17 Nov 2017 News

Dear Members,

Please find below this weeks' newsletter.  We hope that you find it adds value to your day.  Please visit our sponsors as they keep our 5 servers running and without them we will cease to exist. If you would like to join our team of bloggers and content providers then do get in touch.

Do Duy Khuong Blog

Primavera P6, Microsoft Project Tips & Tricks

Sometimes you need to make an activity table report which also shows predecessors and successors of each activity.  

Here are the steps showing how to do it.   Read the full blog [1]....

By Yaser A. Al-Bustanji CPCM, ACIArb, PMP, PMI-SP, PMI-RMP

Of the many different types of date fields in Oracle® P6™, the most controversial and misleading dates are, "Planned Start" and "Planned Finish" dates of the activities.

There are several fields for start and finish dates in Primavera P6. Users need to be sure they understand what each one represents and ensure they are reporting and managing the intended information. 

The basic matter to understand is that P6 has separate dates for activities, resources, WBSs and projects.  Primavera P6 has many more dates fields than any other scheduling tools like P3 and Microsoft Project.   Read the full blog... [3]

The Association for Project Managers (APM) is the largest independent Chartered body for the project profession. The award-winning association has over 23,000 individual and 570 corporate members making it the largest professional body of its kind in Europe.

With this membership, PrimaveraReader makes a commitment to help develop and promote the professional project and programme management community. 

PrimaveraReader continues to help companies around the globe improve the efficiency and revolutionize the way project stakeholders interact with project schedule plans made using Oracle® Primavera P6®.

Are you a practitioner who would like to help coach more junior practitioners and make revenue for doing it full time or part time?

Are you an experienced training provider who can deliver small or large scale training and want a new product set?

You are welcome to use the Guild of Project Controls Compendium and use your experience to help practitioners know and understand the tools & techniques associated with Planning & Scheduling, Cost Management, Forensic Analysis and Project Controls... become a trainer for the Guild.

If you would like to "get plugged in" and utilise this comprehensive competency based toolset then email us at PPAdmin@planningplanet.com [4]

CH2M is a global engineering company that provides consulting, design, construction, and operations services. As a project-focused organization, CH2M understands the importance of developing strong processes and accurate, timely information to drive smarter decision making for its projects. 

The motivation to adopt an enterprise project controls solution came from the difficulty in achieving clear visibility into project performance across the organization as different business groups leveraged disparate project delivery systems.

After an extensive industry search, CH2M adopted EcoSys Enterprise Projects Performance software to standardize and automate organizational best practices across business groups and to build the information needed to drive better forecasting and smarter decision making.  Read the Full Case Study... [5]

CWA Engineers Selects ARES PRISM for Increased Collaboration, Change Controls, and Earned Value Management: read the full story here... [6]

Webinar: Effective Change Management [7] 

As we mentioned in previous news the Guild of Project Controls is going to stop offering a one-off lifetime payment for Membership...  

After they close this any new members will have to pay the $150 USD every year rather than once in their lifetime.  

Take advantage of this offer here - before they close it on us [8]

The AACE Region 5 Symposium, held in The Woodlands, TX, was a big success thanks to its insightful speakers, exceptional planning, and execution.

The integrated project controls solution of Cost Engineering and how our software Cleopatra Enterprise can serve as an integrated solution drew a great deal of interest among project controllers.

In his presentation, VP of Business of Cost Engineering, Stefan Bakker, wanted to create an awareness regarding the need for integrated project controls. This started by asking a question to the crowd: ‘Why is it important to see project controls as an integrated approach, instead of a collection of individual disciplines?’

The presentation was very well received leading to fruitful discussions on the most common pitfalls in integrating estimating, planning, cost management and benchmarking and how to avoid them.

Also, the curious eyes and arising questions showed that the project controllers were very interested in learning about the Integrated Project Controls Matrix (IPC Matrix) which shows the integration maturity levels based on categories such as work process, IT solutions and culture. Read more about the Integrated Project Controls concept [9]

Spider Project software is most popular project, program and portfolio management tool in Russia. It has customers in 34 countries but still is not widely known abroad.

The first version of Spider Project was launched to the market in 1993 and since then its improvement based on its development team ideas and experience and users proposals and requirements never stopped. Today it has a lot of unique features that are not available in other tools. Look at the presentation here [10] that describes some advanced scheduling functionality that is required in many projects but is absent in most tools.

Project models may be used as the decision making tools only if they reflect all existing dependencies and constraints. Let us know if you create project models that give reliable answers to any what if question and forecast future results. We'll be glad to discuss any issues with creating these models in Planning Planet Spider Project forum [11].

That's all folks... 

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