What does it take to roll out Oracle Primavera P6? If you are considering implementing Primavera P6, you might be wondering what the roadmap to ‘good’ looks like, and what kinds of activities you would be committing to once you’ve made that decision to go ahead.
We support a lot of large-scale, multi-year implementations for Primavera P6 and other tools that underpin an environment that uses earned value management as one way of project performance measurement. In this article, we’ll share four areas for consideration that can be impacted implementing Primavera P6.
1. Business planning
Your first thoughts shouldn’t be the software or the Primavera P6 training – although we’ll come to those. Instead, it is how a mature, earned value-based way of working is going to affect business planning.
Primavera P6 can support your development roadmap for activities and support the work of planning and scheduling initiatives. Ultimately, implementing Primavera P6 can change your program and portfolio management approach for the better.
There’s also a piece of work to do to develop and rollout a project management standard that fits with the tool, or perhaps updating your existing PMO processes to align them to Primavera P6 ways of working. That can include procedures and guidelines that support business needs.
Finally in this area, Primavera P6 will become a trusted and essential planning tool. As such, it needs to fit within your existing standards. Make sure the implementation team has visibility of other internal and external compliance expectations and that you understand how Primavera P6 will fit into those.
2. IT
Next, let’s consider the technical aspects of introducing new software as part of a large process improvement and business change project.
It’s common for organizations to have a Design Authority or Technical Authority that supports the best practice application of the tool. As Primavera P6 will touch or interface with many other pieces of software or IT processes, it’s crucial that there is a group who has the whole picture. If this kind of internal group is new to you, our Primavera consulting team can help set it up for you.
The software itself needs managing, so there should be a formal change control process set up that can manage and implement internal improvements. That should include representatives from different technical and business areas to ensure that a change does not detrimentally affect functionality being used by another team.
Another consideration for the technical team is testing. Primavera P6 should be tested and evaluated so that the team feels confident it is fit for purpose and suitable for integration into the estate.
3. Training and development
The training and development, or Human Resources, function is clearly going to be impacted by the large organizational change that comes with fundamentally replacing the way projects are led and future initiatives planned across the business. They will get involved by understanding the training needs and organizing training to ensure that there is adequate functional and technical support in-house.
They may also support subject matter experts in delivering training to end users, making sure that the training is relevant for their roles and that it is logged appropriately. End users may also benefit from a refresher in project management training so they can put their software knowledge to the best possible use in a project environment.
4. Vendor management
The final area of the business we are looking at in this article – although by no means the last affected – is the supply chain and vendor management. Managing the relationship with the prime contractor and Oracle if required will fall into this area.
The Primavera P6 user population will naturally change over time, as users leave the business, new joiners require access and additional functionality changes the needs of users. All of these changes can be managed through appropriate licensing, but that requires someone to monitor license usage and ensure the organization is adequately licensed.
Someone in the organization may choose to represent the business as part of the user group or forums run by Oracle, and that could be your trusted implementation partner or someone internal, like a representative from the Procurement team.
These were all areas covered by the Primavera P6 deployment at The BG Group PLC, a world leader in natural gas with a broad portfolio of business interests across five continents.
BG worked with Ten Six on a global deployment of Oracle Primavera P6 with the goal of improving project and portfolio management and supporting the delivery of business strategy. It was a successful program that delivered far-reaching benefits beyond simply having the software in operational use. For example:
- In one region, safety critical backlogs were reduced from 600 hours to 10 hours.
- Increased visibility of project performance increased confidence in delivery.
- Leaders have visibility over upcoming work so they can better prepare for it and assess the readiness of their teams to deliver it.