Project codes in the global dictionary are an important part of an organization's enterprise data in P6. Needless to say, keeping this dictionary (as well as other global data dictionaries) clean and well-organized is an essential task for the application administrator, as well as for other admin superusers. Incorrectly named project codes and project code values result in confusion and translates into unproductive time for the users, which ultimately results in losses for the company.

When trying to work through a large schedule and trying to understand the sequence of work, what tools can help make sense of multiple paths?

This is a question I have addressed numerous times in P6 training classes and at client sites when building huge turnaround schedules with the planning team. In days gone by (P3 days), we used to print trailer walls full of these logic diagrams. I am talking about 30 feet long by 10 feet high easily.

But with trace logic, we can do a lot of troubleshooting without killing so many trees.

Alberta’s Capital Health was a big user of Expedition from the 1990s through to 2010. They had hundreds of projects that were sitting on a Sybase SQL-Anywhere server that needed to be retired, but they needed to have easy access to the documents related to these health care projects.

Emerald solved their problem using the PCM-Archiver. This PCM add-on tool automates the extraction process of all projects and documents, and in this case, ultimately saved the client approximately 140 hours of computing work. For a more in-depth understanding of this project and its results, please refer to Part 1 of Saying Goodbye to Expedition 8.5 and Hello to Unifier. In Part 2, we are going to explore a more technical perspective including some of the bumps we experienced along the way of extracting 1,213,318 documents, generating 1,123,318 Excel files, generating links for 39,384 attachments, and generating 91,236 PDF files!

We recently turned our clocks forward an hour for the daylight savings adjustment. Today our users could not log into Team Member - they got an error indicating that the “Current Timesheet Period Does Not Exist”. What gives?

Primavera Expedition, now known as Primavera Contract Management (PCM), was a great tool in its day and still is as PCM. We had a number of clients who ran their entire capital program on the tool with hundreds of large and small projects.

Now that PCM is moving into the extended support phase, how do you get years of data out of the system and preserve it for future reference?

In early 2017 CEGBU released a new version of Unifier in their SaaS Cloud. This is their new release strategy with monthly releases in the cloud and yearly releases for on-premise.

In early 2017, Oracle CEGBU (Primavera) released P6-EPPM in their SaaS Cloud. This is part of their new release strategy for their SaaS Cloud of monthly releases while on-premise releases will be switched to yearly only.

In reading a P6 setup recommendation document for one of our IT program clients I almost fell off of my chair when I saw the recommendation for resource leveling. It said not to use resource leveling as it introduces too many variables into the scheduling process. For an IT group not to be using resource leveling in a program is crazy!

Believe it or not, we see this advice suggested a LOT.

Whenever we have a client that is interested in TAPS, we always get the question about how an activity is updated to reflect that it has been cancelled. So, how does TAPS cancel activities?

Cancelled work is work that you have decided not to perform. Typically the turnaround (TA) team doesn’t want to delete the activity because that would change the baseline hours. On the other hand, they also don’t want to progress the activity which would earn hours.

We are working with a client who have been on the Primavera SaaS cloud for awhile and are now getting serious about migrating their dispersed team to the Oracle Primavera SaaS cloud for their P6 users. We are helping them with this process using our P6-Loader for P6 v16.2 in the cloud. We wanted to go with P6-EPPM version 16.2.3, since it has some crucial patches applied to it in the last 3 months and seems to be stable.

Then we get the news we were dreading, no you can't get that version you must upgrade to version P6 17.1? So we went to Oracle e-delivery to download P6 17.1 and guess what? It is not even released for on-premise use. So what is going on?

We had heard rumors that the upgrade model in the Primavera SaaS Cloud was going to change, but did not want to believe them. Now we cannot ignore them anymore.

When planning a turnaround project you want to make sure you include all the tasks that will happen and even those that might happen. This is a great strategy in the planning phase because during the actual turnaround, you don't have time to add all of the “potential” activities that become necessary.

Now the dilemma becomes, how to cancel the tasks that your team doesn't need after all.

You could process the updates for cancelled activities using manual data entry, dealing with logic, manhours, and baselines, but if you handle a lot of these it becomes time consuming, tedious and frustrating. Lets face it, during a Turnaround that is just not a good idea. You might think that dissolving is good enough, but is it?

We have been working with a client using Primavera P6 for a large multi-year, multi-sprint IT project to revamp their customer loyalty program and overall customer experience. The team has been using P6-EPPM and have been aggressively putting together schedules for each key component of the program from infrastructure, to ERP, to integration testing and deployment.

This team is in large part new to P6, and they have been fighting to produce an overall program plan that has a continuous critical path so they can answer the usual question “when are we going to be done?”.

Oracle Primavera Analytics requires one of the following three Oracle Business Intelligence products, which must be licensed separately:

• Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Foundation Edition
• Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Extended Edition
• Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Foundation Edition for Oracle Applications

Only versions 11.1.1.9.160719 and 12.2.1.1.0 of these products are supported with Primavera Analytics 16.2.

I’m using acronyms liberally in this entry for your and my benefit … these names are a mouthful!

• Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Foundation Edition (OBISFE)
• Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Extended Edition (OBISEE)

Of these three choices, two options do not impose supplemental restrictions on how you can use Oracle Business Intelligence with Primavera Analytics within your organization.

When you are building up your schedule it is easy to miss assigning roles to resources, especially if you did not use roles at first and are introducing them after the fact. Another common scenario is when you are importing contractors' P6 schedules and are merging them into your turnaround plan or a large capital program where you are reporting both on resources as well as roles for trades and discipline rollups.

A very common pain point when trying to align project schedules to company or project SOPs (standard operating procedures) is ensuring activity id breakdowns are consistent (as outlined in your company schedule business processes). This can be a real nightmare especially if you are working with multiple contractors and engineering firms all with different structures and standards.