Managing multiple project plans

[Andy]

We are currently managing around 25 projects and have several problems
sharing the project management data around the multiple stakeholders involved
in each of the projects. As the IT Manager I need to be able to see what is
going on with each project without having to search through all of the
individual project plans, I would be interested to see suggestions as to how
to overcome this issue. Can you have a master plan which links into all of
the others to enable a management summary ? Most of the projects are not
interrelated therefore the plans cannot be merged.

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi Andy,

There are several ways to coem to this result.
There is Project Server, which will delibvver what you ask and more, but
implementing it is not done immediately.

The simplest approach is to create master file into which you insert all
the project files, then either only show the project lines or better, filter
on milestones. Of course people have to create milestones in their plan and
by alml means record a baseline or deadlines to allow comparison to a
target.

From there on, one can us eproject's reports, or better, with some VBA
procedures create whatever report you want..

Over the past years, I've done this for 2 customers (with 80 and 200
projects, respectively).

Hope this helps.

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Andy,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

You might like to have a look at my series on Microsoft Project in the
TechTrax ezine, particularly #17 & 18 on Multiple Projects, at this site:
http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc or this:
http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/Pub0009/LPMFrame.asp?CMD=ArticleSearch&AUTH=23
(Perhaps you'd care to rate the article before leaving the site,
Thanks.)

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at
this web address: <http://www.mvps.org/project/>

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP