Paul E Harris - 99 Tricks and Traps for Oracle Primavera P6 PPM Professional Updated for Version 21: The Casual Users Survival Guide

1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background Knowledge required to use this book

Readers of this book should understand:

How projects are managed and the processes associated with running projects,

Critical Path theory including understanding Early dates, Late dates and Float calculations, and

The basic functions of Oracle Primavera P6 PPM Professional.

1.2 P6 Versions

This book is applicable to Oracle P6 PPM Professional Version 7 and later.

The main difference between Version 7 and 8 was the toolbars became editable in Version 8.

The main difference between Version 6 and 7 was a major change to calendars. Version 7 now calculates the duration in days correctly for calendars with a different number of hours per day.

There were no P6 Versions 9 to 14 because after Oracle purchased Primavera Systems, they adopted the Oracle convention of naming versions by their year of release.

There are minor updates to the software with each new release but no major changes to the software.

1.3 Aim of this book

P6 has many functions and terms that are not intuitive and the aim of this book is to give P6 users a comprehensive reference book allowing them to set up a database and use P6 with confidence.

1.4 Information Sources

This book has a large amount of information taken from my other books, some of which I have summarized. I have also included several techniques from other sources thus providing some more advanced information than my other P6 books.

1.5 Important Points

Primavera P6 has functions that that do not work in an expected way and catch out users. Thus, using P6 becomes a career shortening exercise when database administrators and users do not understand these functions. Every P6 user and Administrator must understand the functions listed below and be able to identify when they should be used carefully or not be used at all:

Schedulers should always display the date and time when manipulating a schedule. These are set in the User Preferences . If the time is not displayed then P6 may use an irrelevant time when Actual Dates , Constraints , Suspend dates and Resume dates are being set.

What the Planned Dates are, how they are recorded by P6 and when they are displayed. It is CRITICAL that every P6 user and P6 database administrator understands the Planned Dates in both the Current Schedule and a Baseline schedule.

Schedulers should understand what dates and costs are being read from a Baseline. The data that is read for all projects and all users is set in the Admin , Admin Preferences , Earned value tab, Earned value calculation drop down box. Different databases may have different Admin settings and this may result in Baselines displaying different Baseline data when a schedule is imported into a different database.

When a user closes one project and opens another the original Layout will still be applied to a project. This causes problems when there are multiple customer projects in one database with different customer logos and text in the customers Layouts . There should be procedures and check lists written and used to prevent a schedule being presented to a customer with another customers logo and information in headers and footers.

The non-working time displayed in all Gantt Charts is adopted from the Enterprise , Calendars , Global Default calendar. Different projects may not display different non-working times in the Gantt Chart because all users are displayed the same Default Calendar non work time in the background.