Sometimes organizations want to restrict pay rate information to a select few individuals that have a need to know. It is possible in Primavera Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM) to hide labor pay rate data from unprivileged users.
Primavera P6 EPPM has nice features for determining the budget of a project schedule. These budgeting schedule software elements rely upon a resource database, which includes personnel labor rates. It is important to note that this database is global and available to all users. And this accessibility of labor resource information may create a dilemma.
Primavera P6 schedulers need access to labor rates to determine the project cost, but pay rate information is sensitive personnel data that should be kept confidential. You would not want an employee’s personal pay rate accessible to everyone in the organization. The solution is to limit access of resource data to a select few individuals in the company.
This article demonstrates in Primavera P6 EPPM how to restrict certain users from accessing the pay rates of individual labor resources.
Restricting a user’s access to personnel pay rate data requires setting both the global security profile and project security profile accordingly. Global security profiles are directly assigned to users. Project security profiles are assigned at the crossing point where the Organizational Breakdown Structure (OBS) meets the Enterprise Project Structure (EPS).
We begin in the global security profile where we restrict a user’s direct access to personnel labor rates, Figure 1.
Figure 1
In Figure 1 we take away the project manager’s privilege to “view resource and role cost/financials”. This directly restricts the respective users assigned project manager privileges from viewing personnel labor rates. Figure 2 displays what the restricted user views when they try to access labor rates.
Figure 2
And displayed in the bottom details, all the labor rates for a selected resource are lined out. Primavera P6 EPPM has the capability to define five different labor rates for an individual resource. As shown in Figure 2, all five labor rates are lined out.
At this point we would think we are done. Every user assigned the project manager global security profile cannot see the resource labor rates. But a determined person is still able to find out personnel labor rates. The work around is to assign a user to an activity for one hour. This is a backdoor way to unveil a respective resource’s labor rate.
To avoid this possibility we remove project manager-1’s security profile privilege to “view project costs/financials”, Figure 3.
Figure 3
This restricts responsible managers assigned the project manager-1 project security profile. Now the planned labor costs are lined out, Figure 4, so the restricted user cannot acquire any project related cost data.
Figure 4
This may seem a little draconian, but it is necessary to protect sensitive personnel data. So the schedule budget data is limited to the few in the organization that have the requirement to know personnel salary rates.
Summary
Primavera P6 EPPM is the central repository for project data and labor resource data. To prevent the persistent person from acquiring confidential personnel pay rates the administrator should restrict access to both global pay rate data and project specific budget data. In this way a company may limit access of sensitive labor rate data to a select few.