Struggling With P6 Activity ID Consistency - or Should we say Lack Thereof?
A very common pain point when trying to align project schedules to company or project SOPs (standard operating procedures) is ensuring activity id breakdowns are consistent (as outlined in your company schedule business processes). This can be a real nightmare especially if you are working with multiple contractors and engineering firms all with different structures and standards.
Give Your New Schedulers A Head Start with the P6-QA Tool
Let’s help our new schedulers get up and running faster then ever before.
I love training up new schedulers. I've been a scheduling lead for years and always get a kick out of teaching new users best practices that I have learned the hard way.
On a previous assignment I worked on a 6 week turnaround project with 500,000 man-hours. After each shift update we needed to get Earned Value reports to management. It was hard enough completing updates within a 2 hour time period along with getting the next shift's reports out, but having to do full earned value was even harder.
The unexpected happens during a Turnaround project - Let TAPS help
“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy” - Helmuth von Moltke
When you are a scheduler on a Turnaround project you cannot expect everything to go as planned. Often at the end of your shift, when entering progress, you’ll find out something unexpected has happened in the schedule. For example, activities have been marked as completed while their predecessors are not yet started.
What the P6-Auditor and a Flight "Black Box" Have in Common
I love watching the TV show Mayday – the forensic work that goes into understanding how and why a plane crashes is fascinating to me. Key in any investigation of what went wrong is recovery of the flight data recorder. This “Black Box” records virtually everything that happens in the control system of the aircraft and enables investigators to understand exactly what went wrong.
We implemented our P6-Auditor for one of our clients a couple of years ago, and a few days after go-live, we got a call from the help desk that users across the organization were reporting that all of their activity code assignments for a particular Global Code had disappeared.
“Tagging and Bagging” - One of the Best Tips I can Share After Working With Primavera for 27 Years
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.
Integrating with Primavera P6 and Unifier - Where do we stand?
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.
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.
A step-by-step guide on how to create new users in P6 using the P6-Loader
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.
Huge potential for improvement in API performance in applications that create objects with uniqueness rules in Primavera P6 based on user-entered values
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).
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.
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:
