Post on 12-Mar-2015
Primavera P6 Statement of Capability Page 1 of 21
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.