Circular Reference Clean-up

[Michelle Moulliet]

One of my project managers neglected to build a dependency between lifecycle
phases in her project plan and she is now getting a circular reference when
she tries to make this link.

Does anyone have any recommendations on how to do the analysis to find the
workpath that is causing the problem? I'm having a hard time trying to find
the kink in the chain of dependencies because I did not build this plan and
its structure and dependencies are not as consistent as I would have made
them.

I've tried researching the 2 tasks. I've also tried analyzing her critical
path. The only thing I can think of now is to make a copy of her
dependencies in a text field and delete all of her dependencies and rebuild
them using the copy as my guide and preventing any kinks in her work paths
that way.

Oh yeah and to make matters even more exciting, we have external links to
other projects in project server too.

Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!
Michelle

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Michelle:

Simplify whenever possible. Most people over-do their dependency links. This
is advice for life survival. To help analyze your current problem, I suggest
that you download Jack Dahlgren's tracing and filtering macro from:

http://www.masamiki.com/project/macros.htm

This will help you find the problem children. Remember that you may be
looking for something not so obvious such as workpaths crossing twice. This
is not easy to see in a large plan with multiple workpaths and a lot of
parallel tasks.

 

[Michelle Moulliet]

Gary,

This macro is a huge help in finding the errors. I was able to fix every one.

Thanks, as always, for your expert advice!
Michelle