Managing large programs with many streams

[Mike Carwana]

Large programs involving many work streams (and thus many PM's) result in
numerous individual project plans - some thousands of lines long - that
inherently have dependencies between them. Understanding and correctly
including these dependencies between project plans is crucial to understand
the true program end date, and also to manage schedule risk, etc. To date
we've done this manually by creating a program integrated plan that only
contains key milestones from each plan with dependencies implemented in the
integrated plan. This integrated plan itself has been 1-2 thousand lines
long, and is very arduaous to manage.

The purpose of bringing it al together is simply to manage resources,
schedule, dependencies, etc, in one place, and to report on the program from
this one integrated file.

Is there a way thru MS Project to have these individual plans created, and
then rolled up into an integrated plan? The other challenge I forsee is how
does one create dependencies in the integrated plan that are then
automatically captured in the individual plans? the reality is the PM's will
be managing to their own plan as that's what PM's do. Having them manage the
integrated plan will result in weekly file contentions, etc.

Maybe I've assumed too many constraints, however I'm interested to know if
others have/had this challenge and how they got around it. I appreciate your
help...thx.

 

[Rod Gill]

For a program of this complexity and size, the preferred solution is Project
Server. Project Server has a great feature called dependencies where a
project can offer dependencies for other projects to consume. This handles
inter-project dependencies. Project Server will also handle Resource
management and multi-project reporting.

You could create a resource pool in project and inter file links, but with
that size and complexity a file corruption (when not if) would cause a lot
of grief!

Inter-project links can be manual: In the first project have milestones
flagged as dependencies and in other projects have a summary task called
external links with milestones underneath that have dates manually updated
to match the dependencies in the other files.

--

Rod Gill
Microsoft MVP for Project

Author of the only book on Project VBA, see:
http://www.projectvbabook.com

 

[Mike Carwana]

Rod, thanks for your reply. What you describe still sounds rather manual.
Maybe it's my lack of understanding of the "dependencies" feature. If I use
an analogy, if I'm building a car and I have an engine work stream (and thus
an engine PM and engine project plan), a transmission stream, suspension
stream, interior stream, body stream, etc, etc...can I have all of these
plans automatically rolled up by MS Project Server into one overall program
that then shows me the program schedule? And from there, can I see all my
milestones, resources, etc...or, does Project actually manage the projects
individually, allowing comsuming of dependencies between projects, but has
not automated roll up feature?

Today there are many, many projects that are very large, divided into major
work streams which are managed individually but which are a part of a much
larger whole. Is managing these types of programs still largely a manual
process?

Appreciate your further assistance...thanks.