Primavera 6.0 (P6™) Capability Summary Primavera P6 is the most powerful, easytouse project and program management solution available today. It lets you manage projects of all types and sizes – anytime, anywhere. P6 is faster, easier to use, and offers many new and enhanced features:
§
Powerful web access for all users
§
Easy to deploy, rich functionality
§
Easytouse interactive Gantt chart
§
New, powerful dashboards for greater visibility
P6 delivers highquality project execution and appropriate visibility at all levels to help meet your strategic business goals.
Contents Planning and Scheduling Management.............................................................................2 Project Management ......................................................................................................4 Resource Management...................................................................................................8 Portfolio Management .................................................................................................. 11 Collaboration and Content Management ........................................................................ 15 Time Sheets................................................................................................................ 16 Reporting and Analytics ............................................................................................... 18 Technical Overview & Supported Platforms .................................................................... 20 Architecture ................................................................................................................ 21
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 1 of 21
Planning and Scheduling Management Plan and Execute Projects with Confidence Many organizations have hundreds—even thousands—of projects underway at any given time. These projects cross normal business hierarchies and chains of command, making project management an organizationwide challenge. The P6 Planning and Scheduling functionality enables power users manage the entire project lifecycle from Project Initiation to Project Closeout. P6 provides multiuser, multiproject functionality, with scheduling and resource control capabilities, support for multitiered project hierarchies, resource scheduling, capturing of actual data, customizable views, and the ability to extend functionality based on user definable data.
One Version of the Truth: Central Data Repository With P6, organizations have the ability to store all of their projects in a centralized data repository. By having all of the projects in a single database, they can standardize how the company manages projects and share best practices.
Save Time with BestPractice Methodologies Methodology management functionality in P6 enables users to author and store methodologies, or project plan templates, in a central location. Project managers can select, combine, and tailor methodologies to create custom project plans. In this way, organizations can continually improve and refine methodology activities, estimates, and other information with each project.
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 2 of 21
Schedule with Confidence Once a project plan is built, P6 calculates the dates when the activities should occur, using Critical Path Method Scheduling (CPM). The Early dates, the earliest possible dates each activity can start and finish, and Late dates, the latest possible dates each activity can start and finish without delaying the project finish or an intermediate deadline (constraint) are also calculated. Additionally, P6 provides organizations with the ability to analyze multiple critical float paths (sequences of activities) that affect the project schedule. This enables organizations to mitigate the various causes and understand the impact of interdependencies effectively.
Balance Resources among Multiple Projects The Level resources functionality in P6 ensures that resource demand does not exceed resource availability. This automated process compares the resource requirements of all scheduled activities to the maximum quantity available at the time of leveling. An activity is delayed if too few resources are available at any time during the activity’s duration.
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 3 of 21
Control Project Finances The ability to perform topdown planning and bottomup actual reconciliation is important for effective organizationalwide planning and control. P6 accurately plans, tracks and analyzes the financial performance of projects, programs, and portfolios. Furthermore, P6 helps document budget changes as they occur, and then uses these changes to calculate the latest budgeted amounts for the project.
Project Management Anytime, Anywhere Access Web Project Management gives the project team anywhere, anytime access to the projects they are assigned to work on. A 100% Webbased user interface covers the full project management lifecycle from project initiation through to project closeout. This includes requesting approval for a new project, the creation of Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and activities, documenting and managing project risks and issues, managing status updates, and reporting on key performance indicators like earned value. By using Web Project Management, organizations can ensure that the project team members are communicating with each other, whether it is regarding activity status updates, scope changes, revisions to documents, or issue(s) resolution.
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 4 of 21
Enforce Governance when Initiating Projects In P6, Project initiation helps to eliminate delays in lengthy and often manual approval processes. By automating the project initiation process, everyone knows the status of their project request and is able to follow up if the request gets stalled at a specific approval level. P6 can ensure that an approval process is followed when initiating a new project. The approval process is flexible and configurable so that it follows the company’s existing project approval process. Leverage Best Practices P6 user may use templates, from a library of precreated and catalogued templates, to populate the project plans. By leveraging project templates when creating new projects, project plans can be completed more quickly and accurately, and organizations can successfully leverage and reuse knowledge from their subject matter experts. Manage Simple or Complex Projects Using the Interactive Web Gantt Chart The interactive web based Gantt chart allows for adding, deleting, and modifying the WBS, activities, relationships, resource assignment, and costs. The Gantt chart can easily configured to display only the information needed based on the user’s role and project management maturity. This flexibility provides a scalable, 100% web based project management solution for users of various roles within an organization.
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 5 of 21
Update Project Progress Quickly and Easily During the execution of a project, the interactive Gantt chart provides an easy way to collect progress status. Different views can be created so that project team members are guided to enter the required information via an elegantly simple interface. Additionally, filters and the Project Spotlight feature narrow the view down to the activities that the person is responsible for updating and highlight the activities that should be updated. Access and Manage Project Resources Quickly P6 tracks labor, material, equipment and expenses for each activity and Work Break Down structure. By controlling and monitoring the required resources and costs plus all potential changes, organizations get a better view of the project trends and are able to predict the project’s forecasted completion costs.
Manage and Mitigate Project Risk During project execution it is important to understand the potential risks that can impact the successful delivery of the project. P6 provides a risk register that project team members can use to view and track project risks. Project team members may also add new risks, collaborate on potential mitigation strategies, and update or close risks as appropriate. Identify and Resolve Issues Quickly P6 issue management functionality helps to account for and deal with unexpected problems in projects. The P6 issue log enables team members to view and track project related issues.
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 6 of 21
Team members may also add new issues, collaborate on potential resolutions, and update or close issues. Centralized Access to Project Documents To ensure that the project team is working with the same information, P6 provides a centralized document repository. The enterpriseclass document management system supports more than 25 different types of documents and provides collaborative functionality like check in/check out, routing for approval, versioning, and the ability to attach documents to projects, activities, project workflows, and threaded discussions. Provide Visibility and Insight via Project Dashboards The P6 project dashboard provides project managers with the ability to share key performance indicators with the project team and executive stakeholders in the form of a graphical dashboard. Each team member views the same projectrelated information, including project milestone status, activities behind schedule, project documents, and other critical project performance information.
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 7 of 21
Resource Management Right People on the Right Projects at the Right Time P6 fully supports the resource request and staffing process, from both a topdown planning and a bottomup assignment perspective. This gives project managers and resource managers the platform they need to easily communicate their requirements and decisions throughout the entire project lifecycle. Topdown and Bottomup Planning P6 enables resource and role allocations at all levels of the program structure. Make requests and assignments to programs, projects and work packages for early scoping of work, ensuring that organizations have a realistic view of the future demand even if the detailed planning of the project work has yet to take place. Then, later in the project lifecycle, as projectspecific needs are more finely tuned, managers can allocate using a bottomup model down at the task level. Managers can draw from the resources already approved and allocated on those projects in the early stages, preventing overallocation of resources by enforcing that an approval processes is followed. Book Resources and Roles at a High Level With P6, both resource and project managers have a single, Excellike “booking page” with an interactive worksheet view of all resources in the team and the projects they are booked to work on. Requests can be made from this worksheet, and are staffed accordingly.
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 8 of 21
Manager Resource Requests Using P6, Project Managers may make requests for named resources, or for roles or skills, both at the project and the detailed task level. Skill level, headcount units, and specific time periods can also be requested along with specific resources for each role.
Staff Resources using Advanced Algorithms Resource Managers receive requests for roles to be filled from the project managers. P6 provides a scorebased search engine that generates a ranked list of resources that can fill the work request, thereby advising the Resource Manager who, of the available resources and based on the project manager’s requirements, will best fill the role.
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 9 of 21
Slice and Dice Resource Data Resource Managers may track supply and demand of both resources and roles, highlighting shortfalls or overallocations across the entire organization.
Analyze Capacity and Demand Resource Managers can easily see future requirements for roles and skills on forecasted project work, as well as the availability of those roles over time. Users can see which roles and skills are in high demand and which are not needed. The business can plan its hiring and training program based on this detailed skill and role analysis.
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 10 of 21
Portfolio Management Effectively Prioritize Projects and Optimize Organizational Capacity P6 Portfolio Management helps organizations align their portfolios of projects and programs with strategic objectives by taking advantage of advanced whatif scenario modeling, capacity analysis, tabular scorecards, rich graphics, and optimization functionality. It enables organizations to better manage incoming demand, seek the right balance of projects, ensure that resources are not overstretched, and easily communicate the performance of projects and programs to stakeholders.
Easily Define and Model Criteria for Project Selection P6 provides support for more than 200 outofthebox project metrics including criteria like NPV, IRR, and ROI. P6 also provides the ability to easily create composite scoring models, which enable organizations to tailor the objectives and criteria for project selection based on their specific needs and business processes. Dynamically Create and Maintain Portfolios P6 enables an organization to create and view portfolios in a variety of ways that are meaningful to individual users or classes of users within the organization. For example, one portfolio might contain projects that are the responsibility of a specific business unit, while another portfolio contains only projects budgeted for the next fiscal year, while another may be based on managerial responsibility, and yet another one based on geographic lines.
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 11 of 21
Easily Capture and Inventory Proposed Projects and Ideas In addition to systematic, workflowbased project initiation functionality that solicits and captures a proposed project’s business case, P6 streamlines adding proposed projects on the fly using a Webbased, Excellike interface. This provides users with a simple interface to quickly create an inventory of projects for further whatif analysis.
Graphically Analyze Existing and Proposed Projects P6 users have the ability to make better decisions by having access to realtime portfolio performance and scoring information via personalized views. P6 supports unlimited portfolio scorecards, each with configurable data and graphics. Users can create multiple types of charts including bar charts, stacked histograms, bubble charts, and pie charts to graphically analyze the various performance and selection criterion. Create and Collaborate on Whatif Scenarios Users can create unlimited whatif scenarios, save those scenarios, and share them or collaborate on them with other stakeholders. An advanced constraintsbased optimization, allows users to define a constraint and easily identify the multiple combinations of projects that fit within the constraint.
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 12 of 21
Compare Tradeoffs to Reach Consensus Whatif scenarios can be saved and recalled at any time in the future. This functionality enables companies to take snapshots of approved portfolios and recall them at anytime to compare, side by side, with current portfolio data to better gauge performance and variances.
Strategically Plan and Optimize Organizational Capacity P6 enables organizations to determine the capacity implications of project investment decisions by evaluating multiple scenarios against the available capacity. Users can perform whatif analysis via an interactive view that enables them see the impact of moving project dates or changing the project mix on resource availability. This functionality balances business requirements with operational constraints and identifies resource bottlenecks early in the portfolio or program life cycle.
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 13 of 21
Effectively Execute, Control, and Communicate Performance With seamless integration to the planning and execution modules within P6, organizations can ensure that the finalized portfolio is made available to project and resource managers in a timely manner so that they can begin detailed planning and execution. Moreover, with a rich array of graphics and tabular scorecards available within P6, once portfolio execution is underway, stakeholders receive clear, concise, and uptodate communication on project performance.
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 14 of 21
Collaboration and Content Management Improve Organizational Performance by Optimizing Team Collaboration P6 facilitates teambased collaboration to improve decisionmaking, streamline execution, and improve efficiency. P6 provides personalized connectivity to the people and data needed to accomplish organizational goals. Most importantly, P6 enables easy communication as part of the typical work process, rather than requiring users to put work aside to communicate and collaborate. Collaborate to Succeed Each P6 user has their own personal, configurable dashboard or workspace. These collaborative workspaces and dashboards can be made available to the user using a subscriptionbased model. Actions, assignments, discussion threads, calendars, reports, events, and other collaborative portlets are just some of the items that can be published.
Share Knowledge on Specific Projects The Project and SubProject Workspace is the home page for the project or portion of the project, and provides many categories of project information. Each team member views the same projectrelated information, including project milestone status, activities behind schedule, project documents, and so on. Project workspaces provide data such as project documents, issues, risks, notebooks, project calendar, submittals, RFIs, projectrelated threaded discussions, and numerous other collaborative portlets.
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 15 of 21
EnterpriseClass Document Management P6 includes wordclass document management capabilities so users may manage private, project, and subproject documents. Furthermore, the document management system checks in and checks out documents, supports version controls, and routes documents various users for approvals. Documents may also be attached to threaded discussions, events, activities, projects, workflows, and issues.
Time Sheets Track and Analyze Time for Increased Visibility into Resource Use Organizations may track, capture, and analyze the time that team members spend on a project or program. Project team members work with timesheets that are automatically populated with their own resource assignments across all projects. They may record both project time spent working on each task, as well as nonproject time such as personal time off In addition, they may provide additional information directly to the project manager, such as document updates, status notifications and any additional notes or other pertinent feedback.
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 16 of 21
Easily Access Time Reporting Data Reports can be quickly and easily generated from the time reporting system. For example, a hard copy of a timesheet may be required for signoff in a contractor environment. Team Members can generate, with one click, a preformatted paper timesheet or activity status report from within the Web browser.
Adapts to Individual Organizational Preferences P6 Timesheets align with corporate timecapture processes by enabling rules at both the global and the project levels. Set Flexible Approval Rules Organizations may establish different approval levels for submitting time to ensure that the correct processes are followed. Timesheets can be submitted, and then approved by a combination of resource and/or project managers before time is applied to projects.
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 17 of 21
Reporting and Analytics Access the Right Information at the Right Place at the Right Time P6 includes a powerful Enterprise Reporting database that enables users to create operational reports and business intelligence on any project or portfolio, using any thirdparty reporting and business intelligence tool. The Enterprise Reporting database provides: 1) an Operational Data Store (ODS) for daytoday operational views and 2) a Project Star Schema for advanced business intelligence. Easily Access Data via Operational Data Store The ODS is a relational database that supplies a persisted, easytounderstand, denormalized version of the project management database (PMDB). Designed primarily for operational, day– today reports, the ODS provides the most granular view of the PMDB.
Slice and Dice Data via Project Star Schema The P6 Project Star Schema supplies a dimensional schema that organizes project data into hierarchic relationships. The schema design allows for the highest level of query efficiency and flexibility in data analysis. The Star Schema database is designed to accumulate project data over time. These historical "snap shots" provide organizations with baselines for trending and advanced business intelligence.
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 18 of 21
OnDemand Access to the Latest Project Information Data movement between the project management database and the reporting databases uses an ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) process. Project Management data is extracted, calculations are applied in a staging area, and results are loaded into the ODS and Star Schema databases. The ETL scheduling provides cyclical refresh capabilities, both daily and on demand, for data freshness.
Protect Data Access via RoleBased Security P6 rolebased security is mirrored in the Operational Data Store providing barriers between users and project related data. This design allows 3rdparty reporting tools to safely access the ODS without fear of data compromise and limits the amount of administration required.
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 19 of 21
Technical Overview & Supported Platforms Primavera can be deployed to support both small and large organizations. Hardware requirements vary significantly depending upon a variety of factors including the size of the organization, deployment methods, modules being used and platform selection. The following is a technical overview. For detailed hardware guidelines, please contact a Primavera representative for your specific needs. Application Server Support Apache Tomcat BEA Weblogic IBM WebSphere RedHat Jboss Database Support Oracle 9i or 10g Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and 2005 Microsoft SQL Express 2005 (<=8 users) Client Operating System Microsoft XP Professional Microsoft Windows Vista Business Edition Citrix Internet Explorer 6 or 7
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 20 of 21
Architecture Deploy with Confidence Primavera P6 architecture is a JAVA, standardsbased, multitier enterprise application platform providing scalability, availability, security, recoverability, manageability, and interoperability. This architecture simplifies integration with external applications (ERP, CRM, SFA, etc.) and their resulting business processes. Some of the key features of the Primavera architecture include: • A flexible, objectbased design that allows rapid incorporation of new features and functionality; • JAVAbased portability that provides flexibility to support multiple operating environments; • A Webbased presentation layer; • Application Server clustering to provide scalability for large sophisticated organizations.
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability
Page 21 of 21