Primavera P6 Planner

[Alayna Rother]

Todays high-performing organizations need to maximize the value of project information to capitalize on their investments, improve project performance and optimize the return on resources, effectively achieving more with less.

Are your organizations managing multiple projects or programs? Are you challenged with integrating all these projects into a cohesive picture for senior management? Our EPPM experts enable clients to continuously improve the tactical delivery of projects across their "enterprise".

Pinnacle has over 20 years of experience enabling agencies and corporations over a diverse portfolio of industries to effectively adopt Integrated Program Management solutions though Management Consulting, Business System Implementations, and Training and Adoption.

Primavera has been in business since 1983. Their business model was to build project management software and sell it through a network of distributors. They now sell directly to major accounts, IT accounts and Government Agencies.

Until the new century, Primavera focused on, and became the dominant player, in Construction and capital intensive industries, typically used on large projects with dedicated project teams. Today, Primavera has a number of products, some have their roots in the early days of the company, others have been acquired attempting to move in new directions.

Primavera Project Planner, Primavera Expedition (Primavera Contract Manager) and Primavera SureTrak have their roots from the early days when the focus was on professional project managers in large capital intensive industries.

Primavera Project Planner is a mature multi-user product still being used on many construction projects. Sometimes referred to as P3, it is for experienced project planners needing all the CPM (critical path method) bells and whistles and has been refined over many years. It is based on client/server technology and uses the btrieve database, a low maintenance, reliable but old database that most IT departments will not want to deal with.

Primavera Expedition is a multi-user project administration and contract administration product more tightly focused on the engineering/construction industries. It incorporates document management capabilities. Support for Primavera Expedition is about to be discontinued (November 2008) and the upgrade path is to the re-architected Primavera Contract Manager which was released in 2005.

Towards the end of the 1990s it was becoming clear that the growth in the project management software market was going to be in high-tech knowledge worker environments (banks, information technology etc.). As a leading project management software vendor Primavera made moves towards this market. In 1999 Primavera purchased a small company called Eagle Ray Software Systems who had built a product targeted at the Information Technology/software development area.

The early versions of this product were client/server based using Oracle or MS SQL-Server. Subsequent releases have included web components for timesheets and collaboration and, more recently, portfolio management. Today, the Primavera P6 range has a sophisticated technical architecture for large Enterprise Project Management deployments. Its project planning and scheduling capabilities are world-class although inexperienced project planners are often perplexed by it. Pinnacle has led many implementations of Primavera for Enterprise Project Management.

In 2003 Primavera purchased Evolve software Inc. and their Professional Services Automation (PSA) product. This product, Primavera Evolve, is positioned for Enterprise Resource Management and targeted at knowledge-worker intensive organizations such as professional services firms.

Over the last 5 years project management software vendors have been improving their offerings to position them as supporting project portfolio management: the simultaneous management of hundreds or thousands of projects and a pipeline of new business. Primavera has added Project Portfolio Management capabilities to their P6 product line. In 2006 Primavera also acquired Prosight Inc. and their product which was a market leader in the Asset Management or Application Portfolio Management area.

Bottom-up would be managing the portfolios using information from detailed project plans. The P6 range of products is oriented toward a bottom-up approach that depends upon consistent project management across the organization. Primavera ProSight can work with the P6 product range but can also work independently supporting more of a top-down approach that may not even be project-oriented. Primavera ProSight can be oriented toward management of assets (applications in a software development environment) throughout their lifecycle.

Pinnacle has led the largest implementation of Primavera products as the basis for an Earned Value Management System. Our client wanted to use both the Primavera cost engine (Primavera Cost Manager) and the Primavera scheduling engine (P5 at the time, now P6). Many Earned Value implementations use a combination of Primavera and Deltek Cobra as well.

Recently Primavera was acquired by Oracle Corporation. This acquisition will certainly change the playing field in the project management software world. Pinnacle expects to see Primavera become a much stronger player in New Product Development and in the IT space. The leading players in this space today are Planview, CA Clarity and Compuware. We also expect to see Primavera continue to be the leader in the A&E, Construction, Plant Maintenance, and strong in Government Agencies.

Founded in 1993, Pinnacle provides a wide range of professional services through 4 primary service lines: Management Consulting, Technology Systems Implementation, Training & Education, Functional Fulfillment. Pinnacle has extensive experience implementing and optimizing enterprise-wide capabilities in all Project Management related practices.

There are many professionals working in the project management field of different industries. Recently project planning and controlling area became very popular among the employees but the problem is that it takes long years to become a skilled project management professional. Scheduling is a collaborative process that focuses on all details of a project, from its initiation to completion. Scheduling software tools like Microsoft Project and Primavera P6 facilitate planning, managing, and reporting processes within a project. Becoming a Primavera Project Planner (or Primavera Project Scheduler) is not a piece of cake because it requires experience as well as project management knowledge. In this article, we will discuss the key requirements of becoming a Primavera Project Planner.

Therefore, budgeting, scheduling, and resource management tasks must be coordinated well by professionals to keep the projects on track. To that end, project managers employ technical and administrative staff with specialized skills and experience.

Most of the project managers started their careers as project planners, schedulers, or project coordinators. Starting in one of these steps is an excellent way to understand the responsibilities and workload of a project manager. However, project planning and scheduling with Primavera P6 software is a career itself today.

There are many resources, documents, e-books, and manuals for planning and scheduling available. One of them is The Practice Standard for Scheduling which is a complement to the PMBOK Guide. It is an extensive guide for practitioners which describes the hallmarks of a sound and effective project scheduling methodology, as well as providing quantifiable means for assessing the application of the provisions of this standard to a schedule model.

Oracle Primavera P6 is a powerful project scheduling software that offers advanced enterprise project management, product management, and reporting solutions. It is one of the best software like Microsoft Project, used for creating Gantt charts and other supporting graphs and diagrams for visual presentation. One of the main benefits of using project scheduling software is to analyze the critical path easily.

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