What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started with Oracle Primavera P6, reviews the history and core concepts of P6 and introduces the new features in version 8.

Chapter 2, Getting Around: Understanding and Customizing the P6 Interface, walks you through logging into P6 Professional and P6 web, and gives an overview of the key menus and screens in both applications. Users will also be shown how to customize the screens to best meet their needs.

Chapter 3, Organizing your Projects with EPS, OBS, and WBS, introduces the organizational elements of P6. The Enterprise Project Structure (EPS) organizes projects, and the Organizational Breakdown Structure (OBS) organizes people. Traditionally, EPS matches internal divisions within a company, and OBS matches the employee hierarchy. We also show how the WBS is used to organize work within a project. This chapter also covers how OBS relates to project access and security.

Chapter 4, Creating a New Project and Work Breakdown Structure, takes readers through setting up a new project, detailing all of the decision points including how to enter WBS according to best practices. We also discuss creating project codes and show how codes are used for other P6 entities as well. The chapter closes with a discussion of importing projects into P6 from other sources.

Chapter 5, Adding Activities and Relationships, shows the many types of activities and explains the relationships that can be created between them.

Chapter 6, Resources, discusses resources and roles, how they are created, organized, and used globally and within projects. This chapter will also cover how costs are associated with roles and resources.

Chapter 7, Scheduling and Constraints, zeros in on the heart of P6 scheduling. It will discuss the algorithms used and how to run schedule calculations. It also explains the many different settings in P6 that affect the scheduling algorithm.

Chapter 8, Issues and Risks, illustrates how to keep projects on track using issues and risks. Readers will learn to create, manage, and report on issues. Readers will also learn how to create project risks and how to track, manage, and report on risks.

Chapter 9, Baselines and Statusing, describes how to manage changes in a project schedule using baselines. We also discuss updating project status and entering actuals.

Chapter 10, Project Templates, illustrates the concept of project templates, which can be used to quickly generate new projects in a consistent manner.

Chapter 11, Portfolios, steps above the project level and discusses portfolios, how to coherently manage and analyze sets of projects. In this chapter, we show how to collect projects into static and dynamic portfolios. Readers will learn about key built-in project-level fields and how to group data for Portfolio Analysis. We also discuss user-defined fields (UDFs) and how to use these when creating portfolios.

Chapter 12, Portfolio Analysis, introduces the tools of portfolio analysis, such as scorecards and graphs, and shows how to use these to compare portfolio data.

Chapter 13, Measuring and Scoring Projects, discusses creating portfolio scenarios, scoring projects, and using waterline analysis.

Chapter 14, Capacity Planning and ROI, shows how to use P6 to plan out resource usage across projects. We also discuss how P6 calculates Return on Investment (ROI).

Chapter 15, Dashboards, presents real-time reporting using dashboards. These allow users to focus on the data they need the most. We show the wide variety of dashboards available, and how to customize and make your own dashboards.

Chapter 16, Resource Management, discusses the features of P6 that allow you to manage resources across the enterprise by analyzing resource requirements, requesting resources for projects, and committing resources to projects.

Appendix A, Integrations, gives a high-level overview of the key integrations provided by Oracle that tie data between P6 and each of Oracle's three key ERP systems—E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards.

Appendix B, Reporting, discusses the many ways to obtain and view data from P6, including screen printing and the built-in reporting engine in P6 Professional, and using BI Publisher in P6 EPPM.