Microsoft project size limitations

[kandace]

I would like to know if Microsoft project would be an effective tool in developing a enterprise project
plan , that could possible reach 75,000 task items. I was told by a peer that this tool would be
a poor choice in handling a project of that magnitude.
I believe we could make several smaller plans then merge these plans into one project plan at a higher
roll up task line. Any thought's anyone?

 

[Rob Schneider]

I would like to know if Microsoft project would be an effective tool in developing a enterprise project
plan , that could possible reach 75,000 task items. I was told by a peer that this tool would be
a poor choice in handling a project of that magnitude.
I believe we could make several smaller plans then merge these plans into one project plan at a higher
roll up task line. Any thought's anyone?

75,000 tasks is a lot (too much?) for any planning tool. You'll
definitely want to break the plan into many smaller plans simply to keep
the file size down. Huge files take long times to load and save. I'm
assuming that you'll have multiple people working on various parts of
the proejct file. Divide the file up into pieces to match your
organisation. You'll probably also want do the master projects into some
sort of hierarchy (again, matching the project organisation). with such
a large project with so manny defined tasks in the plan to manage,
you'll surely have a very large team of planners, managers, and
"do-ers". Have you considered using the so-called "enterprise"
components, e.g. Project Server, Web Access, etc.? I assum your peer has
another tool in mind?

 

[Steve House]

It's within the capability of Project to handle such large projects in
its latest releases (>2000). As I recall the maximum theoretical number
of tasks is 999,999. That being said you're going to need pretty much
state of the art PCs with lots and lots of RAM to work with such large
files and just from a practical standpoint you might want to break this
down into a number of more easily managed subprojects.75K tasks is a
biiiiig project! I think it was here I once saw a comment by a Boeing
PM that the step-by-step assembly plan for a 777 airliner ran just about
that. I would think that with that many tasks there are going to be
more than one PM on the project, each with their specific areas of
responsibility.


--
Steve House
MS Project MVP
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs

I would like to know if Microsoft project would be an effective tool

in developing a enterprise project

plan , that could possible reach 75,000 task items. I was told by a peer that this tool would be
a poor choice in handling a project of that magnitude.
I believe we could make several smaller plans then merge these plans

into one project plan at a higher