Breaking Down a Master Project

[Roland67]

I have recently started a new position and have been asked to breakdown a
Master Plan into smaller groupings. The plan is full of links and has about
8K in tasks. Is there an easy way to breakup the Master Plan or do I have to
start from ground zero and rebuild it?

Thanks

 

[John]

Roland,
I assume when you say master plan with links that you mean a
consolidated master made up of inserted subprojects with external links
between the subprojects. If that is your case my first question is why
do you want to break the master down? For a project plan with several
thousand tasks, a consolidated master of multiple individual projects is
actually the preferred structure for a variety of reasons. If the above
assumption about your master is incorrect, please elaborate, we will be
better able to help.

Nonetheless, if for some reason you still want to break apart a
consolidated master, there are several approaches. However, let's first
make sure we understand what you have.

John

 

[Roland67]

John,

The Master Plan has no linked subprojects (8K+ lines of tasks). At one time
several subprojects were maintained outside the MP but those tasks have since
been copied into the master and maintained only there. As such, no
subprojects are available as a starting foundation.

My assignment is to resplit Master Plan into very minut subprojects making
sure not break the links.

Roland

 

[John]

Roland,
Ok, now I understand. Your master is one huge Project file instead of a
consolidated master. There are a couple of options I can think of to
break the single large file into more manageable separate files. The
first step of course is to identify the task grouping that will be
broken out into separate files. Don't go overboard though (your use of
the word "minute" scares me a little) and break the plan into too fine a
detail. It will just make managing the total project more difficult the
other way.

The more challenging part will be to maintain the links. There is always
the manual approach but that will be time consuming and prone to error.
Personally I would do a little analysis after the file grouping is
identified to see just how many interlinkages between files will be
needed. Once I had an idea of what was needed, I would write a VBA macro
to automate the process. The code shouldn't be too complicated and once
the code is written it will definitely make the whole process easier and
virtually error free. If you don't have experience with VBA, we can
help. In terms of psuedo code here is the process I might use.
1. Identify subproject task groupings
2. Analyze links for those that will now be external
3. Copy the external link information (new filename/task) to spare
fields for later processing. This may include two separate spare number
fields to hold an arbitrary "source" and "destination" value (I use a
similar approach in a macro I wrote that does exactly the opposite of
what you want to do).
4. Delete the future external links from the task predecessors in the
current master file
5. Break the master into individual files. Cut and Paste work or you can
make multiple copies (different names) of the master and delete what
isn't needed. Cut and Paste is probably the better approach since it
will start each new subproject with a fresh UID sequence.
6. Use the stored external link information fields to re-establish the
links.
7. Now rebuild a consolidated master. At this point it should be
possible to run a macro I have (not freeware) that runs the reverse
process (i.e. convert a dynamically consolidate master into a single
static master) to compare with your original master for comparison.

Hope this helps.
John

 

[Roland67]

Thanks John! I had developed a similar game plan. I like the idea of
copying the predecessors and successors into holding fields, hadn't thought
of doing that. I have been discussing with the management here to not break
down the project to too small of pieces. They wanted to insert the smallest
subsets into Word documents. I have suggested instead that they insert link
instead. Its being considered.

Roland