In doing consulting with an IT PMO client the other day I was faced with this comment:

“The last P6 consultant we had told us not to use activity coding because it is an administrative headache!”

Now I have to say, after 27 years of doing P3 and P6 consulting, this demonstrates one of the most unpleasant parts of the role of “Expert”. How do you politely explain to your client that they paid good money for bad advice? And how can I know exactly what was said and in what context for the client to come to that conclusion? However, in this particular case, when in comes to activity coding in P6, it is clear cut no-brainer – THEY GOT TERRIBLE ADVICE.

Primavera Gateway is an integration web application being developed by Primavera that allows data to be moved between a Primavera application and another application. Primavera Gateway consists of an Integration Broker in the middle, and at least two providers, one for each application that is involved in the integration. All Primavera providers are built-in including the P6 Provider, Unifier Provider, Enterprise Track Provider and Prime Provider. Third-party vendors can create additional Primavera Gateway providers to integrate non-Primavera applications with Primavera applications.

It is that time of year again where we celebrate the harvest and look forward to the latest release of Oracle Primavera. Once again the Oracle Construction and Engineering teams have got some great new improvements in Primavera 16.2 for us.

On the Unifier side they are working hard to make Unifier easier to administer, easier to integrate with, easier to load documents into and easier to get reports out.

P6-EPPM - HTML5 almost there

P6v16.2 again is focused on driving the P6-EPPM Web platform into HTML5 and out of Java. Not quite sure the percentage just yet, but it is looking like we are almost there. For those wanting a tool to help with the Java issues take a look at Ericom, it is working well in our PCM Cloud and with several clients.

The P6-Loader helps streamline and accelerate many processes, one of which is creating new P6 users. The P6-Loader is a flexible and secure solution that allows users with the correct security access on their P6 profile to extract and upload nearly every data element in P6 data. Let’s have a look at how easy it makes creating new P6 users.

We have a client in the US who was reporting performance issues with a 3rd party client application that creates large numbers of activities in the P6 database using the Primavera P6 API. I was called to help isolate the issue.

When I joined the meeting, they already had Oracle Enterprise Manager up and running, and it was easy to isolate the query that was taking a long time to run (and using almost all the CPU in the server).

While Oracle is busy working on removing Java applets from Primavera P6-EPPM, the same cannot be said for Primavera Contract Management (PCM). With the announcement that PCM v14.2 is the last planned major release for PCM, the Java applets will potentially remain an ongoing issue.

Some creative solutions have been worked up over the years with CITRIX and controlled versions of IE, but all were problematic when other tools needed other versions of Java.

In Primavera P6 V16.1 you can now simply include relationship type (and lag) information in a column!

Adding a new view in either the EPS or Activities screen using the new HTML5 Standard View is identical in both windows, except the options that are available for the Gantt chart.

Log in to P6 16.1 Web and navigate to the EPS or Activities screen.

A step-by-step tutorial

Since the earliest days of cloud computing technology, the question “why move to the Cloud?” has been asked over and over again. The truth is, every new technology faces doubt and suspicion at first, especially when it pretends to replace well established norms and infrastructures. But now, in 2016, more and more companies have already migrated over.

When working with the Oracle Primavera suite of products, scenarios vary a lot from one corporation to another, and each case must be studied carefully before decisions can be made.

Selecting the proper software licensing model can be a rather cumbersome exercise. It requires IT administrator and project managers etc. to go through many different steps and ask questions such as:

• Should I use Named User license model?
• How many users will need access to the software?
• What if more people will join our team down the road?
• Can I decrease without penalties /cancellation fee number of licenses?
• What if a user needs access to the software temporarily and may not need it later? How can I handle the cost of such scenarios efficiently?
• How much paperwork will I need to fill in and how much time will it take to process an amendment request?
• What if person is on vacation? Can I reuse a license for another employee?
• How can I track who/when/how uses the system?
• As a contractor I want to track usage on a per project basis so I can invoice my clients respectively?

Many advanced Primavera P6 users have been manipulating XER’s for years – in fact there are tools out there specifically for manipulating XER’s. We have always recommended against manipulating XER’s and here is an example of why:

I was working on TA project and was asked to provide S-Curve (Units and Cost) reporting for every morning management meeting. The client wanted to observe project trends from a schedule and cost perspective for each unit, piece of equipment and also for various contractors.

We are working with a client who is consolidating many separate P6 databases into a production database, turnaround database and an archive database. Along with the thousands of projects being exported from the old databases to the new ones, our client wants the baselines for projects exported, imported and reattached for a large number of the projects. If you have ever had to un-assign and restore baselines and then turn around and attach and reassign them for even a handful of projects, you know how tedious and time consuming it can be. First, the baseline has to be un-assigned, then restored to a project in the original database. Once the baseline has been imported into the new database, the baseline has to be converted back into a baseline and re-attached to the original project.