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P3 Vs P5

11 replies [Last post]
Wed, 2007-07-25 10:54
Suresh Devarajan
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Hi Planners,
What is the difference between P3 and P5 in terms of application usage. Is it more user friendly than P3?
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Thu, 2007-07-26 09:48
#1
ulysses garcia
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About the subject..

P3 is NOT a refine tool , considered as unripe, not completely developed .
P5, and P6 is exceptional powerful, that planner will not sit in thier office the whole year; just manuevering the P3 , but instead think of the most essence things in planning the project..

uly
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Thu, 2007-07-26 09:26
#2
Vladimir Liberzon
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Dieter,
I don’t agree that PMBoK reflects the life of PM.
I tried resource levelling in P4 for one large project of similar size. I started levelling in the evening, in the morning it was 23%, then I quited. You are lucky that levelling was not needed.
Regards,
Vladimir
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Thu, 2007-07-26 08:15
#3
Vladimir Liberzon
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Dieter,
did you ever try resource levelling in large projects (like 191000 activities)?
You stated that P3 does not follow PMBoK - where? In what areas P3 contradicts PMBoK Guide?
Regards,
Vladimir
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Thu, 2007-07-26 09:10
#4
Dieter Wambach
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Vladimir

it’s the terms. As PMBoK just reflects the life of PM, the principles cannot be different to P3. As I stated before, the terms are different - as described by Primavera.
In this big project, resource levelling was not a topic.
In the past I did resource levelling just for the bottleneck resources but then over all involved projects, of course.

Regards

Dieter
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Thu, 2007-07-26 04:10
#5
Dieter Wambach
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Raviraj,

just very short to the equipment: Oracle 10. ; wireless LAN 1MB, PC Dual Core, 4G main memory. P3e doesn’t profit from dual core - hopefully Version 6 will do. 4G was very helpful. Start the system in the morning: about 8 mins, F9 2 to 3 mins, depending on charge on LAN. During the day I had to work with admin rights. Update progress, Reporting, Global Change there was a big difference if I used a user with reduced rights or the Admin - seconds to 10 minutes.
More than 20 users, 5 with overall rights, some hundred different projects in the database. Heavy usage of codes - 10 per activity.
Terms of the PMBoK: P3e/P5 100% follows the PMKoK, so it’s easy to understand the terms. P3 is different. On the documentation CD if P3e there is a pdf "From P3 to P3e" with some pages on the differences.

Regards

Dieter

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Thu, 2007-07-26 02:50
#6
Charleston-Joseph...
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Uly,

P5 not anymore, man.

A new kid in town: P6.

Primavera state: P6 is here to stay.

So no point P3 vs P5.

Maybe it should be P3 vs Spider since whatever update from Primavera will eventually become obsolete.

Cheers,

Joseph
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Thu, 2007-07-26 01:56
#7
ulysses garcia
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In real life, of course.. you dont want to leave your old best friend by replacing new ones, that you are not familiar with..

This philosopy is true to P3 users , they dont want to try P5.

For me i considered P3 a better tool , but P5 is the BEST...

Cheers,

uly
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Thu, 2007-07-26 01:35
#8
A D
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Dieter,

Thats awesome 191000 activity schedule. How much time it takes to schedule / update it; every time u press F9?

Well anyway, in the last sentence u said "If u follow PMBOK, then u will fell with P5".

Whats d difference between P3 & P5, as far as application of PMBOK is considered. Any significant change?

Please explain it.

Cheers,

Raviraj
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Wed, 2007-07-25 16:40
#9
Dieter Wambach
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Suresh

With with this question you may raise a religious war. P3 appeared in 1983 and was steadily improved. Many add-ons were written and published. In about 1995 it’s user interface was transferred to Windows without real internal modifications, The way you work with P3 in planning and scheduling is exactly the same as if you would use pen and paper. Users got accustomed to it and don’t want to miss P3. It is extremely fast, needs little computer performance and little space. Many predefined reports make life easy. No problem to handle projects up to about 100000 activities.
But: Database is Btrieve - index-sequential, fixed record length, project-names must have 4 characters. Some functions are not more supported today. No chance, to adapt this 16bit application to today’s system environment. It is as an antique car - but use it for business? No doubt, you still can plan big projects with P3 with many experts. But it will be obsolete rather soon.
But the P3 users are getting older. Management and stakeholders have different needs for information than 24 years ago.

Primavera decided to issue a new software with some features made similiar to old P3. The first Version issued in Europe was 1.5 in about 1999 - a horror as for performance and stability but with one common database multi-project and multi-user ability. In 2000 there were some big improvements. It was really useful for IT already with many small projects and ressources working on more than one project, overall reporting, flexible filters, fulfilling WINDOWS standards.
Now we have Version 5 and just some details leading some users to prefer the old one.
No problem to handle big projects: last year I worked with 191000 activities which worked inclusive daily bi-directional transfer with SAP, overall reporting, ...No real limits for codes, ressources, number of projects, user defined fields.
Difference is more in the philosophy. Modern against old-fashioned, up-to-date against old standards. If you know and follow PMBoK, immediately you’ll feel well with P5.
Best regards
Dieter
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Wed, 2007-07-25 14:30
#10
Mike Morrison
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And...

We use P5 for maintaining about 300 schedules simultaneously, so this is very beneficial because there is virtually no file management except within the software, No folders/windows folders to worry about.

Having the projects in a single database is also nice if you want to look at several at the same time, you just open them all with any layout you want. You have to calculate them separately of course.
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Wed, 2007-07-25 14:24
#11
Mike Morrison
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P5 is a database where all the projects are self contained in one database that grows as you add projects. P3 project files are comprised of a group of files for each project that can be stored anywhere as long as the group of files is stored together for each project.

Primavera says that P5 (soon to be P6) is the newer version, but seasoned schedulers still use P3 for many reasons. It is difficult to state all the differences, but just assume that for the time being, P3 is more suited to use on very large schedules/projects. While P5 could also handle large projects, it doesn’t have the functionality that p3 users are accustomed to. Primavera appears to be working on this, with version p6 coming out summer 07, and P7 coming out in 2008. It’s a long term process trying to get the new version to be as good as P3, all in one database. Primavera officials indicated to me at the user conference in 2006 that their support for P3 would wane as P5/6/7 improves, but P3 is still their cash cow, so your guess is as good as theirs and mine what that actually means.

For the most part, the commands, and look and feel are similar in P3 and P5, but may have slightly different ways to access certain features. P5 also integrates with MyPrimavera, the webbased tool.
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