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.

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).

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.

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.

Quality Assurance is a group of methods and processes ensuring that the quality of any work or creation matches established standards. In the project management world, many of such norms exist and are implemented on a daily basis.

But enforcing standards for schedules is only one part of the problem. While at Emerald we released a tool known as the P6-QA Tool to drastically increase the quality of P6 schedules, we also looked into a lower level aspect of the problem and came up with conclusions and solutions.

Over the last few years we have all been struggling with the applets in Primavera P6. Struggling might be an understatement if you are like me and you felt like you never knew what was going to happen when you opened your P6-EPPM web version. With browsers getting tougher on Java applets and Chrome not supporting them, this was becoming a bit of a nightmare for many IT teams supporting P6-EPPM. At Emerald I was lucky to have our tech team right with me, and when I would HipChat Dan “HELP, I don’t know what I did… but P6-EPPM is not working” he knew what was coming next.

You will all be happy to know that Primavera P6 v15.2 has really made some progress on removing the applets. They are not all gone, but several are, on the admin side as well as the user side.

We are currently implementing Primavera P6 with a New York development company and I was asked the dreaded question “what do you think about the construction managers’ schedule”? Well this is a loaded question at the best of times because, although I am familiar with the project, I have not been involved in the contracting strategies and execution discussions.

A few weeks ago we got a panicked call from a client needing their P6-EPPM setup internally. We were surprised to find out that they had put their Primavera P6 in the cloud. They said it was for a large project they were doing in Arizona and they had some other tools in the cloud as well.

We were even more surprised when they needed the environment turned around in 48 hours. We asked, why such a rush? Then the third surprise came...they told us they lost their entire P6-EPPM database!