Renumbering Activity ID in Primavera P6

By default activity ID in Primavera has a format like A1000, A1010 and so on.

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A process to includ inteligence on the activity coding feature.

Primavera P6 Four Week Schedule Look Ahead

Once a schedule has been created, baselined and started, you begin the process of tracking progress. In support of this effort, it’s not uncommon to want to report all activities taking place in say, the next 4 weeks.

David Allen’s popular book on organization entitled “Getting Things Done” encourages you to focus on listing the next steps required to keep your project’s progress moving forward. The beauty of Primavera P6 is that it can display everything that commences or is in progress over the next 4 weeks. These are the next step items of your project schedule.

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Primavera P6 Solves the Start-to-Start Open Network Problem

In Primavera P6, once all the activities are clearly defined and the corresponding durations accurately estimated, the next step in the scheduling process is to define the relationships between these activities. This can be a deceptively challenging process. It may appear that you have all the relationships between activities sufficiently defined. But when you start the update process your schedule has logic and critical path errors that are difficult to spot. These errors are most likely caused by an open network somewhere in your schedule. This means that the relationships between activities have loose ends.

A common relationship susceptible... 

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Creating a Believable Schedule

Defining activities is an important part of scheduling. Part of the complexity of the project is determined by the number of activities required to complete that project. When it comes to the size and/or placement of the activities, several control factors should be considered. Once the project has been broken down into unique definable elements of work, the duration of these elements must be accurately estimated. Accurate definition of activities and their durations creates all the elements necessary for a believable schedule.

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Organizing Filters by Project Layouts in Primavera P6 Professional

In Primavera P6 Professional there are several different filter types including default, global, and user defined. But did you know there is also a fourth type of filter? This is the layout filter type that can be associated with a specific Layout. This can be used to help better organize your filters.

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Primavera P6 Professional EVM Features

Increasingly of late, we’ve been getting enquiries about the capabilities of Primavera P6 Professional as far as performing Earned Value Management (EVM) is concerned. Can it do it? If so, can you help us use Primavera P6 for Earned Value Management? Can I develop a DoD or DoE certified EVM system using just Primavera P6?

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What is Primavera P6 Implementation and Administration?

Implementation?

The ‘out-of-the-box’ installation of Oracle Primavera P6 comes with a basic configuration set-up which requires additional customization of the administrative or ‘global’ settings in P6 to cater to your company’s needs. The whole process of customizing Primavera’s configuration is called Implementationin the Primavera world. Oracle usually relies on its Primavera partners and consulting companies with P6 Implementation Specialists to help clients set up P6 once they’ve purchased their software licenses. P6 consultants would sit down with your project team to conduct a needs analysis to help configure Primavera for you.

One of the main reasons it is necessary to have P6 configured is to make sure that the security and user access settings are properly configured to be scalable from a few to 100s of users. It is important to remember that P6 is database driven, where multiple people can work on and make changes to the same project at the same time. It is necessary to ensure that people are given access to only their projects or even parts of the projects they are responsible for. Once the security profiles are created, a user can be assigned different levels of access to various parts of Primavera, whether it’s “read only” to “can edit but not delete” to “no access”.

The basic settings the implementation process will help set up are:

• The EPS (Enterprise Project Structure)
• The OBS (Organizational Breakdown Structure)
• Security Profiles – Global and Project Security Profiles
• User Profiles
• Global Dictionaries – resources, calendars, project & activity codes, notebook topics, etc…

The implementation process can vary depending on the complexity of your company’s needs; a straight forward implementation can take as little as a day to a week. If there is a requirement to integrate other software programs with P6, then it may take upwards of a year or more to make sure everything is set up properly and tested.

Administration?

If your company is new to Primavera, you may be unaware that P6 requires at least one individual that is knowledgeable in the Administrative functions of Primavera. Your company may have involved a consulting expert with the set-up or implementation of P6, but the on-going maintenance of P6 requires an individual that can make changes on an as needed basis would be the P6 Administrators role. For example, if you purchase additional P6 licenses, then someone in your company needs to be able to create additional users with the proper security and access settings.

As a best practice, every company will have one “super administrator” user account (license) that will have full access and abilities to make changes in your company’s P6 settings. For larger companies, additional Business Unit Administrators may be needed for their division of projects.

Oracle Primavera has made changes on how to access the administrative functions in their newer versions of P6. All of the administrative access is now done solely through the P6 Web Access platform in the EPPM (Enterprise Project Portfolio Management) suite. In general, most companies primarily use the P6 Windows version of Primavera to manage their projects. However, these companies would need their administrator to be familiar with P6 Web Access as well for administrative purposes.

Some of the duties a Primavera P6 Administrator will have to do are:

• Maintenance of the EPS (Enterprise Project Structure)
• Maintenance of the OBS (Organizational Breakdown Structure)
• Add/Remove users
• Monitoring of Global/Enterprise dictionaries such as: Calendars, Activity Codes, Project Codes, Resource & Role Libraries, Calendars, Cost accounts, Notebook Topics, UDFs (User Defined Fields), Filters, Timesheets, Scheduled Services and much more
• Creation/maintenance of Layouts/Views, Dashboards, Portfolio Views 
• Some technical support – Java issues, database or SQL inquiries, Event Code errors, web browser issues, and other environmental issues that may come up.