Understanding Primavera P6 Architecture

Duration: 4m 52s
Skill Level: Beginner

So you're about to dive deep into Primavera P6 and learn all of it's workings. Well before you do, make sure you get a handle on Primavera P6's architecture. It changes the way the way you work with the tool.

Primavera P6 has a database at its core and that is one of the major features that makes Primavera P6 an Enterprise project management tool. So what does that mean to you?  Watch the tutorial video to find out. 

So you want to learn how to schedule? Our Introduction to Primavera P6 course is where you'll get started learning how to build project schedules in Primavera P6. There's lots to learn about Primavera and this is where you'll learn the steps and the process of building schedules in P6 from the ground up. We'll take your through creating your first project, adding WBS and Activities and linking it all together. You'll be building your own schedules in no time!

Video: Understanding Primavera P6 Architecture

Hi it’s Michael. In this video we’re going to take a minute to talk about the architecture of Primavera P6. Now before you get into Primavera P6 and start putting your projects and doing all sorts of resource analysis and wonderful things, I think it’s important to step back for a minute and see we can understand a little bit about the architecture of the tool. I think that’s important because Primavera has a unique architecture. It may not be like some of the other management tool that you may have used in the past. Like say, Microsoft project. It’s a little bit different and its core, Primavera has a database.

This is the internationally accepted symbol for a database, and this stand for Project Management Data Base which is kind of the acronym that was used throughout. This is data base houses of all of the information, all of the projects, all of the global data, everything that is in the Primavera is actually house in that data base. And that data base it’s in some central location somewhere, probably in a server in your enterprise. And having that kind of architecture means that we are allowed to do then is have multiple people access that data base. This actually gives us a lot of power, and this is in truth what makes primavera an enterprise Project Management System. It not just a desktop project management planning tool, the fact that it has a data base means that everybody can access projects. So we tend to have a lot of advantages from that.

Number one, we get away from working with files which again can be a little bit different if you’re used to working with files. So this may involve you changing your thinking a little bit. See, with a data base, if someone ask me for the latest copy of my project plan, i don’t need to email it to them, they can simply open up Primavera and go to the data base and look at it. Or my boss wants a report, in theory my boss can log in to Primavera and want a report on my project plan. It also gives us a lot go opportunity for collaboration. Meaning that we can allow actually multiple people to work on a large project, we can debug that project down from different sections. You can access the data from different tools. Some of you know that Primavera has a web based application called EPPM. And so we can access the same data from EPPM web based tool or from a windows based tool.

It gives us lots of flexibility; it makes Primavera as I said an enterprise wide planning tool. If you’re an IT guy, you may be interested to know that Primavera supports both Microsoft Sequel Data Bases as well as Oracle Data Bases. I’m not surprise because they are owned by oracle. Now, some other advantages to having the data base in moving away from files. One of the things I like to talk about in trainings is how files tend to get littered all over the place. So we email files, we leave them on zip tribes, we leave them on other computers, we email them across organizations and files get littered all over the place.

So for looking for the latest copy the project plan, where is it? With files, they tend to be littered all over the place but with a data base, by looking at the latest copy of that project plan, I know that it’s here in my data base. What are the other advantages of a data base? Again, this may not be exactly for you but it’s easy from an IT perspective to secure my data. Everything sits in one central place so I need to just back up that data base and I’ve secured my data for the entire enterprise where is again with files, they littered all over the places, it’s much more difficult to secure files.

So I think it’s important that you understand that Primavera has a data base at its core and that data base as you get working with the tool won’t change the way you work with the tool a little bit. We’re going to see more as we get into the tool in the next video.