What is Primavera P6 Used For?
Primavera P6 is used for project scheduling, planning, tracking and reporting: it’s a powerful enterprise project management tool that supports the delivery of complex, multi-faceted projects. Whether you are a small contractor required to produce plans using Primavera P6 Professional, or the prime contractor overseeing a major initiative, it’s a tool that helps project teams deliver on time and on budget all around the world.
Primavera P6 Professional is used for carrying out all the project management functions you would expect from a world-class project management software suite. It offers:
- Project portfolio management
- Scheduling and critical path analysis
- Project risk management and analysis
- Resource management and optimization, resource allocation and capacity planning
- Collaboration
- Project budget and cost management
- Advanced reporting features and analytics
- Project controls
And more. Project activities are added to the tool by creating a project structure, and the software offers various views for interrogating the data such as a Gantt chart and visual reports. In short, it’s a fully-fledged, mature and well-respected project portfolio management tool, available in both Windows desktop application (P6 PPM) and cloud-based (EPPM) options.
Oracle Primavera P6 integrates with a range of other platforms and tools like Deltek Cobra and Acumen Fuse to form an essential part of your Earned Value management system, or it can be used alone as the main project management tool in your organization.
While you can manage a single project using it, the power is in being able to visualize the whole portfolio or a large program with sub-projects. That’s what makes it particularly useful to the construction industry, for example, because of the nature of the project team and the use of sub-contractors each responsible for their own section of the work. All of that can be managed within the Primavera interface with rolled up, integrated and linked plans.
Who uses Primavera P6?
Many large companies use Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management or Primavera p6 Professional to manage their portfolio of projects – and many of them are our clients. The software is used across many industries including construction, oil and gas, aerospace and defense, government and federal agencies, energy and utilities and biotech firms. In many ways, it has become the standard project management software to deliver large-scale projects.
Organizations like Oshkosh Defense, Thales Naval Ltd and BG Group all use Primavera P6 to deliver their projects.
Having said that, you don’t need to be a multi-billion dollar organization using earned value management to take advantage of the power of Oracle Primavera. Many smaller firms use it because it helps them keep projects on track and ensures they can deliver the best results for their clients.
Organizations may also choose to use Primavera P6 because they are bidding for work and the job requires their business to use Primavera to ensure all sub-contractors are working in common tools. That helps with standardization, comparability across projects and makes life easier for everyone.
What roles use Primavera P6?
There are many project professionals in job roles that may have a requirement to use Primavera P6. For example:
- Project planners, planning engineers and planning managers
- Schedulers
- Project managers
- Project coordinators
- Project controls engineers, managers and analysts
- Systems administrators
- Development managers
- Operations managers
And more. Certain roles will have more of a ‘power user’ relationship with the tool, whereas other roles like the project manager or other members of the project team may use fewer of the features for their daily tasks.
Once upon a time, Primavera users would need to be office or site-based, but now it is common for schedulers and those in other roles to work from home. As long as you’ve got a decent internet connection and secure access to your network (or are using the cloud-based EPPM solution) then you should be OK to work on your project schedules from the comfort of your home office.
That shift in ways of working has opened up the ways Oracle Primavera P6 can be used by various industries, making it a more popular choice than ever.
In summary
In summary, Oracle Primavera is an effective project management software choice for many companies who need to use a robust, multi-user system for making sure projects stay on track and deliver the expected results to clients. From project creation to planning, tracking to execution, a wide range of commercial projects are delivered using Primavera P6 Professional each year. Will yours be among them?