Planning and weather; and introduction
This blog post forms the basis for discussing some useful methods for dealing with the weather in the development of your planning.
Planning for disaster
In times of disaster, we tend to call in force majeure on our projects, and therefore, keep our hands off. Stating no-one could foresee the possibility and impact of said force majeure, we cannot handle it within our project objectives of scope/time/cost. Both employer and contractor will take their responsibility and take a piece of the incurred damages. But can’t we plan for disaster? Are there established principles to do so?
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Collaboration through integration of Primavera P6 EPPM and Oracle Primavera Cloud (OPC / Prime)
Niels Ligtvoet discusses the possibilities of integrating Primavera P6 EPPM and Oracle Primavera Cloud (OPC/Prime).
Read moreVisualizer: An extraordinary view embedded in P6
Introduction
We are all familiar with the old-fashioned but convenient way of presenting our activities in Primavera P6: Gantt charts. Options for shapes of bars, lines and milestones are limited. That is why eventually you can easily run out of options while presenting your activities. It even started to engrave its own visualising norms: bars are blue on left side of the data date and green on right side of the data date. It is time to add some richness to our Gantt chart elements.
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The start of the Primaned Academy Field committee
The Primaned Academy continuously improves its education, responding to what organisations need for their employees. Our field committee consists of experts in project management, working for various organisations in the Netherlands. They give us advice, both solicited and unsolicited, in order to keep our training courses practical and relevant. The first meeting last month showed how much we can learn from each other in this rapidly changing and exciting field of Project Controls.
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Earned Value Management: cheat sheet
As a temporary conclusion to our Earned Value Management blog series, we’d like to provide you with an EVM formula cheat sheet. This file contains all essential formulas for calculating the Earned Value metrics, indicators and measures. Download the .pdf for free.
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Scheduling progressed activities
In this blog post, we’re going to dig deeper into a question you will face when preparing or reviewing a schedule update. How do you address “out-of-sequence” progress in Primavera P6?
The user has 3 interesting choices in the schedule options on how the software deals with progressed activities that are out of sequence. This blog post will address 3 options, which will help you better represent reality in your progress updates.
Two + Two types of Float
When using the Critical Path Method (CPM) in traditional project management software, Total Float (TF) and Free Float (FF) are calculated, which most project managers know and use. But there is more to it. We can gain deeper insight in which timeframe an activity can shift, and the effects on the related activities by calling in two more types of float. The Interfering Float (INTF) and the Independent Float (INDF). Let me tell you how to interpret them, help decision making, and support claim prevention/preparation by using these four characteristics.
Read moreThe Project Controls Programme available as remote and classroom education from June 1st
Since the Corona measures are being phased out gradually the Primaned Academy will also adapt its measures: From June 1st it is again possible to register for classroom training modules. Measures are in place to keep the appropriate 1.5 meter distance and there are stricter hygiene measures.
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The Primaned Academy is open for registration!
Yes indeed, you can keep expanding your knowledge in the field of Project Controls in times of Corona. In fact, it might be even easier for you to invest time in education in case Corona created some gaps in your agenda. Of course we took all the measures necessary to avoid spreading the disease:
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From Project Controls to Project Intelligence
How can Business Intelligence offer added value within Project Controls?
In the information age, knowledge is essential to remain competitive. Companies are making a shift towards attaining a data-driven culture. Interest in Business intelligence is on a steady rise and today more and more companies are even investing in more advanced set-ups like combinations of big data with artificial intelligence.
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Help! My baseline bars are in the wrong place!
When I started working with Primavera P6, I had a colleague who showed me how you can use ‘global change’ to make sure that your baseline bars are showing the right information. It was fairly simple: you just amended the planned dates to the dates you want in the baseline, and it’s done. Hu? Primavera is not capable of managing baselines? Of course, something else is going on. Like so often, Primavera turns out to be so powerful and versatile that one really needs to understand what’s under the hood to properly operate the system.
Read moreIntegral planning and risk management processes
Integrated project management is becoming increasingly important for project organisations in the Netherlands. At the Primaned Academy, we see that Planning and Risk processes in particular are increasingly carried out by a single person. Our risk specialisation trains a planner to carry out a qualitative risk analysis in order to prioritise and possibly quantify risks on the basis of a probabilistic planning.
3 metrics, endless possibilities
I’m a true advocate for using (a basic implementation) of EVM on all your projects, or at least the philosophy. The use of Earned Value Management metrics gives a good insight in your current project status at a simple glance. By planning your project carefully and assigning budgets, in hours, euros, documents, resources, to your activities, a world of possibilities opens. Every project stakeholder can have their own personalized reports on their points of interest, with their own style of preference.
The level of project controls maturity has a great impact on the insight you can gain using the same, simple metrics provided by EVM. Let me take you through the different levels of reporting maturities, followed by some ideas on how to improve further than the classic methods.
Read more5 reasons why your schedule contains negative total float
Every planner regularly encounters negative total float in schedules where he didn’t expect it. This happens more often than one would like. And every time this is the start of a nerve-wracking search for the cause. In this post we list the most probable causes to give you guidance on where to start looking.
Read moreThe To Complete Performance Index (TCPI)
How can we get the most out of our EVM metrics? We’ve evaluated our current cost and schedule performance, and have seen how to forecast the Estimate At Completion (EAC). Now is the time to evaluate the realism of our project’s Budget At Completion (BAC). Following the current conditions, is the aimed for budget still sufficient?
Read morePrimaned announces partnership with Safran
Primaned is a boutique consulting firm, specialising in Project Controls for the construction & engineering, petrochemical, health & pharmaceutical industries and government.
“Project Controls is the part of project management that captures, models, monitors, analyses and visualizes project data to generate insight into the project that results in improved decision-making so that maximal value is created for the stakeholders.”
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First remote training
Last week we organised a first COVID-proof training. The participants of the PMWeb admin training could follow the interactive training without leaving their homes. In the near future, we will more often offer remote training courses.
Read moreChange Control: 4 Levels of Change
Gert Truyens explains what the different levels of change are, what they mean and how you can deal with them.
Managing change will always be a challenge in projects. Its importance cannot be overestimated in order to successfully deliver projects. Messing up will have huge implications in a claim-oriented environment. Still we see many project teams struggling with organizing and following a proper change management process.
Read moreThe “Too Late Is Possible” constraint in Microsoft Project
After following the tooling courses Oracle Primavera P6 Professional (P6) and Microsoft Project (MSP) one will identify differences between MSP and P6 on the following topics: milestones, adding activities (tasks in MSP), use of constraints, levelling, baselines, lags and relations. This blog will elaborate on the difference of using the “As Late As Possible” constraints in MSP and P6. It is essential to reckon this difference since it has a significant influence on the schedule.
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Allocate resources in Microsoft Project: Units, Peak, Work and Duration
Microsoft Project is a planning tool with which, besides planning on time, resources can also be allocated to activities. In this blog we will briefly discuss how Microsoft Project deals with the concepts Units and Peak and how different resource fields are calculated.
Read morePrimavera P6 duration issues – Hours per time period explained
Primavera is a wonderful tool but sometimes it’s calculations give weird results. For instance when filling in durations of an activity, you might’ve encountered a problem similar to the ones below:
- Your activity duration is showing as 5 days but it starts on the 1st and already ends the 4th
- Your units/time is showing 8h/d but Primavera is actually calculating with 12h/d
What is going on? Well it’s probably something to do with your hours per Time period settings.
Read morePrimavera P6 and the Longest Path
There is more to showing THE Critical Path in Primavera than your project manager can imagine. Primavera allows you to change certain settings to define the criticality of activities: you can define a threshold value for total float, or choose for the longest path instead of a total float-based critical path.
Read moreA budget is not the same as a cash flow
As a follow-up to the post about the difference between a time buffer and total float; here is a new post in the same series – seemingly easy concepts that seem to confuse many. This one might be an open door for financial or general management profiles, but it is not for most project controls engineers.
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