Scenarios in Master Project

[RandySeattle]

I am maintaining a Master Schedule with 12 individual projects in
Project 2003 Standard, with quite a few external linkages between them
(all told, the file is about 2500 tasks). All of the files are
maintained in a single file and there are no linkages to files outside
of the folder. All of the files are maintained by one person (me).

My question is this: How can I run scenarios on the individual
schedules to run comparison reports without creating a bunch of
"phantom" external linkages (I know that it's not possible to run
comparisons on inserted projects). Prior to the Master Schedule, I
would have simply done a "save as" with a new name, made the
anticipated changes to the new file and run a comparison report. But
now that we are maintaing a Master Schedule with external linkages
between the projects, if I copy or save as new external links are
created in the Master File.

I have tried a couple of different ways of doing this and the result is
the same. I have to go into the newly created file, and delete all of
the external links. But because some of these projects are also master
projects in their own right (There are 5 projects that make up the
"master", but 12 projects in total because some of the 5 have
sub-projects of their own) this is a time consuming and often
frustrating process, that is fraught with danger of corruption. I have
already had to rebuild the master file once from scratch because of
some bad links.

Does anyone know of a good way to be able to do this? Management often
wants to play what-if games with the schedule to see what the impacts
of changes to the schedule would be. There should be an easier way of
doing this.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Randy

 

[John]

I am maintaining a Master Schedule with 12 individual projects in
Project 2003 Standard, with quite a few external linkages between them
(all told, the file is about 2500 tasks). All of the files are
maintained in a single file and there are no linkages to files outside
of the folder. All of the files are maintained by one person (me).

My question is this: How can I run scenarios on the individual
schedules to run comparison reports without creating a bunch of
"phantom" external linkages (I know that it's not possible to run
comparisons on inserted projects). Prior to the Master Schedule, I
would have simply done a "save as" with a new name, made the
anticipated changes to the new file and run a comparison report. But
now that we are maintaing a Master Schedule with external linkages
between the projects, if I copy or save as new external links are
created in the Master File.

I have tried a couple of different ways of doing this and the result is
the same. I have to go into the newly created file, and delete all of
the external links. But because some of these projects are also master
projects in their own right (There are 5 projects that make up the
"master", but 12 projects in total because some of the 5 have
sub-projects of their own) this is a time consuming and often
frustrating process, that is fraught with danger of corruption. I have
already had to rebuild the master file once from scratch because of
some bad links.

Does anyone know of a good way to be able to do this? Management often
wants to play what-if games with the schedule to see what the impacts
of changes to the schedule would be. There should be an easier way of
doing this.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Randy

Randy,
Your scenario is similar but yet a little different from things I have
worked on in the past. You are right in that the Compare Project
Versions utility will not work with dynamic masters. The reason is
because that utility uses the Unique ID as the index for the comparison
and the Unique ID will not necessarily "track" in multiple dynamic
masters even if they are made up of the same subproject files.

So what can you do? Well the most viable approach would be to convert
the dynamic master to a static master and then perform what-ifs on the
static master. Given the same base static master, the compare utility
WILL work. The catch of course is the external links between
subprojects. Simply de-linking the subprojects from the dynamic master
to create the static master will not preserve the external links.
However, if the external source and destination link information is
stored in temporary fields, the file can be converted and the links
restored. Obviously this would be a very tedious manual procedure, but
it can be automated with VBA. As it turns out, I wrote a dynamic to
static conversion macro some years ago and have since updated it. If you
are interested you can contact me direct at the address below. I will
tell you up front, the macro is NOT freeware.

John
Project MVP
jensenj6atatcomcastdotdotnet
(remove obvious redundancies)