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best practice to make plan for master project and its sub projects which are interlinked

Answered best practice to make plan for master project and its sub projects which are interlinked

  • Wednesday, July 18, 2012 3:03 PM
     
     
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    Please tell me best practical way to make Plan for program.

    Master project and 10 to 15 sub projects and every sub project has 10 thousands to 20 thousands tasks.

    and all sub projects are interlinked to each other.

     

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  • Wednesday, July 18, 2012 5:20 PM
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    Hi John,

    I assume that you need Master Project for consolidated Reporting Purpose, because that is what Master projects are used for in major cases. But going by the size of your projects wherein each project itself has 10-20 thousands tasks it will become cumbersome and highly complex to manage.

    When you open a Master project, it opens all sub-projects in backend, so in your case it will imply opening 10 projects of total 10 X 10,000 line items which may involve custom fields, formula, baselines, notes, shared resources plus the deleted tasks (which linger arounds even though deleted) which would eat up system resources and could lead to several issues like crashing of projects, which would lead to corruptions etc. The list of issues could be endless. 

    Yet as you asked for best practical way, I would suggest not to in-corporate all 10-15 projects into 1 single plan rather have multiple related projects clubbed together keeping in mind complexities it may raise. It would be good if you opt for Project Server, which could provide more reliable way to manage and report across projects even without having a master project. Yet I don't debate your business need, you should look at pros-cons before building a master project with such large/big sub-projects.

    Sapna S

     
  • Thursday, July 19, 2012 5:19 AM
     
     
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    If I will finish Master project . its ok.

    But all projects are link to each other.

    These projects will not create issues list. although they have tasks in thousands and tasks are linked to each other project tasks ?

     
  • Thursday, July 19, 2012 5:33 AM
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    Easy best practice: don't do it! For every link between files you have a roll of the corruption dice if you have the slightest network issue or rename files or move them or rename them.

    I would create a new master each week by inserting files with Link option OFF. This copies all Task data to new master and merges all resource data for reporting purposes and keeps a weekly snapshot.

    I wouldn't have inter-project links either. My preference is if you can to:

    1. Split the sub-projects up so as to minimize links.
    2. If you only have a few links, maintain manually.
    3. If you have a lot of links use VBA to export Milestone data to a database and in another VBA macro to read milestone data and update milestones nominated as linked to other files.

    This is quick and completely corruption free.

    Rod Gill

    The one and only Project VBA Book

    Rod Gill Project Management