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.

On every Turnaround there are Pre-Turnaround activities that do not get done prior to the actual Turnaround and need to be moved into the Turnaround phase of the schedule.

The challenge is how to record actual hours earned in the PRE phase vs the TA phase, since a large number of these activities already have earned hours associated with them. Simply moving the activities would decrease the reporting of hours in PRE and create earned hours in TA for work that was actually done in PRE.

This can be done simply and quickly with P6-Loader.

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.

Here are step by step instructions on how to upgrade your Oracle Primavera Portfolio Management (OPPM) environment to the new 16.1.3 version. To learn more about OPPM you can visit our product page.

Last week I logged in to my Oracle Primavera Portfolio Management environment and found that my items were in the wrong quadrants. Rather than having current tasks in my upper quadrants and future tasks in my lower ones, all my tasks were being broadcast as low priority and ending up at the bottom of the quadrant.

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.

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.