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.

Project codes in the global dictionary are an important part of an organization's enterprise data in P6. Needless to say, keeping this dictionary (as well as other global data dictionaries) clean and well-organized is an essential task for the application administrator, as well as for other admin superusers. Incorrectly named project codes and project code values result in confusion and translates into unproductive time for the users, which ultimately results in losses for the company.

When trying to work through a large schedule and trying to understand the sequence of work, what tools can help make sense of multiple paths?

This is a question I have addressed numerous times in P6 training classes and at client sites when building huge turnaround schedules with the planning team. In days gone by (P3 days), we used to print trailer walls full of these logic diagrams. I am talking about 30 feet long by 10 feet high easily.

But with trace logic, we can do a lot of troubleshooting without killing so many trees.

We recently turned our clocks forward an hour for the daylight savings adjustment. Today our users could not log into Team Member - they got an error indicating that the “Current Timesheet Period Does Not Exist”. What gives?

In early 2017 CEGBU released a new version of Unifier in their SaaS Cloud. This is their new release strategy with monthly releases in the cloud and yearly releases for on-premise.

In early 2017, Oracle CEGBU (Primavera) released P6-EPPM in their SaaS Cloud. This is part of their new release strategy for their SaaS Cloud of monthly releases while on-premise releases will be switched to yearly only.

In reading a P6 setup recommendation document for one of our IT program clients I almost fell off of my chair when I saw the recommendation for resource leveling. It said not to use resource leveling as it introduces too many variables into the scheduling process. For an IT group not to be using resource leveling in a program is crazy!

Believe it or not, we see this advice suggested a LOT.

Whenever we have a client that is interested in TAPS, we always get the question about how an activity is updated to reflect that it has been cancelled. So, how does TAPS cancel activities?

Cancelled work is work that you have decided not to perform. Typically the turnaround (TA) team doesn’t want to delete the activity because that would change the baseline hours. On the other hand, they also don’t want to progress the activity which would earn hours.

We are working with a client who have been on the Primavera SaaS cloud for awhile and are now getting serious about migrating their dispersed team to the Oracle Primavera SaaS cloud for their P6 users. We are helping them with this process using our P6-Loader for P6 v16.2 in the cloud. We wanted to go with P6-EPPM version 16.2.3, since it has some crucial patches applied to it in the last 3 months and seems to be stable.

Then we get the news we were dreading, no you can't get that version you must upgrade to version P6 17.1? So we went to Oracle e-delivery to download P6 17.1 and guess what? It is not even released for on-premise use. So what is going on?

We had heard rumors that the upgrade model in the Primavera SaaS Cloud was going to change, but did not want to believe them. Now we cannot ignore them anymore.

When planning a turnaround project you want to make sure you include all the tasks that will happen and even those that might happen. This is a great strategy in the planning phase because during the actual turnaround, you don't have time to add all of the “potential” activities that become necessary.

Now the dilemma becomes, how to cancel the tasks that your team doesn't need after all.

You could process the updates for cancelled activities using manual data entry, dealing with logic, manhours, and baselines, but if you handle a lot of these it becomes time consuming, tedious and frustrating. Lets face it, during a Turnaround that is just not a good idea. You might think that dissolving is good enough, but is it?