Oracle Primavera P6 EPPM – What's It All About?

by Neil Hogben, Oracle Primavera P6 EPPM Implementation Specialist

The number of large and sophisticated projects in the modern business environment is increasing all the time. Little more than a cursory glance at the news headlines on any given day will tell you that many of these are, unfortunately, out of control: over budget, behind schedule or generally in disarray.

It’s an increasingly familiar story, rooted in the problem that many project managers face in being able to effectively plan, manage and track their complex projects. But this is where Primavera P6 comes into its own.

Oracle’s flagship solution supports all aspects of planning, managing and controlling, ensuring the decision-making process is more transparent and accountable, and keeping more projects more firmly on track. Anyone new to the field of project management would be well advised to take the time to understand the main functions of P6 and get to grips with how it could help them in their day-to-day job.

As one of the most useful and effective project-management products available on the market, Oracle Primavera P6 is designed to aid the planning and management of all kinds of complex projects, providing all the necessary tools and features to help you to manage your project throughout its entire life cycle.

Critical path analysis, resource and cost management and risk management are some of the basic features of this software but, conversely, they are also among the most powerful ones available to the project manager and planner. By using Oracle Primavera P6, organisations can simply manage their projects more successfully, no matter how large or small they are.

There are two versions of P6: Primavera Professional Project Management (PPM) and Primavera Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM). Although both versions serve the same project management purposes, there are similarities and differences between them which are crucial to understand before deciding on which one to opt for:

1. Both are suitable for large and complex projects. 
2. P6 PPM is a Windows-based piece of software, which connects either to a server or local database. While many organisations do use P6 PPM as a standalone software solution, it can also be used as part of an enterprise implementation.
3. P6 EPPM includes a few useful features that its counterpart does not. For example, dashboard reporting, which is more advanced in system reporting and enables you to create visual reports, graphs and tables. This is useful for demonstrating the project status at any level.
4. Because P6 PPM is a standalone software you are able to make changes faster than when working on a remote server. To perform at its best, P6 EPPM requires a high-quality internet connection and if your connection speed is low, you cannot use the software efficiently.

What can P6 do for you?

Primavera P6 provides a high-level project management solution for any business environment. It’s a common misconception that Primavera P6 is designed only for scheduling purposes; its capabilities and uses go beyond creating Gantt Charts. Vital disciplines such as cost management, resource management, earned value management, risk management and reporting are all part of the package. The basic features of Primavera P6 include:

• Scheduling: Primavera P6 involves advanced scheduling solutions. Activities are created under WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) levels, relationships can be established between the activities and the critical path of the schedule can be calculated with the help of the scheduling feature. This leads to more robust, reliable deadlines that keep the project on track.
• Resource and Cost Control Management: Resources, unit prices and expenses can all be assigned to activities, leading to better tracking for project budgets. Project teams can easily compare the planned and the actual status of costs and analyse the performance of a project, flagging up concerns sooner rather than later and avoiding spiralling overspend.
• Reporting: Primavera P6 has an advanced reporting feature that allows you to either use the existing database reports or create your own custom versions for special needs. This allows the right people to be kept abreast of the situation in a timely, efficient manner and encourages effective decision making.

Customizable Gantt charts and Timescaled Logic Diagrams make it easy to create reports at intervals to suit you and showing the information you need.

What are the benefits of using Primavera P6?

Because today’s projects so often involve thousands of activities and variables that need to be controlled effectively, an unexpected problem or delay in the critical path may cause a catastrophic overall delay. It is difficult to complete a project on time and on budget without the help of effective project management software, so teams using P6 to monitor and control performance will certainly lead to far better outcomes. Primavera P6 can help you:

• Manage complex projects which would otherwise be susceptible to oversight or overwhelming the project manager. Organisation and foresight are critical to a project’s success, so the more that can be tracked, allocated and measured, the better the outcomes.
• Manage project portfolios, providing greater transparency over all existing work in progress. Cross-organisation breakdowns of current activity give a clear overview of what is happening, where, at any point.
• Gain increased visibility of activity and progress, ensuring that all aspects of a project are at the right status at the right time. Being able to pull out information on individual components will make for more agile, responsive project management.
• Confidently manage project risks: knowing what could go awry, and when, is pivotal to proper mitigation and planning appropriate back-up solutions. Keeping a project running to plan often relies as much on being able to react to things going wrong as tracking them when they go right.
• Perform resource and cost management, empowering you or your project manager to not only keep spending in line with budgets but also to flexibly and confidently reallocate resources as and where required. 
• Improve collaboration and decision making to bring together the right experience in the right way to the benefit of the project as a whole. A project inevitably succeeds when all stakeholders are pushing in the right direction in total consensus, so when decisive teamwork is facilitated to a greater extent there is much more likely to be a happy outcome.

Portfolio management enables you to make timely and confident, informed decisions at executive level.

Should I make the switch to Primavera?

Oracle Primavera P6 is one of the most popular project control products used for effective project management. Project managers, project coordinators, project planners, schedulers, planning engineers and stakeholders from industries as diverse as nuclear power generation and mobile phone product development have been successfully using Primavera P6 for many years on large-scale, highly sophisticated projects and smaller, shorter projects alike.

The Oracle Primavera solution was instrumental in the programme and project control behind the successful delivery of the Olympic Park for the London2012 Olympic Games and is already in use alongside Oracle Primavera Unifier to track project risk changes over the long lifecycle of the project to upgrade transport systems in Los Angeles in readiness for the 2028 Summer Olympic Games. Trust it to help your projects ‘Go for Gold’, too.

Get in touch to find out more about how Oracle Primavera P6 can help your business to succeed or to hear about our range of workshops, training courses and education services.