CH2MHILL, a $5 billion-a-year construction company with 24,000 employees, recently migrated to Primavera P6 after having used Primavera P3 for about five years. Erik Tuma, a project planning and controls specialist with the firm, said that, while he finds the software invaluable, he has felt challenged at times with minor bugs, poor technical support and a security flaw that sometimes sees him reverting back to P3.

Tuma appreciates that Primavera P6 is able to work with other tools, such as Microsoft Project management software. He said P6 allows him to take a preliminary schedule that project managers throw together in Microsoft Project before a scheduler takes that and develops the true project schedule in P6.

The calculations done in P6 seem to be more accurate with the real world results. Tuma said that float calculations are different in Project than in Primavera, so you’ll get different paths between the two. Project also auto computes actuals so you can't load in the actual costs from the accounting system. He noted, "Project basically just doesn't calculate the same as Primavera, which is our standard. I have heard some good things about the latest version but haven't been able to dive into it."

One of the useful features in P6 is MyPrimavera, which provides Web access to the project planning process. In one recent instance, an upgrade to Spokane, Washington's wastewater treatment plant, this feature made a dramatic difference in simplifying the management of a remote project, Tuma explained: "The entire design team was on site in Spokane, while I was down in Corvalis, Ore. They were able to get into the schedule and make their Schedule/ETC/Percent Complete changes themselves. It was a rather large project, so that saved me the time of having to personally enter all that data and allowed me to analyze the data more."

But although he favors Primavera P6 over other construction planning software, Tuma does get frustrated at times, particularly when it comes to the lack of user rights scalability. "CH2MHILL isn't going to give everyone Super user rights because an uninformed user could do a lot of damage to a lot of other people's work. At the same time, since we aren't Super users, we can't import schedule information from Microsoft Excel," he explained. "This is a problem when baselining a good size project. What we end up having to do is create the schedule in Primavera P3 (which allows you to import Excel files) and then integrate into P5 or P6. If I'm not using MyPrimavera on a job, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to take this extra step when I can get what I need out of P3."

Overall, Tuma rated Primavera P6 a 6 out of 10. "It's a pretty good program and one that I prefer to use; it's just not good enough to be an 8 or 9 yet."