Small projects treatment in Project Server (perhaps in conjunctionw/Portfolio Server)

[anovak]

We keep going back and forth about how to handle small projects. A
good number of our projects - probably close to 40% - are 2-3 week
projects that meet the PMI criteria for a project (start and end,
unique deliverable, temporary endeavor, not repeatable, ongoing
work). They are just short-lived.

It has been suggested that we create "Enhancement" project objects for
each team where a new task line is added for each one of these small
projects.

I can see the upside of ease of entry but I see more than one
downside...

1. We are planning to use Portfolio Server along with Project Server
and the meta data in Portfolio Server will not be captured (anything
you wanted to capture would have to be duplicated as task level custom
fields). Although they are small projects, there still needs to be a
minimum amount of business justification information gathered.
2. If the small projects are at the task level, you can't easily pull
together all projects in one comprehensive list (in the
Optimizer or elsewhere) for prioritization.
3. No luxury of creating projects over in Project Server through the
gateway between Portfolio Server and Project Server
4. If a majority of your projects are small, it will appear that you
have much fewer projects than you really do in PWA

I come from a logical database design background, and to me slamming
all these small projects into task lines go against the grain. To
me, this would be like creating one PO for an entire organization and
then creating all the POs as line items.

I would appreciate any and all comments, suggestions, and real-world
success stories regarding either approach (pros and cons, etc.).

Thanks,
Andy Novak
UNT

 

[Crook]

Hi Andy,

FWIW, we use support projects, that have one line for each application our
group supports, to hold small work. Small work is usually defined as being
less than 40 hours. We make project plans, however simple, for all other
work. I have a couple of projects with less than 10 tasks. I guess I kind
of agree with you, it seems that creating projects is best, even if a bit
more overhead involved.

HTH,
Crook