Best Practice question

[Project Slave]

I have a project with 13 subprojects, all being tracked in a single plan.
Each of these 13 subprojects go thru a 5 stage software development life
cycle (requirements, design, development, testing and implementation).

Currently, the plan is ordered by the 5 development lifecycle stages and
within each stage, the 13 subprojects are scheduled. So, essentially, these
13 subprojects appear at 5 places in the plan, which is kind of cumbersome.

My question is, is it a best practice to do a plan like this (5 major
sections and 13 minor subsections) or flip the order (13 major sections, 5
subsections).

 

[JulieD]

Personally i would have approached it by listing the 5 phases within each
subproject for the following reasons
1) you can then separate out the 13 subprojects into individual project
files if someone else takes over the responsiblity of managing one or all of
them
2) it would be easier to manage (IMHO) if you get a 14th subproject (copy &
paste on of the other subprojects at the bottom of the projecf file & edit
as required ...rather than working through the project line by line adding
in the 14th.

however, if a different person was responsible for each of the 5 phases then
maybe your method would be better.

Alternatively, you could add into a numbering system that would allow you to
sort either way, depending on what it is you were after at the time!

Cheers
JulieD