Subprojects and iterative development 1

[bigprojectpm]

I am managing a very big project (multi-year, dozens of people) using an iterative development approach based on the Unified Process. I have multiple people who manage portions of the project (subprojects in essence). For example, UI design is a separate vendor - yet integrated in our work, QA is separate, and another PM I have managing work of the internal tech team. I am struggling to find a best practice - or least painful anyway, approach to structuring my MS Project files. I started with the UP phases, Inception, Elaboration, etc, and put the iterations within those. For each iteration, though, each of the above subprojects has tasks. I prefer (and in the case of UI it is necessary) to have the individual PMs manage tasks in their own project file(s). On the other hand, I need to look at completeness and dependencies within each phase and iteration at the master level.

I have thought of three options with one chosen so far for now anyway, but am curious for other ideas.

Option 1) Use a separate subproject file for each iteration for the subprojects. This is my current approach at least for the dev stuff. However, because of project overall size, we have multiple higher-level cycles (BIG subprojects) that are full UP cycles (Inception, Elaboration, etc) and those BIG subprojects overlap, so there are times when there may be an elaboration iteration for cycle n going on at the same time as a construction iteration for the prior cycle, etc.), in somewhat of a factory model for resource usage. That means the other PMs managing the separate subproject files could have several at once to manage.

Option 2) Use one subproject file for each discipline (UI vendor, QA, Dev) and create dependency tasks only in the master project that tie back to the subprojects, so I can see the key dates in the master in the UP outline order. This is my approach for the UI vendor tasks.

Option 3) Abandon the UP outline order in the master project altogether - but then it's harder to manage and assess UP iterations as a whole.

I also thought about whether I could use option 2 but add a field somehow to the tasks such that I could re-sort in the master project to see all the tasks in the UP order, but it seemed like that might be pretty hard, fragile, and I wasn't sure it would be workable, so I haven't seriously pursued trying the idea out.

Any suggestions?

Many thanks.

 

[bigprojectpm]

P.S.: The option I would love - but that apparently MS Project doesn't allow, would be to have structured each discipline in terms of the UP phases & iterations, and be able to create a master view that selects subsets of tasks from the subprojects to drop into the master view in the same UP outline organization. But, alas, can't insert subsets of a subproject near as I can tell. If anyone knows a tool that supports that, I'd love to hear of it as another option.

 

[jancebk]

BigProjectPM

If I understand your requirements, I think you can achieve your desired results by doing the following:

Have your Master Project & Sub Project files open.
1. In your subproject, Select the Task(s) you want to show in the Master View. Just use summary level tasks (of your subset) from the subproject, the info that rolls up to the summary level will be reflected in the Master View.
2. Copy the tasks. Switch to your Master Project. Use the Paste Special command. Choose the "Paste Link" radio button and Paste As "Text Data". The task(s) will show in your master file, with small grey triangles in the bottom right corner of the task cells. That's your indicator that they are tasks actually linked to another file. If you double click on one of those tasks, it will switch you back to the sub-project file that it "lives" in.

Changes made to the tasks in the subproject will be reflected in the Master Project.

FYI - One of the lessons I've learned (the hard way) about Master & Sub Project file relationships that you may want to keep in mind. Especially if you are using the method I described above, it is best to keep all of your project files in the same directory on a common server if at all possible. Moving the files around (and emailing them, etc) seems to cause havoc with linking. My experience using this feature was in MS Project 98, for a large y2K conversion effort (1 master file, 80 subproject files).

I hope this helps, good luck and let me know if you have questions.

Jan K.
PMP

 

[bigprojectpm]

Jan,

Thanks. That works. I should have thought of it. 10+ years ago I was doing lots with OLE2 linking to pieces of Microsoft apps. I should have remembered and tried it with MS Project. Good to be reminded by a fellow PMP.

-Ed H.
PMP

 

[PDQBach]

One additional thought ... Choose a field (say Text10) and code that field with the UP phase/iteration. You may need to use more than one of the text fields to put in your coding sequence.

Then .. Project | Sort | Sort by and in the popup choose the text fields you've selected.

If you do that then you can click on the AutoFilter button to toggle on the AutoFilter "triangles" at the top of each column and you can the display just Inception or just Elaboration.

 

[DeLaMartre]

Great stuff, Jan! Thank you from an old Excel pro, but a Project newbie!



-Bob in California