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Migrating from Oracle Primavera to Microsoft Project Online

These days, more and more organizations are looking to make the switch from Oracle Primavera to Microsoft Project Online. This decision can be driven by the need to move to a cloud-based SaaS solution, or simply because the organization wants a better user experience and increased flexibility for managing projects and portfolios.

Primavera -> Project Migration paths

Organizations that have made, or are looking to make, the switch from Primavera to Microsoft Project Online are faced with the daunting task of migrating their project information. Reactions to this challenge can generally be put into one of three categories:

“Let’s manually create our projects in Microsoft Project Online!”

This usually only applies to organizations that need to migrate a very small set of low-complexity projects (which is rarely the case). But organizations with hundreds or thousands of complex projects cannot even fathom this approach. Which takes us to…

“Let’s try automating the migration!”

The first order of business is to convert the schedules from Primavera into Project Online schedules. This quickly leads to the realization that things are more complicated that first anticipated and organizations end up doing most of the work manually after all. This outcome leads to a lot of wasted effort, significant cost implications and delays in day-to-day activities, not to mention frustration. Which can often lead to…

“This is way too hard, let’s not even try it!”

If this is where you landed, or are afraid you’ll eventually reach this conclusion, read on to learn why all hope is not lost…

Common migration issues

Some of the common things that you’ll notice after you try to migrate project information from Primavera to Project Online include:

  • The Duration of your projects is not the same after the migration
  • Actual Hours captured on your project have a different spread or are missing entirely after the migration
  • Actual Start and Finish Dates are missing for certain tasks/activities after the migration
  • Resources assigned to tasks/activities are missing after migration

One of the main reasons why you will find mismatched data is the fact that the schedule engines used by these two systems are quite different, which means things like task/activity constraints, actual dates and work are treated differently.

Pro Tip
Did you know the scheduling engine from Microsoft Project 2010 is closer to Primavera’s scheduling engine when compared to newer versions of Microsoft Project?

So, with all these potential roadblocks, how can you make sure you successfully migrate from Primavera to Project Online? That’s where UMT360 steps in with Microsoft cloud migration services.

There’s nothing worse than doing all the heavy lifting — spending tons of time and money — only to find yourself with a failed initiative. UMT360 can quickly evaluate, design, automate, execute and validate your migration for you.

Here’s how UMT360 can help you successfully migrate from Primavera to Project Online:

  • We leverage our experience understanding the differences between Primavera and Project Online to anticipate costly mistakes which can occur during the migration process. UMT360 has built an extensive set of modular solutions that can be selectively applied to address scheduling inconsistencies upon migration.
  • We provide a proven approach for migrating large scale Primavera implementations (1000+ projects) to Project Online in an automated fashion. We help you migrate project schedules, project/task/assignment custom fields, project owners, task notes, etc.
  • We help you reduce the duration and cost of your migration significantly by automating the key steps in the process.
  • We leverage automated Audit capabilities to quickly identify issues in real-time, while the migration is performed.
  • We validate the migration results by leveraging ready-to-use Validation Reports and Dashboards.

So what’s the next step?

Thinking about migrating your current PPM process to a different solution or tool-set, but not sure how to get started? Share your challenges in the comments below, or reach out to us and one of our Microsoft PPM experts will be happy to assess your current situation, provide you with a roadmap of how to get from here to there, and help you understand what’s needed to ensure success.

UMT360

UMT360 is the leader in strategic portfolio management. Our software is recognized by industry leaders, providing clients with powerful strategic portfolio management capabilities, delivered using a unique and proven approach to break down organizational silos to help you continuously connect, align and orchestrate all investments with strategies. We help clients drive business agility through our unique combination of software and a structured approach to guide the investment in the people, processes and, yes, the tools that can help you break down the barriers standing between you and success. And that’s what UMT360 uniquely delivers.