Quality Assurance is a group of methods and processes ensuring that the quality of any work or creation matches established standards. In the project management world, many of such norms exist and are implemented on a daily basis.

But enforcing standards for schedules is only one part of the problem. While at Emerald we released a tool known as the P6-QA Tool to drastically increase the quality of P6 schedules, we also looked into a lower level aspect of the problem and came up with conclusions and solutions.

Over the last few years we have all been struggling with the applets in Primavera P6. Struggling might be an understatement if you are like me and you felt like you never knew what was going to happen when you opened your P6-EPPM web version. With browsers getting tougher on Java applets and Chrome not supporting them, this was becoming a bit of a nightmare for many IT teams supporting P6-EPPM. At Emerald I was lucky to have our tech team right with me, and when I would HipChat Dan “HELP, I don’t know what I did… but P6-EPPM is not working” he knew what was coming next.

You will all be happy to know that Primavera P6 v15.2 has really made some progress on removing the applets. They are not all gone, but several are, on the admin side as well as the user side.

We are currently implementing Primavera P6 with a New York development company and I was asked the dreaded question “what do you think about the construction managers’ schedule”? Well this is a loaded question at the best of times because, although I am familiar with the project, I have not been involved in the contracting strategies and execution discussions.

A few weeks ago we got a panicked call from a client needing their P6-EPPM setup internally. We were surprised to find out that they had put their Primavera P6 in the cloud. They said it was for a large project they were doing in Arizona and they had some other tools in the cloud as well.

We were even more surprised when they needed the environment turned around in 48 hours. We asked, why such a rush? Then the third surprise came...they told us they lost their entire P6-EPPM database!

I have often been asked the question – ‘can I have my schedule activity bars automatically appear a specific color and/or pattern according to the value of a specific code?’ Yes, you can do this very easily.

Let’s look at one simple example.

Above I have incorporated additional bar configurations along with the default Critical Remaining Work and Remaining Work configurations.

The additional bar configurations are generating the hatching by filtering on the activity code used to assign the ‘Engineering’ and ‘Construction’ grouping in the layout.

Oracle Primavera Portfolio Management is the leading portfolio management software solution on the market, so for us, it was a logical step to include it in Emerald’s Cloud Infrastructure.

Being in charge of the deployment of OPPM, I have to say, it was quite a straightforward process but I did face a few issues during the installation.

When we added the financial period dictionary to the v4 P6-Loader, I thought it was a waste of time and no one would really use it. With P6 having a wizard already to create financial periods, I thought that was good enough. Well, I was wrong.

After I wrote my last blog, a co-worker asked me why I would want to store period actuals in the data warehouse when it seems as though I can get the same value from the historical data in the data warehouse.

Both Oracle’s Primavera Analytics and our EP-datawarehouse support capturing some kind of historical data – data that shows what the information in P6 looked like at some point in the past. It’s fairly easy to see how this historical data can be exploited to produce information that is in concept very similar to what you get from the financial period actuals.

Recently, while converting a client from P6 r8.3 to r15.2, we had to move a number of baselines to the new database. We used our P6-Loader to unassign and detach the baselines from the current project and then created XER’s to move them to the new database.

To our surprise, when we imported the baselines as projects into the new 15.2 database, the WBS elements were all messed up. Instead of one project with many WBS elements, our project appeared as many different projects, one per WBS, all with the same Project ID. They also appeared outside the EPS structure and P6 wouldn’t let us move them into the correct EPS node. Every attempt gave us the error that “ is not a valid integer value”.

P6 Time Distributed Data

P6 has two main sources of time-distributed data, spread data and financial period actuals. The main difference between these is that spread data is calculated, while financial period data is stored. This difference impacts both how accurate the data is and how flexibly it can be viewed.

We often have clients ask us the most efficient way to change out resource assignments. This often happens when work that is expected to be assigned to one resource gets assigned to another.

For example – I want to change the resources in a particular plant from my own staff and assign it to a contractor. In this simple example, I have decided to give all the trade work in one plant to Jacobs instead of performing with my own labor force. I want to remap the resource assignments as follows:

A client who we are currently upgrading to P6 v 15.1 has been complaining that the refresh is not working properly in P6 Professional (aka The Optional Client). This client had no issues with release 7.x.

We did some testing and found the same thing. Sometimes hitting F5 doesn’t reliably get a refresh.

We have had a number of complaints recently about the POBS imports really slowing down XER import performance and also complaints that the XER files coming out of Primavera P6 are huge.

Very few people realize that there are substring commands available in the P6 Global Change function (available in the P6 Client only).

Recently in a LinkedIn P6 group, a member was asking for help in renaming an activity UDF assignment. He had a large number of activities that he needed to change the UDF prefix on because of a plant renumbering. He had an existing UDF called Equip_ID and he needed to remove whatever the first character is and replace it with a ‘2’.

The Emerald team just completed a client migration to the Oracle Primavera SaaS Cloud. The client had over 1000 small (50-60 activities) projects in their on-premise Primavera P6 PPM v8.3.2. They needed to be able to share the projects for the next 2 years amongst a large collaborative program team with multiple contractors and engineering firms. This program is very high profile and reporting is paramount.