External Dependencies - how do they work?

[Brian Lukanic]

I have one project that is a 2000 lines long that contains all current
deliverables that one of my cost center produces. All 20 of our PMs will
(once I show them how to) enter cross-project dependencies to those tasks
that apply to them. I've written a simple VBA form that simply asks for the
ID of the summary task in question, and then the VBA enters in the
predecessors (there are 4 total per deliverable.) That all works fine.

Here's my questions:
The PM of the large schedule from the cost center prefers to keep the
project checked out to him at all times. To create external dependencies, I
realize that each PM needs to have that file open.

Is there any problem in setting up the dependencies to an external schedule
that is read-only? It seems that since they are setting "ghost successors" to
that other schedule that they would need to be able to save it back to
server? Or does all of that writing to the schedule happen only once the PM
of the cost center opens the file? Or does no writing actually occur?

Because of the size of the single schedule (2000 lines,) it can take a while
to open. I am worried that once we have a large number of individual project
schedules linking to it then it will make the main PM's experience of opening
the large schedule even more painful - because unless I am incorrect, a
schedule that has had ghost successors put onto it then needs to open the
reciprical schedules in the background - a window doesn't actually open to
display the schedule, but I can see in the bottom taskbar the progress as the
schedules get opened. if I had (let's say) 50 schedules linked back to this
main schedule, would that create a long delay when the PM to opens the
schedule? What I will be telling him to do to mitigate this effect is to
uncheck the boxes in Options so that successors/predecessors from externals
are not always dynamically linked/updated. But at the end of every day (or
whenever he's ready to publish the big schedule with all the changes, he
needs to re-check those boxes so that all PMs see updates to their
information when they open their schedules.

My main objectives are:
* To preserve my central PM's desire to keep his project checked out but
still be able to have all PMs write ghost successors to it. Is this allowable?
* To ensure that my central PM can stay "lean and mean" when he opens his
schedule and makes all of his updates in it. I'll tell him to uncheck the
boxes in Options to prevent Project from opening all external schedules all
the time, but he MUST keep the boxes checked when he is about to publish - so
that the PMs' schedules can then see the updates in their schedules. Is this
the correct practice?
* Lastly - what will the experience be like for the PM who links to the main
schedule, but that main schedule already have 50 other schedules linking to
it. Will the PM with his single project have to wait forever for the central
project to open before linking to it?

 

[Andrew Lavinsky]

The solution I've seen is to export the dates for dependencies into an Excel
file, then reimport as needed. That keeps much of the process pretty clean
and eliminates performance issues involved in interlinking projects.

ProjectPro has a solution for this that looks pretty good (www.projectprocorp.com).
You may wish to contact them....


- Andrew Lavinsky
Blog: http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/epm

 

[Karsten Bosteen]

The solution I've seen is to export the dates for dependencies into an Excel
file, then reimport as needed.  That keeps much of the process pretty clean
and eliminates performance issues involved in interlinking projects.

ProjectPro has a solution for this that looks pretty good (www.projectprocorp.com).
 You may wish to contact them....

- Andrew Lavinsky
Blog:http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/epm







- Show quoted text -

I'm generally not much in favor of having extra information in excel
outside the Project Server solution.

The setup is well known and the problem is structural, indicated by 2
things.

- a very large schedules (2000 lines)
- large number of dependencies to sub schedules

This is a challenging setup, unless the structure is very stable. You
are creating 100's of extra dependencies that are not business related
through the big centralized schedule.

One solution is to break the big schedule up in pieces, and overlook
the total picture in a master schedule - but edit the individual piece
of the big schedule. But still - using cross dependencies to this
extent is not a picnic.

So another and maybe better solution is to decentralize the
deliveries, and discard the use of the dependencies. Then you would
make a custom structure for registering sender and receivers of
deliveries indentified by the project names and an id for the
delivery. Cross reports will indicate if sender and receiver are
aligned, and produce the overview over deliveries. The alligment is
build into the process for schedule update.