Primavera, creating a reporting showing baseline data
How do you create a report with Primavera's own reporting tool to show the per resource baseline hrs vs. the actual hrs? It is so hard trying to use what comes with Primavera. I can show the budgeted hrs or show the per role BL hrs but nothing else.
I know I could go to Oracle-Discovery to generate this required report, but hope someone out there can help me.
Re: MS Project vs. Primavera
I think we should differentiate between small project/basic project management requirements and big project/advanced project management requirement. I’m agree with most of points when it consists in small and basic needs to manage project, but once we have a lot of projects with thousands of activities Primavera should b considered. Some of the benefits they published about P3 are:
- Common Data Platform on Oracle / SQL, Client / Server mode.
- All projects data available on a central location, Comparison of data of different projects.
- Multi-project planning and control.
- To plan and maintain multi project baselines and examine what-if alternatives..
- Plan and control large and complex projects efficiently.
- Project ,managers can quickly analyze the impact of changing resource limits, activity priorities and constraints on the overall project goal.
- File Compression - Send/receive significantly smaller files (55 percent) as a result of new DWG optimized file format.
- Save drawing storage space and increase the speed of file transfer operations such as emailing drawings or opening and saving drawings across a network.
Even more than that, there is a significant ecosystem around Primavera, and a lot of tools are developed to support and facilitate a lot of manual work.
Re: MS Project vs. Primavera
It seems that many professional schedulers prefer the functionality of Primavera over MS Project. However, it often strikes me that they rarely understand MS Project's capabilities and features. I sometimes wonder if they have ever used the product judging by some of the misguided comments that they make about it.
In my company we use both Primavera P6 and MS Project 2007. Both packages integrate and exchange data well with our Oracle based project controls database. I personally prefer MS Project as I can plan projects efficiently and reliably with it. I regularly plan EPC projects with between 1000 and 2000 activities, many hundreds of thousands of man-hours and TIC values of around $30-$40m. MS Project can do everything that I need:
- Establishing custom WBS coding structures
- Establishing a logic linked activity network
- Assigning durations and budget work hours to each activity
- PERT analysis to establish optimistic, likely and pessimistic schedules
- Assigning and levelling resources
- Calculation of available float
- Establishing a baseline schedule and budget
- Establishing the critical path
- Creating manpower histograms (by exporting data to Excel)
- Entering earned man-hours and actual costs
- Monitoring and analysing progress against the baseline
- Performing earned value analysis
- Calculating cost and schedule variances and productivity indexes
- Forecasting completion dates and costs
- Performing what if analysis
- Automatically re-scheduling uncomplete work to beyond the status date
- Re-baselining and creating interim plans (up to 11 baselines are available)
- Sorting and grouping data to present a multitude of different summaries
- Exporting data for analysis and presentation using MS Excel pivot tables
I'd be interested to know what other features are needed to control and analyse a project? I've been managing projects for 15 years and have found these measures quite adequate.
My suspicion is that professional schedulers primarily prefer Primavera and promote its use as it protects their "expert" status within organisations. I'm prepared to change my mind if someone can tell me what Primavera can do that MS Project can't; I am talking specifics not generalities like "its better for complex projects".
Re: Project compare to Primavera
Well thanks. But I did mistate one item: the files are in fact baselined and the baseline work is appearing when the file is baselined. No resources. No assignments. Just 'poof!' 1 fte's worth of baseline work (not timephased) out of nowhere! Grrrrhhh!!!!!! Oh well. Its a living!
Re: MS Project vs. Primavera
Interesting discussion.
I work for a multi-national construction company and we use P3, P6, MSP, Asta and SureTrack. We're currently consolidating the toolset down to P6 and Asta as P3 and SureTrack are both about to be unsupported and are not Win 7 compatible. MSP is seen as uncontrollable, so, as we move towards an enterprise level solution, we are working out when it is appropriate to use P6 and when to use Asta; we've reached the following high-level conclusions:
1. Asta is cheaper
2. P6 has more depth
3. Asta works with more BIM tools
4. Asta is suited to quicker schedules (such as bids) and small projects
5. P6 requires more knowledge to use properly
6. Asta projects can be migrated to P6 (for when you win the bid!)
7. Asta now supports P6 shortcut keys.
8. Both are compatible with Win 7
9. We will likely use P6 when a dedicated planning resource is available (large projects) or dictated by the terms of contract; and Asta for everything else.
10. Construction projects are NOTHING like IT projects - Over the last 26 years I've worked all over the world in and on IT projects.
MS Project Server 2010 and updating existing projects
Zindar (and others),
May I have your assessment of MS Project Server 2010's suitability for updating existing projects in a large enterprise portfolio?
Let's define the current production portfolio:
* 1000-1500 (or more) existing projects
* 900-2500 tasks per project
* 2000 generic resources centrally available for all projects
* 1000 or more enterprise fields
* project duration is typically 20 years (not all finish)
Scope of bi-weekly or monthly changes to production projects:
* 6-10 resources (new, revised, retired)
* 3 enterprise fields with formula revisions and/or 1-2 new enterprise fields
* 2-6 new tasks added to each existing project's WBS
It is my understanding that after revising/adding enterprise fields, one has to open, recalculate, and republish each project.
Adding or modifying tasks for each project also appears to be a manual activity for lack of user-configurable creation macros that pinpoint where specific tasks belong in a given WBS.
Although there is a possibility to update projects through a SQL script, it appears that the server must be offline for customers--not a decent proposition for worldwide users in various time zones. And any checked-out projects would need individual attention after being checked in.
For accurate, portfolio-wide resource modeling and forecasting over ten-twenty years, existing projects need to change with business evolution. When project scheduling is the primary focus, such monthly or bi-weekly changes are less common.
1. From the perspective of maintainability and manual effort, would you recommend using MS Project Server 2010 (or even 2007) when fairly frequent updates of existing projects are an ongoing business reality?
2. Is it wise to go beyond Microsoft's recommendation in the 2010 SDK, which claims that 1000 enterprise fields or less produces "acceptable" server performance?
Thanks for your comments, Zindar.
--John