On a previous assignment I worked on a 6 week turnaround project with 500,000 man-hours. After each shift update we needed to get Earned Value reports to management. It was hard enough completing updates within a 2 hour time period along with getting the next shift's reports out, but having to do full earned value was even harder.

“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy” - Helmuth von Moltke

When you are a scheduler on a Turnaround project you cannot expect everything to go as planned. Often at the end of your shift, when entering progress, you’ll find out something unexpected has happened in the schedule. For example, activities have been marked as completed while their predecessors are not yet started.

Primavera Unifier allows users to assign a proxy. The final tab in the User Preferences is where a “Proxy” is set.

Setting a proxy allows you to assign another user the rights to login for you and move your tasks to the next step of the workflow on your behalf. You may also be given proxy rights for someone else.

I love watching the TV show Mayday – the forensic work that goes into understanding how and why a plane crashes is fascinating to me. Key in any investigation of what went wrong is recovery of the flight data recorder. This “Black Box” records virtually everything that happens in the control system of the aircraft and enables investigators to understand exactly what went wrong.

We implemented our P6-Auditor for one of our clients a couple of years ago, and a few days after go-live, we got a call from the help desk that users across the organization were reporting that all of their activity code assignments for a particular Global Code had disappeared.

Below is a quick guide on how to install Ravello.

From the Ravello login click VM Import Tool. Once you see the window below, click the download GUI VM Import Tool.

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