How the Planning Community is Hacking Primavera P6

The best thing about being part of a community is that members help each other out. And the planning and scheduling community is one of those that really likes to help each other out.

You only need to poke around the many Project Controls and Primavera P6 Groups on LinkedIn to find a myriad of helpful advice on topics ranging from how to name your milestones to avoiding construction delay claims. In fact, that’s pretty much the main reason I started writing Primavera P6 tutorials – it was a desire to help and share with the community.

And nowadays, it’s not just advice that the community is sharing that is drawing attention, but rather templates, ebooks, or especially custom-home-grown applications that solve a common problem that people face with P6. These I’m calling Hacks.

Yes, the planning community is hacking Primavera P6.

/hak/ (def):

a clever solution to a tricky problem

to hack is to mod or change something in an extraordinary way

Users all over the world are developing hacks that solve common P6 problems. And the best part is these creative users are openly sharing their hacks for free.

For instance, we wrote about the problem of bloated POBS data in Primavera P6 XER files slowing down imports and exports from the tool. No long after the article went live, we received a comment on the article from planning engineer Ahmet Kochan who had created and shared for free a very simple windows-app that does nothing but clean an XER file. It works fast and saves tons of steps to get a clean XER file. Get it here if you’re interested.

But Ahmet’s tool isn’t the only one we’ve discussed here – there are many more creating planners hacking Primavera P6 and I’d like you to know about them. I’ve put together an in-depth video all about Primavera P6 Hacks from the Community. Have a watch – I’m sure you will find something that saves you time and frustration.