Book Image

Oracle Primavera P6 Version 8: Project and Portfolio Management

Book Image

Oracle Primavera P6 Version 8: Project and Portfolio Management

Overview of this book

In 2008 Oracle acquired Primavera Software, Inc., a leading provider of Project Portfolio Management (PPM) solutions for project-intensive industries.Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management is an integrated project portfolio management (PPM) solution comprising role-specific functionality to satisfy each team member's needs, responsibilities, and skills. It provides a single solution for managing projects of any size, adapts to various levels of complexities within a project, and intelligently scales to meet the needs of various roles, functions, or skill levels in your organization and on your project team.Oracle Primavera P6 Version 8: Project and Portfolio Management aims to show you all the features and functionality of the software thoroughly and clearly.With Oracle Primavera P6 Version 8: Project and Portfolio Management, readers will master the core concepts of Primavera P6 and the new features associated with version 8.This book is divided into two sections, in the first section we learn the fundamental concepts behind managing projects which include organizing projects, adding activities and relationships, assigning roles and resources, scheduling a project, and much more. In the second section we cover portfolio management and how to make the best use of the web client that includes working with portfolios, portfolio analysis, portfolio capacity planning, ROI, tracking performance, and lots more.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Oracle Primavera P6 Version 8: Project and Portfolio Management
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

User Defined Fields (UDFs)


Earlier we mentioned that a portfolio filter could be based on user-defined fields. These fields are custom items you can add to P6 to hold special properties that are not natively included with P6. For example, you could add a date at the project level to represent the year in which a facility was commissioned. Or you could add a field to hold a project number to use on reports. Or you could add a cost field to represent the initial estimated cost of the project.

The fields that come with P6 are designed to meet the needs of the majority of users. UDFs allow you to provide additional input that is specifically tailored to your company and your industry. The risk of using a UDF instead of built-in fields is that UDF fields are easily overwritten and there are no controls in place to ensure appropriate spelling or other mistakes. UDFs often are used to bring in data from another system through an automated integration script.

UDFs are not limited to projects. They...