Poor response time within Project Pro

[NSHAH]

BACKGROUND
We have been using MS ProjServer 2003 for little over a month. We currently
have 30 plans and about 250 resources (Enterprise Rsrc Pool) in our
Production environment. On an avg. we have 5 to 7 PMs accessing the Project
Pro at any given time.

We have one Master Plan that consists of 17 sub-projects. The total number
of tasks - 6300. 3650 of the tasks have some sort of depdencies. About 250 of
those dependencies are "inter-project" in nature - depedency between two
project tasks.

PROBLEM
Poor performance when working in the Master Plan. It takes 5 to 10min. to
open the plan. 30min. to save the plan. Anytime we add a new task or delete
an existing task the response time is 5 to 8 seconds. Same when changing or
adding dependencies.

We tried puting the same environment in a more beefed up hardware
architecture and stil the same issue.

ANY SUGGESTIONS? IS OUR APPROACH TO THE MASTER PROJECT IS WRONG? OR IS IT MS
PROJ SERVER PERFORMANCE CONSTRAINT? RESPONSE TIME IS REALLY KILLING US.

NSHAH

 

[John Bridgman]

I think the quick answer is that the use of Master projects is not
recommended with Project Server. There are other ways to manage inter-project
dependencies. Do a search on "linking tasks" -- there are a few good
approaches discussed here. I have not tried any of them myself so can't make
any recommendations but bottom line seems to be that you should think about
not using master projects, particularly very large ones.

 

[NSHAH]

Thx John. I tried creating "temporary Master" (as opposed to saving the
Master) but that did not help the performance at all. Is there ANY OTHER WAY
to be able to modify group of related projects at the same time so that we
can see in real time the impact of slippage in one schedule to others?

Niraj

 

[John Bridgman]

That's a tough one. If the projects have lots of low level interdependencies
there may not be an easy answer if you need real-time feedback.

I suspect the normal practice is :

- open the first project, make changes, save
- have a good understanding of which projects are dependent on the project
you just changed, open them and see the results, save

It is error prone in the sense that you could miss a dependency and not
notice until later but if you have a PM hovering over each project that
shouldn't be a big deal.

Dumb question for you -- if you just copied and pasted the activities from
the fully expanded master project into a SINGLE project plan would the
response time be better ? My guess is that it would be much improved, in
which case you might be better off storing this as one big honkin' project
rather than a bunch of little projects -- even if you do have different PMs
for each part. There would obviously be an impact in that only one PM could
have the doc open at a time.

Just a thought...

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

NSHAH:

It's very likely that your network connectivity and workstation specs are
contributing to the performance issues with type of interdependent
complexity in your structure. There are a number of strategies for
improvement. First and foremost is simplification of the plan structures.
Elimination of unnecessary linking is a big part of that. To get very
specific, one would need to fully understand your business needs and
processes to make meaningful recommendations.

 

[NSHAH]

Thx for suggestions John. We will try them out.

NSHAH

 

[NSHAH]

Thx Gary!

NSHAH

NSHAH:

It's very likely that your network connectivity and workstation specs are
contributing to the performance issues with type of interdependent
complexity in your structure. There are a number of strategies for
improvement. First and foremost is simplification of the plan structures.
Elimination of unnecessary linking is a big part of that. To get very
specific, one would need to fully understand your business needs and
processes to make meaningful recommendations.

 

[Michael Samadi]

Just want to check, but you have installed Project Server SP1 to the various
components and Project 2003 Pro SP1 to the clients?

Michael S.