Primavera xers are a liability to CPM consultants bottom line
Make Oracle develop the concept! with enough upvotes, it can happen!
Upvote Idea 17591 at and protect your livelihood.
It must be the weather or something that’s made me cranky this month – but I feel obliged to share a piece of advice with fellow colleagues, as well as my competitors: that’s right – I said advice for my competition. Sharing Primavera xers is bad for the business. By the time you finish reading this post you will full well understand why I say that.
It came to my attention the other day when a colleague working for a CM gave me a call. He works on a three-year project for which I created the baseline for the planning engineers. He knew this before I told him, because he had seen my schedule being used as a passive oversight control document by the stakeholders.
I said “that’s funny because my proposal for the follow up oversight was rejected.” In other words, rather than extending the oversight contract, the stakeholders had Shanghia’d my baseline, and used it for themselves, thereby eschewing outsource fees.
If you use Primavera 6, perhaps you can relate to this experience. Or worse, perhaps your Primavera xers. are circulating and being republished for commercial purposes without your knowledge.
That’s just the half of it. The bigger problem is this: once you allow your best work to be available to anyone it no longer is proprietary, but lives in the public domain. Thus, anyone in possession of your best xers could learn all your best trade secrets and use them to compete against you.
One of two things will come of engineer’s use of your Primavera xers: either they will have no comments at all, or their comments will be rudimentary and uninformed.
It’s not unusual for planners to request only a baseline. Best practice dictates they should continue to keep parallel records to keep the CM honest, and these records should be maintained by industry trained professionals, not overly curious engineers. It’s also in fairness to the scheduling consultant. The baseline is the most difficult effort. If it is a good baseline, the updates will come easy. That is the reward for the scheduler that he deserves for generating a solid baseline.
Engineers just want the xer (thank you!) They aren’t trained in P6, and importing Primavera xers, but they think they can figure the program out on their own: not going to happen!
In fact, the conundrum of locking xers is nothing new – it’s always been the case. Why is it so easy to reproduce Primavera xers? It has to do with the way the program is set up with its databases, and the way it is exported – go ask Oracle. I have been speaking to the Primavera engineers at Oracle to see what sort of read-only protections or other work-arounds exist, or could be developed.
The Oracle Community features enhancement forums for ideas such as mine. With enough upvotes, they may just decide to develop a workaround. Without the votes, they will not.
Circulating open-source Primavera xers is like sending work out the door, as well as creating more competition with yourself. In a sense, we may find that we are competing with ourselves, when others have all our best trade secrets.
In the meantime – and this is my advice to all schedulers: copyright your work, and include language forbidding reproduction. The way I see it, the more loose xers there are laying around for engineers and dilettantes to fool with, the less work there will be for me, because they are stealing my work.
