When you are working on a project and you move from Project into Support, sometimes it is hard to decide the exact cutoff point for the project team to start charging to the new support project. I had a problem the other day where I needed to decide the end date and cut over. The client selected a date a few weeks before we had thought we were going to cut it off after she checked her budgets and we realized we were going to go over.

So I had to go back to look through the timesheets we had submitted in Team Member to get the time reallocated before sending it into our QuickBooks where we invoice from.

Ideas in Oracle Prime:

Use Oracle Prime to create ideas: capture, evaluate, and process the ideas for new initiatives and business endeavors.

Ideas are processed using a submission and approval workflow. Prime Projects provides a default workflow for processing ideas, or you can create a customized workflow. First the idea creator creates an idea and specifies the idea's business case. When an idea contains sufficient information, the creator can submit the idea for further processing by routers and owners.

Manually wading through a schedule and looking for errors is time consuming and prone to human error. Not only that, it's boring. No one wants to do it, but you need to check your schedule for errors!

Even worse then working through your own schedule for errors, is slogging through a contractor's. When you don't know how they have built the schedule, it can take days to make sure things hold together. Some of our clients have several layouts, reports and even special access databases and outside tools to do this which is very time consuming, error prone and boring.

We have all experienced at one point or another how tedious (and time consuming) setting or changing resource availability can be in the P6 resource dictionary. Particularly for an example like the one we will walk through where you are setting up or adjusting turnaround resources and the weekend rule happens to be ½ crews.

P6-Loader can ease the pain of these types of tasks.

You are correct; out-of-the-box P6 does not calculate Earned Value (EV) at the resource assignment level. It only runs EV at the activity level which is fine for a start, but what to do when you need to 'dig deeper' and analyze crew performance? You can't use Global Change to calculate the resource assignment EV because the activity percent complete isn't available in the Global Change list of fields.

A very simple option is to use TAPS to input your schedule updates. TAPS is P6 updating using barcodes (plus additional functionality). By using TAPS, updates are faster and more accurate giving you (and your team) more time for schedule analysis. Yes, TAPS runs EV calculations at the resource level.

When you have a large number of users in your P6 database, it is surprising how quickly that database can get “clogged up” with a lot of unwanted data. This happens even when using Sandbox databases, restricting privileges and every other trick you have thought of; long time P6 users know what I am talking about.

This is part 2 of a series of blogs discussing best practices of P6 archiving. In Part 1 we discussed the question of time:

• How long should you keep a P6 project file?
• How do you track the date to archive your P6 project?

Now we will discuss the question of location.

We get asked on a regular basis what the best way to archive P6 data is.

1. How long should a project file be kept?
2. What should be done with the project files when that time period has expired?
3. Where should they be kept?
4. How can we retrieve if we need them, especially with upgrades?

In this blog series, we’ll look at some of the options available to a P6 user and discuss the question of time.

When working with resources in Primavera P6 Web version 16.x on, there is a new twist: the need to publish data. If you are trying to analyze resources and the following message displays, it's time to publish.

Over the last few years I have worked with many clients on turnaround projects in remote trailers on job sites that didn't have great connectivity. Now I am no techie, so I cannot pinpoint what causes the problem, but I know there is a problem when the coffee maker is the busiest place in the trailer. Now I am talking trailer coffee here folks, that stuff is gut rot at the best of times. If the planning team is hanging around, it is because they have been kicked out of Primavera P6 again!

In the current economy the mere suggestion of financial spends to address system issues are something that will elicit gasps, face palms and shocked facial expressions, let alone a few choice words. But during one of these “extended coffee breaks” I did some number crunching out of curiosity on what the downtime costs really were.

Here are step by step instructions on how to upgrade your Primavera P6 16.x environment to the new Primavera P6 17.7.

As longtime users of Primavera P6 and Timesheets, we were pleasantly surprised to see some great improvements in the timesheets part of P6 v 16.2. The approval portal, which used to be very hard (I would even say impossible) to work with, is now much easier. Oracle has particularly improved the ability to find what timesheets need approval, and there is better adherence to layered approvals by the resource and project managers. Both of these tasks used to be ordeals in the previous versions.

UDFs - Making Sure They are Clean

When working with a client to setup cost controls in P6, we were working with budgets, estimates, work in progress, incurred to dates etc. These required a lot of User-Defined Fields in P6 to make sure we were able to cleanly track all the values we were pulling from the disparate systems from accounting to spreadsheets.

As a contractor, we were planning to track both the costs of the project delivery and the sale to the client. This way we could also report on profit margins and markup.

If you are a Java programmer, or if your organization has a Java programmer who is eager to learn about the Primavera API, there is a world of possibilities about what you can do with your P6 database. The P6 API is a powerful solution that lets you interact with the P6 database from a Java application.

When I added my first baseline in 15.2, I uttered a few choice words because they were not working!

I could not see my baseline, it was not doing anything and I was getting a bit annoyed to say the least. I could not understand what was going on, I mean baselining is not a new thing in P6. So before you panic and get worked up like I did, you need to know that Primavera has made a technology change here.