What is P6 Professional?

P6 Professional is a comprehensive, multiproject planning and control software, built on Oracle and MS SQL Server relational databases for enterprise-wide project management scalability. It can stand alone for project and resource management, and it enables your organization to store and manage its projects in a central location. The module supports work breakdown structures (WBS), organizational breakdown structures (OBS), user-defined fields and codes, critical-path-method (CPM) scheduling, and resource leveling.

P6 Professional enables you to budget, prioritize, plan, administer, and manage multiple projects; optimize limited, shared resources; control changes; and consistently move projects to on-time and on-budget completion. It provides customizable interfaces, scalable and flexible tools, and easy integration with project management software outside of the P6 suite, including Oracle Contractor, MS Project, and MS Excel.

Introducing P6 Professional 

When P6 Professional is connected to a P6 EPPM database:

P6 Professional is a separate component of P6 EPPM that integrates traditional project management with streamlined resource and cost management.

It provides a set of robust features aimed primarily to address the needs of project planners and schedulers. (P6 Professional connected to a P6 EPPM database is not used to perform administrative or most enterprise-level tasks.)

P6 Professional features include the following:

• Support of work breakdown structures (WBS), user-defined fields and codes, critical-path-method (CPM) scheduling, and resource leveling.
• Multiple users can access the same projects concurrently.
• Issue tracking
• Management by threshold
• A tracking feature that enables you to perform dynamic cross-project rollups of cost, schedule, and earned value
• Work products and documents that can be assigned to activities and managed centrally
• Visualizer, which allows you to create time-based Gantt and Timescaled Logic Diagram reports
• Resource and role administration
• A Report wizard that helps you create customized reports to extract any data from the P6 EPPM database

When P6 Professional is connected to a P6 Professional database:

P6 Professional is a comprehensive, multiproject planning and control software, built on Oracle and MS SQL Server relational databases for enterprise-wide project management scalability. P6 Professional can stand alone for project and resource management, and it enables your organization to store and manage its projects in a central location. The module supports work breakdown structures (WBS), organizational breakdown structures (OBS), user-defined fields and codes, critical-path-method (CPM) scheduling, and resource leveling.

P6 Professional enables you to budget, prioritize, plan, administer, and manage multiple projects; optimize limited, shared resources; control changes; and consistently move projects to on-time and on-budget completion. It provides customizable interfaces, scalable and flexible tools, and easy integration with project management software outside of the P6 suite, including Oracle Contractor, MS Project, and MS Excel.

P6 Professional provides

• An enterprise project structure (EPS), which enables project managers to manage multiple projects, from the highest levels of the organization to the individuals that perform specific project tasks. Multiple users can access the same projects concurrently.
• Integrated risk management
• Issue tracking
• Management by threshold
• A tracking feature that enables you to perform dynamic cross-project rollups of cost, schedule, and earned value
• Work products and documents that can be assigned to activities and managed centrally
• Visualizer, which allows you to create time-based Gantt and Timescaled Logic Diagram reports
• Resource and role administration

sing the P6 Professional User’s Guide 

P6 Professional can connect to two databases, a P6 Professional database and a P6 EPPM database. Depending on which database you are connected to, some topics within the user’s guide and some information within certain topics will be relevant while others will not.

Topics that are only relevant to one database will be qualified in the title of the topic. When a topic title is followed by (P6 Professional Only), this topic will only be relevant when P6 Professional is connected to a P6 Professional database. When a topic is followed by (P6 EPPM Only), this topic will only be relevant when P6 Professional is connected to a P6 EPPM database. For example, the topic, “Defining Administration Preferences (P6 Professional Only),” contains information only relevant when P6 Professional is connected to a P6 Professional database.

Other topics will include information that is relevant when connected to either database. These topics will not be qualified. For example, the information in the topic, “Create a project,” applies when P6 Professional is connected to a P6 Professional database and when P6 Professional is connected to a P6 EPPM database.

Other topics will include some information that is only relevant when connected to a P6 Professional and some that is only relevant when connected to a P6 EPPM database. These topics will include conditional phrases such as:

• “When connected to a P6 Professional database,”
• “When P6 Professional is connected to a P6 EPPM database,”
• “(P6 EPPM Only),”
• “This icon only appears when P6 Professional is connected to a P6 Professional database.”

Within our documentation, some content might be specific for cloud deployments while other content is relevant for on-premises deployments. Any content that applies to only one of these deployments is labeled accordingly.