The Organizational Breakdown Structure (OBS) is intended to represent your organization and your projects may also be grouped, sorted and filtered using the OBS, where as the Oracle Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Structure (EPS) is a hierarchical structure for grouping, sorting and filtering your projects under logical headings such as location and client.
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The aim of the OBS is to provide users access to project data at different levels, such as Read Only, Edit, Create or Delete, and is effectively the gateway between users and their access to projects.
P6 uses both terms OBS Name and Responsible Manager interchangeably and they are the same.
When a project is created it is assigned an OBS Node as part of the P6 Creating a New Project process:
When a user is created
- They are assigned a Global Security Profile giving users access to Global Data,
- They are also assigned to one or more OBS Nodes which can have different levels of access and in turn this allows access to project at different security levels:
As WBS Nodes are created they adopt the project WBS Node value but this may be changed for each WBS Node in the WBS Window, thus user access for projects may be driven down to WBS Node level.
The project OBS assignment may be viewed and changed in the Project widow in either a column or in the General tab, Responsibility Manager field:
The OBS form allows both the assignment of both:
- Users to OBS Nodes and Projects:
- And Projects and WBS Nodes to OBS Nodes
When a project is copied and passed the user may select which EPS Node the project should be pasted into but there is no option to select which OBS Node should be assigned when a project is pasted.
P6 Version 21 and earlier kept the same Responsible Manager when coping and pasting a project and users had to remember to change it is required.
P6 Version 22 introduced a new Responsible Manager option in the User Preferences for the assignment of the Responsible Manager to a copied project, allowing each user to two options for the OBS, either:
- Keep the old assignment, as per earlier versions, or
- Adopt the new parent assignment.
Often neither the parent assignment or keeping the original assignment are a logical option and the option to select a new OBS when pasting a project is not available.
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Paul E Harris
Director Eastwood Harris Pty Ltd
13 November 2023