Creating a temporary Master plan in Project Center

[Deborah R]

I have read in a few different threads that it is advisable to avoid creating
one Master project plan when using Project Server. In our situation, we have
one release manager who is managing the overall large project plan, and 6
other project managers managing their individual project plans (each probably
consisting of an average of between 500-1000 tasks. What is the best way for
our overall PM to manage this? He wants to be able to link the plans into
one master for his own managing purposes…Is inserting links to the other 6
plans into one Master plans a bad idea? How would this impact time tracking
in PWA and reporting? Is there any advice you can give us as we are still
"new users" of this product and unsure of the best practice in this
situation. In another posting I saw mention of using PWA to create a
temporary master plan, can anyone speak in more detail to this – how does
that work?THANK YOU!! If you need more background/detail just let me know.
Thanks again in advance for any direction or help you can provide.

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Deborah R --

A couple of thoughts on the use of master projects in Project Server 2003:

1. The default permissions in Project Server 2003 disallow anyone from
saving a master project in the Project Server database and from publishing a
master project. Saving a master project has not been shown to cause
problems, so your Project Server administrator could safely set the
permission to Allow for the saving of master projects in the Project Server
database. We have seen conflicting information about the safety of
publishing master projects from the Project Server database. In Project
Server 2002, publishing a master project duplicated every resource
assignment across all of the subprojects, leading to duplicate task
assignments on every resource's timesheet in PWA. In Project Server 2003,
we thought this problem was fixed, but a recent post in this newsgroup
indicated that perhaps the problem is not fixed. Because of this, I would
NOT recommend that your Project Server allow the publishing of master
projects in Project Server.

2. Using a master project is not a bad idea at all, especially if your
release manager needs to create cross-project dependencies between the six
subprojects. Using a master project would not affect time tracking in PWA,
unless he publishes the master project against my recommendation (which
could potentially lead to the duplicate assignments problem referenced in
point #1 above).

3. If your release manager needs to create a master project, he can quickly
create one by navigating to the Project Center in PWA, selecting the row
headers of each of the six projects, and then clicking the Open button. The
system will launch Microsoft Project Professional, open new blank project,
and insert each of the selected projects as a subproject in a master
project.

4. Because you only have six subprojects, and because it is so easy to
create a master project using the steps detailed in point #3 above, I would
recommend the use of a temporary master project for your situation. The
project would not be saved in the Project Server database and could be
easily recreated "on the fly" using those steps each time it is needed. If
changes were made to any of the subprojects, the PM could simply click the
"Yes to All" button when prompted about saving changes to the subprojects
when he closes the temporary master project.

Hope this helps.

 

[Deborah R]

Thank you very much for the information - this was exactly what I needed ad
VERY useful. I appreciate it!

 

[Jonathan]

Deborah,

Master projects are a good way of easily creating links between plans.
Be aware, though, that too many links between plans can not only cause
confusion for the project and release manager but could also cause
performance issues if you create too many links between plans.

The exact amount of inter project links that will cause performance
issues would depend on your architecture, number of resources, size of
plans, number of plans, as well as what is deemed acceptable
performance by your project professional users.

Another good way to create a master that is not stored on the server
but is re-usable is to create an mpp file that you keep local on your
machine but that has the server plans embedded in it. You do this by
creating a new blank master plan with your six project plans. You do
this from the server but when you are ready to save your master you
would do a Save As File to save it as an mpp. You will then be
prompted to save your 6 plans and you can hit no if you have made no
changes to the plans or yes to the ones you have changed.

Understand that the master is a wrapper and nothing more. It has no
data of its own in it. When you create inter project links between
plans using the master, those links are stored in the individual plans
themselves and not the master.

Hope that helps,

Jonathan Sofer
Microsoft Project MCP
Pcubed

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Jonathan --

Thanks for your additional clarification about master projects. Good
thoughts!

--
Dale A. Howard [MVP]
Enterprise Project Trainer/Consultant
Denver, Colorado
http://www.msprojectexperts.com
"We wrote the books on Project Server"