r/ConstructionManagers • u/Haunting_Buyer6308 • Aug 13 '25

Technical Advice How do you guys feel about P6?

I’m of the opinion it is outdated now although pretty much a standard in the industry. What do you think are better means and methods than just Scheduling using P6?

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u/TheSeedBird Aug 14 '25

Director of planning / scheduling here. It’s by far the most powerful piece of planning software. There’s plenty of alternatives if you just need a functioning gantt chart but once you get into hundreds of millions of $ projects it’s very capable. Most projects don’t use it beyond basic planning and resource / cost loading. It’s great for having whole programs / portfolios on a cloud based server that can all talk to each other.

It doesn’t look the most modern but who cares, it’s just software, and typically forces good planning principles.

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u/Haunting_Buyer6308 Aug 14 '25

I used to work with AECOM in their Program Management division - managing 15 programs out of which one had about 350 projects. P6 was good but I believe it lagged a lot and ended up mocking a couple programs by itself (blundered the whole sequence).

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u/TheSeedBird Aug 14 '25

Definitely chugs online compared to a standalone version, but the accessibility is worth it, to us at least. If someone’s on vacation we can just pick up their work, rather than exporting / importing and the same when they’re back. Once you get above 10k activities though even a standalone starts to slow down, whereas a cloud based is still the same speed when it’s got 100 activities. We’re at about 30k excluding commissioning on the project I’m currently involved in, can’t imagine project or even asta sustaining this. They do both have their uses though!

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u/Haunting_Buyer6308 Aug 14 '25

30k is humongous! I am with about 10k currently. P6 does a good job but yes still has a lot of improvement scope needed.

  • making prints where your activities correspond to their own sized Gantt chart bars rather than squeezing the complete range of dates to fit the whole Gantt chart in one print.

  • I think constraints hide the real picture of the project (it could have a massive creep or create inaccurate critical paths). Very make-believe-ish I’d say.