necessarily five elapsed calendar days.

Views, layouts, and assets

A view controls the way schedule information is presented, including columns, filters, grouping, and sorting. A print layout controls the printed page, headers, footers, and related output settings. A report can reuse print setups for a set of outputs.

Assets is the place to manage reusable items such as views, calendars, custom columns, resources, curves, palettes, layouts, reports, and quality profiles. Their scope determines where they are available and who can manage them.

Three percentages that mean different things

• Physical percent complete: a manually reported estimate of work accomplished.
• Duration percent complete: a duration-based measure, which may differ from physical progress.
• Update completion: how much of a progress collection has been addressed by contributors.

An update marked 100% addressed can still describe a project with months of work remaining. An active activity entered as 100% physical complete still needs actual completion recorded before its status becomes completed.

Use the glossary for more scheduling terms, or follow Get started to put these concepts into practice.