Master Project Plans & Project Server

[chicagohunter]

I have never used Microsoft Project Server 2007 w/master project plans. Are
there any drawbacks we should be concerned about before enabling this
capability in our Project Server environment? I believe there used to be some
issues with Project Server 2003 specifically around reporting but am not 100%
certain. Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

chicagohunter --

In Project Server 2002 and 2003, you could not publish a master project
because it duplicated the resource assignments for every resource assigned
to tasks in any of the subprojects in the master project. Microsoft fixed
this issue in Project Server 2007, so you can now safely save and publish a
master project. Furthermore, when a user clicks the name of a master
project in the Project Center page, the detailed Project page can now show
all of the tasks in all of the subprojects. Beyond this, you can also set
up a Project Workspace for the master project itself, and sub-workspaces for
each subproject. Refer to the following FAQ for the steps to do this, as
they are not intuitive:

http://www.projectserverexperts.com/ProjectServerFAQKnowledgeBase/PublishMasterProjectWorkspace.aspx

Hope this helps.

 

[L8rdays]

One of the drawbacks we had with implementing is:

If you insert the sub-projects as read-write, when the master is opened it
also opens the sub-projects locking them too. (Our work around was to insert
the projects as read only, as what we were interested in was reporting only.)

This was a problem for us as we had different owners for the Master and the
sub-projects and lock outs would happen often.

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

L8rdays and chicagohunter --

Your warning is well taken, and I thank you for sharing it. When you create
a master project, by default the system inserts each subproject Read/Write.
Whenever you open the master project, the system checks out and opens each
project Read/Write. This means that no one can open any of the subprojects
while the master project is open. As L8rdays has clearly stated, if you
want to use the master project for reporting purposes only, you should
intentionally insert each of the subprojects Read-Only. On the other hand,
if you want to set cross-project dependencies, or manually update the
subprojects in the master project, then you will need to insert them
Read/Write. Thanks for sharing!

 

[chicagohunter]

Outstanding responses Dale & L8rdays. Thank you very much for sharing.

 

[Mark E. Read]

Outstanding responses Dale & L8rdays. Thank you very much for sharing.

There is one more key item to note when using master projects, that
you should only insert a plan into a single master.

This means that you should not attempt to use master plans as a
portfolio rollup tool.

For a plan to exist within multiple portfolios, you should use an
enterprise code to aggregate your data, rather than a master plan.