P3 v P3e V P5

From Primavera.



The 5.0 release has significant advances in existing functionality, as well as introduce new conceptual areas of functionality to extend Primavera’s overall Project Portfolio Management solution.

One hundred percent of the proposed features have been suggested and requested by Primavera customers, and they can be categorized into three areas:

1. Industry Thought Leadership

2. Specific Customer Enhancement Requests

3. Technological Maintenance and Enhancements



The objective of the 5.0 release is to integrate a broader selection of options for planning and managing projects and programs. Primavera Engineering & Construction will reach a larger audience, resulting in more precise resource allocation, improved project portfolio visibility, and greater project execution efficiency. Primavera Engineering & Construction will accomplish these objectives with a focus on core project management capabilities, high-level resource planning, and an introduction of new functionality that will provide enhanced alternative methods for the management and resolution of project issues, changes, and risk.

More specifically, the 5.0 release includes improvements to the following areas

1. Project Level Resource Reservations and Planning

2. Issues Management

3. Access Control Lists for Documents and Project Collaboration

4. Improved User Interface

5. Core Security Options

6. Updated and Enhanced Reporting Capabilities

7. Robust Baselining Capabilities

8. Advanced scheduling options





These release notes describe the overall intentions of the release and provide an initial statement of the proposed feature and functionality coverage.

Delivered Functionality by Module

Project Manager Professional (Formerly PM, MM, and PA clients)

Improved Reporting Options

1. The report wizard will allow joining multiple select subject areas. For instance, the wizard will allow the selection of notebook topics as well as activities to display activity data with all related information stored in the notebook fields.

2. All reports defined in PM Professional will be accessible in myPrimavera, allowing users to view and print these reports from a myPrimavera session.



New Activity Type: Summary Activities

Summary activities will allow for the roll-up of information across a specific node of the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). In addition to the automatic roll-up to the WBS element, this new activity type will allow for the assignment of resources and the collection of actuals at the WBS level.

Progress Spotlight

Progress spotlight is a usability tool that will allow the project manager to quickly schedule as planned by graphically identifying and selecting activities that should have progressed since the last scheduling period. The feature allows the project manager to step through selected activities, updating them at a more discrete level, as necessary.

EPS Level Activity Codes

Users will have a third option by which to distribute activity and project codes. This new option associates codes at the Enterprise Project Structure (EPS) level. Codes are assigned as accessible from a specific node within the EPS. Activities in that node (and its children) will have access to the identified activity codes.

Baseline Maintenance

Baseline maintenance will now include the option to update portions of a project plan or even select only newly added or deleted items from the last baseline for incremental baseline updates.

Suspend and Resume Activity

Project managers will now have the option to selectively set dates for an activity to indicate that work on the activity has been suspended and will resume on the specified date.





Rates on Roles

The role dictionary will now include a value for rate on each identified role. This will allow for the assignment of roles and a calculated, estimated cost based upon the specified weight for the assigned role.

Past Period Actuals

The system will now store reported period actuals for use in all layouts and reports. Period actuals will be tied to the “Period Closeout” feature, allowing for the storage of reported actuals without the need to collect time reported actuals.

Step Enhancements

Users can now build activity step templates that will allow for the assignment of groups of steps to activities. In addition, the interface will display a graphical indicator when an activity has a step assigned to it.

Unraveling Float Path

This new capability will allow for the identification and mining of critical paths that exist in the schedule and will allow users to incrementally step through all contributing network logic.

Independent Resource Leveling (5.1)

Independent resource leveling will provide an option for leveling that allows activity dates to be calculated based on assigned resources without a prerequisite of consistent availability of every resource assigned to the activity. The activity will be scheduled if at least one resource is available.

Excel Import/Export engine

Users will have the ability to export multiple subject areas to an Excel® spreadsheet. An easy to use wizard allows the user to build export templates and quickly execute the export and import of multiple tables to multiple worksheets within the same Excel workbook.

Undo

A fully functional undo feature will be included in the 5.0 release. The system will track an unlimited number of user actions and provide for the instant reversal of any minor data addition, modification, or deletion. Example of some of the actions that can be undone:

• Rename activity

• Delete activity

• Fill down

• Copy/paste activity





Layout Improvements

To allow project managers to leverage layouts as a robust reporting tool, Primavera will continue to update layout graphic options and capabilities. The 5.0 release will include the following graphical layout improvements:

1. Ability to format weight and color of vertical sight lines

2. Combination of ordinal dates with corresponding weeks on the timescale

3. Introduction of 3rd line for bar chart and histogram timescales

4. Multiple curtains and extended formatting of timescale curtains

5. Customization of bar labels



Multiple Timesheet Approval Periods

The timesheet approval screen will now allow for the selection of multiple reporting periods and graphically indicate when a time period contains timesheets awaiting approval.

Overhead Activity Visibility

The resource assignment view will include reported actual overhead hours entered within the timesheet.

Security Enhancements

To allow greater access control, the security infrastructure will be extended to allow for more discrete assignment of access rights based upon specific area of functionality. These security changes include:

1. New privilege for scheduling, leveling, and applying actuals

2. Separation of calendar privilege into multiple options (e.g., global vs. resource)

3. Node level resource access, restricting users to a specific node of the Resource Breakdown Structure

4. New privilege that will prevent the deletion of any resource that has posted actuals

5. Separate add and edit privileges for resources, activities, and project codes

6. Separate add and edit privileges for user defined fields

7. New privilege for updating the activity ID

Hi Chappers,



Glad to here you are moving into the world of P5 / Multi user, (about time you did - mate).



I agree with Arthur’s comments and advise as described bellow.



One bit of advice is to get to get onto a course for P5 asap (try Forgetrack) - or at least get your wallet out and invest in a manual on P5 Produced by Paul E. Harris(wwww.eh.com.au), as P5 versus p3 I have found are total differant beasts.



Mind don’t worry about P5 as P6 is supposed to be coming along very soon.



(Hope the training is going well and not to many injuries.)



Regards John L.

Pharrel,



reference your last point related to start - finish dates. We face the same situation. If you have a 24 hour calendar then you face this situation, whereas for an 8 hour calendar, it works fine, as far as the dates that you see in dates column. However, 24 hour calendar too is not incorrect. If you change the format to dates and time, you’ll find that though in the dates column it appears to be a day more, time terms it is still OK. The workaround is to add a user defined finish date field and globally set the same as 1 day lesser than ’early finish’ date.



If anyone has any more ideas on this issue, please share.

regards.

Mark,



I have played around with P5, and it has a huge differences with P3 eventhough with the same concept, i tried to import a project from p3 to P5, the duration, Resources loading are totally not the same.



1st the duration of each activity is lesser and the resources man-hrs is messed up.



May be i do not know the setting that i have to make before the transfer, but the point is you would have to adjust a lot of things before you can play around with it.



Other example is my friends (who are now using P5 for the project) just got a note from the clients, saying that the Date is not consistent, if the duration of activity is 1 day, the start& finish should have the same date, but it is not on the Software, and other comments.



Regards,

Thanks mate!

Yes. P3 has a maximum of 8 activity custom data fields. They are called User Defined Fields in P5, and there are an unlimited number of fields for any of ten different categories. And one of those categories is activities. P3 only has one other category, resource/cost. Another example of the "no limitations" to which I referred earlier.

Hi Arthur,



I want to know; does P3e or P5 support more than 8 activities in the custom data item. Thanks.



Ife

"P3e" (the term used from versions 1.0 to 3.5) and "P5" (version 5.0) are different versions of the same thing.



Both P3 and the Windows client of P5 can be installed "standalone" or on a server, there is no difference in functionality. And both P3 and P5 are multi-user. But obviously multi-user capabilities (whether P3 or P5) only become relevant if there is more than one licence and they are server-based.



I suggest that you need to discuss some fundamentals with whoever supplied your P5.

Fundamental differences (other than "features") such as SQL databases and lots of browser-based options. As well as effectively no limitations when it comes to sizing (# project levels, # projects, # codes, # activities, etc.) There are other important implications for larger environments because P3 would hit the wall with a relatively small number of concurrent users.



But speak to Primavera in London, or to your local Primavera rep, to get more detail of what might be relevant to your own use. If you already have P3, and know and love it, it is not necessarily "wrong" to continue using it. But there will not be any more functionalty added and the day will come (albeit several years away) when it is no longer supported.

P5 is the acronym coined by users (but now also used by Primavera) for Version 5.0 of the software that began life in 1999 as P3e. That latter acronym is now not used by Primavera.