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.

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!

I have often been asked the question – ‘can I have my schedule activity bars automatically appear a specific color and/or pattern according to the value of a specific code?’ Yes, you can do this very easily.

Let’s look at one simple example.

Above I have incorporated additional bar configurations along with the default Critical Remaining Work and Remaining Work configurations.

The additional bar configurations are generating the hatching by filtering on the activity code used to assign the ‘Engineering’ and ‘Construction’ grouping in the layout.