What You Can Expect From Primavera
P6 Professional Release 8.3 includes a new enhancement entitled “Discussion”, which enables project team members to communicate information pertaining to specific activities. Project team members and project managers can ask questions, respond to questions, and include general information about an activity. These messages/discussions are saved with the activity on the new “Discussion” tab in activity details allowing project contributors to view the entire discussion thread. Additionally, a column entitled Unread Comments can be added to the activity table to alert Project Managers that messages are awaiting their disposition.
This Primavera P6 tutorial on Discussions is the first of several demonstrating the features of P6 Professional 8.3.
Enhancements in this release include:
- Discussions
- Visualizer for enhanced graphical reporting
- Stack columns and use word wrapping on the Gantt Chart
- Use notebook topics or a list of steps as bar labels or columns on the activity table
- Apply different fonts to individual fields & labels
- Color code and use various shapes for bars & endpoints
- Draw bars on top of each other
Discussions in P6 Professional Release 8.3
Step 1: Add the Discussion tab to activity details by accessing the Layout Options Bar, selecting Bottom Layout Options, and moving the Discussion to the displayed tabs.
Step 2: View the components of the Discussion tab. The left side of the tab displays the discussions including the user that posted the question, when the message was posted, and the actual message. Use the right side to enter and post the message.
Step 3: Enter the message & post. To add messages, the user must have Add/Edit Activities Except Relationships security privilege.
Step 4: Use the Show drop-down list to display all messages, sent messages, or received messages.
Step 5: Use the Sort drop-down to sort messages from Oldest to Newest or Newest to Oldest.
Step 6: Add the Unread Comments column to your activity table by accessing the Layout Options Bar & selecting the Columns option. This will alert the project manager to messages requiring disposition.
Step 7: The screenshot below indicates that one unread message exists.
The new Discussions feature will help facilitate better communication between project team members. This feature provides a centralized location for tracking all of the details and communications associated with an activity. Can you think of past projects that you have participated in where having the Discussions feature would have been helpful?
If you are interested in attending web based Primavera Release 8 training to earn PDUs, click here to view our training schedule and course descriptions.