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P6 Real World Scheduling - 3rd Edition (R.1) is called "real world" because the author wrote it drawing upon his 40+ years of experience consulting with contractors to help them meet their construction scheduling software needs, as well as his 30+ years teaching construction scheduling softwares at the college level.  He knows how students learn and how contractors use scheduling software, what's important to them - and what is not!

This manual has been tested and retested in both the classroom and the company training room. It will guide you through some of the quirks of P6 as well as teach you how to use the software the way contractors use it. Other software manuals are often hundreds of pages long filled with dense text that wastes your time trying to cover every corner and nuance of the software - ultimately leaving readers more confused than before they started.

P6 Real World Scheduling - 3rd Edition is written for Oracle’s Primavera P6 Professional software using the default PMDB (Project Management Database) database. It was written using version 19.12.6, but can confidently be used with all versions of P6 from R8.1 and beyond since the functionality of the software does not change from version to version.

Rest assured that it will help the reader clearly grasp the many, sometimes puzzling nuances of this “enterprise” based software, such as the use of the OBS (Organizational Breakdown Structure), the EPS (Enterprise Project Structure), the lack of traditional “save” features, user security profiles, and its uncommon import / export components.

P6 Real World Scheduling assumes that the reader has no previous exposure to the software and takes the reader through the process of creating a schedule covering the same features that a contractor would include on their typical schedule. This includes creating and saving the schedule, covering numerous formatting options to customize the look of the schedule, working with calendars including 50% and 100% weather calendars, then activity coding the schedule to organize the activities into various Work Breakdown Structures. Different views of the schedule are explored and from there the schedule is resource loaded and cost loaded, including a real world analysis of an over-allocation of resources. The schedule is then Baselined and updated covering all possible update scenarios that may actually occur.

If adopted for your course, the professor is provided with an Instructor's Package that contains everything needed to teach your course  and  to adapt it to an on-line format including the solutions manual, all (16) P6 schedule files (and matching Layouts) that your students will create throughout the manual, the end of lab Schedule Analyses, sample tests with answer keys, and much more - all in a digital format to be used as is or to be customized to fit your course. 

With this manual and a few hours of your time, you will be ready to effectively use Oracle’s Primavera’s P6 Professional on a real project - or - teach it to your students the way contractors use it.