Disconcerting - "Links Between Projects..." dialog not opening

[Matt Kennedy]

We have become quite adept at the use of external links. We have had nearly
20 large projects that have on average of ~20 external links per plan and we
have been doing this successfully for about 3 months now. We also have the
feature in "Tools > Options" set to "Open the Links Between Projects...
dialog window on project open" so when you open any of these projects this
dialog window is the first thing you see. We use this to ensure that the
project managers remain aware of, and can accept, any changes that may have
occured with the external dependicies/successors.

This has been the norm for over 3 months now without a problem. That is
until a couple of days ago. A couple of days ago this "Links Between
Projects..." dialog window stopped opening automatically at project open in
one of the larger plans (about 1500 line project plan with about 50 external
links) even though this option is still checked in Tools > Options. When a
product like this stops behaving "as advertised", especially in a large
project like this I get concerned about things like corruption problems.

One other thing worth noting. Just before this behavior started this same
project plan had another strange error display right away when you opened the
project. This error is no longer displaying. The warning or error message was
"Invalid Date" and stated what the valid date formats were. You could click
OK and continue *apparantly* without problem. The real frustration with this
warning was that it gave absolutely no indication where the invalid date was
located. The project manager reviewed all baseline and current start & finish
dates and found nothing. One last tidbit I'll add in case it helps is I also
recently saved a new baseline but before I did I did a "Save Interim Plan"
and had the current baseline dates saved into the baseline1 date column. I
haven't checked those dates but plan to this morning in case there was a
problem during the copy.

Part of me wants to try something like saving/exporting the plan out of PS
and then somehow re-importing it but I am really afraid to try it with all
the external links as they can be very challenging to re-create.

Any thoughts/insights would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
-Matt

 

[Matt Kennedy]

Darn, is there no way to edit a post on this forum? Please completely
disregard the last post. I am sorry if you had to read all the way through it
before seeing this and finding out you wasted your time. If I could
edit/delete it I would have!

Bottomline is that the Links Between Dialog window was not opening becuase
there were no "differences" in any of the external links (this would be a
first . I do not beleive it is documented to behave this way. To test this
I made a small change to an external link and when I reopened the plan the
dialog also opened! I'd sware that there have been many other times where
there were no differences and it still opened but I can't be sure so I am
calling this resolved. Sorry for the alarmist post. -Matt

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Matt:

The biggest problem with external links is that you can create unintended
circular relationships between plans. One symptom of cross-plan circular
relationships is that the schedule change dialogs open every time, despite
the fact that the plan doesn't change. How does this happen? Imagine that
there's a circular relationship occurring between three different plans;
each time you open one of the schedules, you'll get the notification that
the plan has changed. You accept the changes and close the plan and then
open the next one. The same behavior happens and you repeat the process and
then go on to the third plan. Again, you'll see the schedule has changed,
accept the changes and reopen the first. Once again the dialog boxes appear
and all you've done is open and close the plans. The bottom line is that the
last project opened wins in the circular scheduling merry-go-round.

I've yet to come across a PM who could manage as many external links as
you're attempting to manage without falling into this trap. Perhaps the
behavior you've been seeing all along is due to circular relationships and
not schedule changes? If so, you need to get off the merry-go-round.