Like most enterprise software, Primavera P6 is massive and for someone new to P6, it can be daunting. Most P6 training courses will only teach you how to use P6 without any explanation on why P6 does things in a certain way and for people switching to P6 from other scheduling software, things can get really confusing.

A must read for anyone new to P6 is Ron Winter's paper on the inner workings of Primavera P6. The abstract of Ron's paper is shown below and the paper can be downloaded from Ron's site using the link below the abstract.

Oracle® Primavera P6 scheduling software is noted for its diverse and extensive set of features and range. The newer date fields and their calculation methods have started intense discussions and caused some misunderstanding in the scheduling community. The sheer number of different date fields can be a benefit or a curse to the scheduler depending on mastery of how they should be used.

Every scheduler should clearly understand the software’s methods of calculation in order to use this powerful tool at its full capacity.  This paper will define the durations used and describe the P6 date fields, their uses and the underlying calculations. P6 examples will be used to prove how the little-known method of calculating Critical Path Method (CPM) dates of a schedule that has been progressed with status.