Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016 Advanced.
In this and the next few sections we’re going to look at a couple of related topics
in Project 2016.
And we’re going to look at these two topics together because you very often need to use
them perhaps for the first time on one large program of work or one very large project.
Now what quite often happens when you’re working on a large project is that the project
gets larger and larger and maybe becomes a set of projects or perhaps you’re working
on a program that needs to be split into a set of projects.
And not only do you need to split the work up but different people are going to manage
different parts of that body of work.
And what often happens is that the different projects although they need to be managed
separately share resources.
So what we’re going to look at in the ne xt few sections are combining multiple projects
into one, or if you like splitting a large project into several projects, and sharing
resources between projects.
So it’s project consolidation and resource sharing that we’re covering here.
Now in order to demonstrate these two techniques I’m going to use an example of a charity
event.
And the idea is that we’re going to run a charity event and it’s going to comprise
actually three events within one.
There will be a gala dinner, there will be a fashion show and buffet lunch and there
will be a sports day and barbeque.
So the gala dinner will be a fundraising dinner where we’ll charge the participants a pretty
heavy admission price but for that they’ll get a good dinner, there’ll probably be
a prize draw, some entertainment and so on, probably some dancing.
And then the fashion show and buffet lunch we’ll invite local fashion houses to put
on a show.
And as part of that we’ll provide a good buffet lunch.
And again we’ll charge a suitable admission charge for all of the people that want to
see the fashion show and enjoy the buffet lunch.
And we’re also going to run a sports day, pretty much a family focused event and that
will include a barbeque.
Now I need to point out to you that as we’re dealing with an event where the planning and
execution could become very complex indeed and with very large numbers of participants
involved and where in reality it will probably cover a very considerable period of time I’ve
actually compressed the detail and compressed the timescales here in order to cover this
in a reasonable amount of time on the course.
Having said that, all of the key features that you need to be aware of are covered in
what I’m going to do here.
As far as this stage in the course is concerned assume that we’ve done some of the early
planning.
I’ve put in place a provisional schedule for the major aspects of the event.
And in the Gantt Chart here, let me just expand that planning section, you can see I’ve
got maybe 20 tasks in the planning section.
And I’m assuming that at this point we realize that this really is going to be quite a big
undertaking and we need to split the charity event into separate parts.
And we’ve now got to the point that we realize we’re going to need people to manage each
aspect of the event.
So we’re going to have one person managing the overall plan.
We’re going to have another person managing the gala dinner, another person managing the
fashion show and buffet lunch and then finally a sports day project manager.
Now the key point here is that although the individual projects are not really very complicated
at this stage, maybe about a dozen tasks in each, we need each of the project managers
to be able to manage their project independently and separately.
So why do we need to be able to do this?
Well as you’ll know from your current knowledge of Microsoft Project when you’re dealing
with editing a single MPP file if our four project managers each want to work on it at
the same time that becomes very, very complicated, particularly if say they all want to work
on it at home, they don’t have some kind of shared access, and they’re going to need
to be phoning each other up and saying, “If I send you the plan I want to change that
bit.
You want to change this bit.
Have you changed that?
I need to change the link from my task to your task” and so on.
So what the project managers need to be able to do here is to manage each of their projects
separately.
And effectively the way that we do this is to split this project into four separate project
files.
So that’s part of what we need to do to to create four separate files.
Now that in itself is a pretty straightforward thing to do.
But the problem then is how do we share the resources?
Some of the people, for instance, the group of volunteers that we’re going to take on
to do a lot of the work here, people dealing with, for example, publicity, people dealing
with the legal side, getting insurances, licenses and so on.
There are many people involved in an event like this who will be shared between the four
projects.
How do we make sure that those people are not over allocated?
And the way that we do this is to set up our four separate projects so that they share
resources.
And this is a typical scenario, i.e., one where we need to share resources between a
number of projects.
Now the added complication here, and again this is typical, is that the four projects
although we want to separate them out from a file management, an MPP file management
point of view, they are not independent.
These projects have various links between them and we need to make sure that these links
set up correctly, understood and respected by all of the projects.
Now let me point out a couple of things about this before we start.
First of all, if you are going to split a program of work into a number of separate
projects it’s a good idea to make that decision as early on as possible because if you’ve
already set the program up as a single MPP file there will be quite a bit of work to
do in splitting it up again.
I’m going to show you one or two options for splitting as we go through the next few
sections.
And as you’ll see there’s very often quite a bit of work to do.
Usually a very good proportion of that work relates to the relationships between the tasks
in, in this case the initial program before we split it up and maintaining those links
when we split the program of work up.
At the moment with my four summary tasks I’ve only got the fourth one open, Sports Day and
Barbeque.
And although you can see links within that task because the other three summary tasks
are currently collapsed you can’t see links to tasks within those from Sports Day and
Barbeque.
But if for instance I were to expand the planning summary tasks, look carefully at Sports Day
and Barbeque tasks now.
Now you can see that there are in fact several links to the planning summary task or should
I say the tasks within the planning summary task.
When one of the summary tasks is collapsed you don’t see those links.
They’re still there but you can’t see them.
If you expand the planning task you can see the links again.
And of course the same is true of the other summary tasks that are currently collapsed.
And it’s the setting up and maintenance of those links that very often creates the
most work.
Now before I get started on splitting this program of work into four separate projects
what I’m going to do is to take a quick look at the Resource Sheet.
Now I’ve got here eight resources at the moment, although note the last one, Volunteer,
we’re counting on getting ten or possibly even more volunteers to help on this charity
event.
Note that also that we’re not looking at costs here.
I’ve left the standard rates at zero.
And for the purposes of this first few sections of the course I’m really going to ignore
cost.
We’re going to come to cost in relation to other projects a little bit later on.
So we’ve got eight resources in the Resource Sheet.
Let’s go back to the Gantt Chart itself.
And what I’m going to do first is to separate Sports Day and Barbeque to make it a separate
project.
Now I’m going to set up Sports Day and Barbeque as a separate project in a particular way.
And this way is not necessarily the best way of doing this.
The best way will always depend on the particular circumstances that you’re in.
But some of the tools and techniques that you’ll see here will be useful to you.
And then as we go through the next few sections hopefully you’ll see some improvements that
you can make to the way that you do this.
But as I said earlier on in the section, one of the key things here is that the earlier
in the process you can do this the better.
You’re more likely to save yourself time and effort if you split a program into separate
projects as early on as possible.
So first of all let me create an empty, blank project using the keyboard shortcut Control-N.
There is my project.
Now let me switch back to my original project.
And what I’m going to do is to expand out Sports Day and Barbeque and I’m going to
select all of those tasks, copy them to the clipboard, switch back to my empty project,
and I’m going to paste those tasks into that project.
Now having pasted those in note that within what was a summary task in the original project,
the dependencies still exist.
Of course there are no dependencies to the other tasks in the other summary tasks in
the original project.
So all of that has effectively been lost.
Now what I’m going to do is to save this particular project as a separate MPP file.
So I’ve saved it in the Project course files folder and I’ve called it CharityEvent_Sports_Day.mpp.
Now there are a couple of important points to make here.
One of them is that when I copied that block of tasks I copied the summary tasks, Sports
Day and Barbeque itself as well.
And I want to return to that point a little bit later on.
But in addition if I look at the Resource Sheet for my newly created project you may
be surprised to see that there are only two resources on it.
We have Volunteer, and note that the max number is one, and we have Sports Day PM.
So our new project has sort of had a Resource Sheet created for it but it doesn’t get
the same Resource Sheet as the total project that we started with.
And what happens when you do what we’ve just done is that Project 2016 creates a Resource
Sheet based on the resources that are already specified in the copied and pasted tasks.
And so you can see, for example, here one consequence of that is that the volunteer
resource already seems to be over allocated because when it creates the Resource Sheet
it defaults to creating a max of one resource.
And if we looked at the resources already allocated in the original project we would
see that within the Sports Day and Barbeque summary task we already have more than one
volunteer assigned to tasks.
But in fact there’s an even bigger problem here with the resources because although I
now have two projects and they each have, for instance, a sports day PM resource these
sports day PM resources are completely different resources.
Each of the projects is using its own resources.
And even though each of them has a resource called Sports Day PM, obviously that resource
name is the same on both resource sheets.
As far as Project 2016 is concerned those are completely different resources.
Those two resources are unrelated to each other because these two projects do not share
resources.
So before we go any farther with splitting our program of work into four separate projects
what I really want to do is to show you how to share resources.
And that’s what we’re going to cover in the next section.
I’ll see you then.