Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2013 Advanced.
In the previous section we created a project containing just this little summary task,
requirements, from our original project for the proposed implementation of a new website
for Northern Farm Foods.
And what we’re basically going to do is to split the whole of this proposed implementation
project into separate subprojects.
Now before we continue with this exercise I want to take a look at that requirements
project again and point out something very important about what’s happened.
So here is the requirements subproject and what I want to do is to look at the resource
sheet.
So I’m just going to switch to the resource sheet and take a look at it.
And what you discover is that the resource sheet has a single resource on it.
You may remember from the previous section that the overall implementation project had
about seven or eight resources on it.
One of them was Northern Farm Foods.
The new project only has that one resource.
Now the reason it’s only got that one resource is that with the tasks that we pasted in when
we created the project, the only resource specified was Northern Farm Foods.
Now, at the moment, I’ve got both of these project open and as far as Microsoft Project’s
concerned not only are they two completely separate projects but they are two completely
separate sets of resources.
So although this project has a resource called Northern Farm Foods, the other project has
a resource called Northern Farm Foods, as far as Microsoft Project’s concerned those
two are completely unrelated resources.
And as we’re going to see later on in the course one of the most important things we
do when we start to look at a consolidated project is making sure that the resources
that we’re looking at are common where they need to be common.
Having created this project not only have we created what is a separate project but
we’ve also created a separate set of resources at the moment with just Northern Farm Foods.
Note that when we created this requirements project, it didn’t use the whole set of
resources from the original project.
It only created a set of resources containing the resource or resources that were actually
in use in the tasks that are included in this requirements project.
That is only the resource Northern Farm Foods.
Okay, file that useful piece of information away somewhere for a moment and now we’re
going to return to the original project.
So what I want to do now is to replace the requirement summary task in the original project
with the new project which is totally devoted to the requirements work.
So what I’m going to do, I select a task ID 3 there, click on Task, and then on the
Insert Task dropdown here one of the options is Blank Row.
I’m just going to select the Blank Row.
Then I’m going to the Project Tab and the left most command there, Insert Subproject.
Now Insert Subproject gives me the Insert Project dialog and this allows me to browse
to a file, in this case NFF Requirements.mpp.
Either double click or click and press Insert, and that project is now inserted into my main
project.
Now I can tell that it is a separate project because in the information column here I have
the little Project icon there.
Now it does appear a bit like a summary task.
In fact, if you look at the marking on the right, although it’s partly grayed out,
it looks a bit like a summary task and if you click on the little wedge there, you can
see the individual tasks within that project.
But not as expected although we have a dependency between requirements definition here and requirement
sign off within the individual inserted project, we don’t have any dependencies with the
tendering process and we don’t have any dependencies from here to either the analysis
and design summary task or its subtasks or to the development summary task and its subtasks.
So in order to fully make this inserted project replace the requirement summary task, we need
to re-establish those links but now to the inserted project rather than to the original
summary task.
So let’s put those links, those dependencies in step by step.
Let’s start at the beginning.
We’ve got tendering process contract, ID 2, and we have a link from that, a dependency
to ID 6, requirements.
Notice that six is itself a summary task.
If I double click on ID 6, open up the task information, click on the predecessors then
I can see that it has a predecessor of two tendering process contract.
So that’s fine.
What I really need is exactly the same dependency from this project, NFF Requirements, to that
tendering process task.
So if I double click on NFF Requirements, I get inserted project information.
Note that the Predecessors Tab there is empty so I have no predecessors but I need a predecessor
of ID 2 so I just type in there two, click on OK, and I now have a dependency and you
can see how that little arrow appeared there.
So I now have two tasks, both in their own way summary task for requirements and they
both have finish to start relationships with the tendering process contract which has ID
2 in the original project.
Now I want to point out something else.
You probably noticed this already anyway but very important to realize that when you insert
a project like this if you look at the ID’s on the left, there you can see an important
change in the way that the ID’s work because the ID’s are still numbered from the beginning
for the project we’re looking at here which is NFF Proposed Implementation.
We get down to number four and number four is an inserted project.
When we get an inserted project, we then get a numbering sequence within that project.
So within NFF Requirements we get numbers 1, 2, 3.
That’s the last task in the inserted project, ID 3, and then we get back to the ID’s for
the overall project again.
Now that’s very important because very often when we’re dealing with dependencies, we
refer to the other tasks by their ID numbers and it’s very easy to get confused if you’re
not careful when you’re looking at these ID’s maybe to not realize that you’re
looking at an ID of an inserted project or indeed that you’re not looking at an inserted
project.
So just be wary of that when you’re using ID’s to setup these types of dependency.
So let’s look at this task ID 11 here, analysis and design.
If I double click on that and look at a predecessor, predecessor is requirements definition ID
7.
That’s the original one within the summary task.
It’s a start to start relationship with a lag of 30 days.
So what I really want to do now is to setup the same relationship but with the requirements
definition in the inserted project.
So what I’m going to do is I’m going to select requirements definition in the inserted
project, select analysis and design, and I’m going to click on Task, setup a link, and
having established that link, and there it is, I’m now going to double click and change
it from the default finish to start with a lag of zero days into a start to start with
a lag of 30 days and click on OK.
And I have now added an exactly equivalent dependency to the original one.
Okay, let’s take a look now at that analysis and design task again.
Double click.
Note the dependencies.
You have two predecessors.
One predecessor has an ID of seven.
The other predecessor has an ID that includes the file name for the inserted project followed
by the ID number of two.
So it works in just the same way but you qualify the ID in this case by putting in the file
name.
So its file name, back slash, and then the ID within that project file.
And that’s basically how dependencies between projects work.
All of the other details of the dependency, so the type start to start, lag 30 days, they’re
the same.
We just have a project file name in there effectively to qualify that dependency and
that’s because the task on which this one is dependent is in another project.
And it really is as straightforward as that.
So let me now select the task ID 7 and press the Delete key to remove that dependency,
click on OK, and now the dependency on the original requirements task to analysis and
design has gone.
I’m now going to do effectively, exactly the same thing with graphical resources and
branding here.
So I’ll do that.
I’ll be with you in just a moment.
That’s done that one and now I’ve just one more thing to do and that is that I still
have the dependency of requirements, the original requirement summary task having a predecessor
of the tendering process.
So let’s just select Delete and get rid of that and now that requirement summary task
has no predecessors, dependencies outside at all.
It’s all on its own and, of course, it’s sunk back to starting as soon as it can because
it’s not dependent on anything else.
So what I really need to do now is to just delete that summary task.
It’s no longer serving any useful purpose.
It’s been replaced by the NFF Requirements insert project or subproject.
But I am going to use it to just show you one more thing that I’d really like to emphasize
because this thing is probably the thing that causes people most problems when it comes
to project consolidation.
Let’s go into a different view.
Let’s go to Resource Usage View.
If I go to Resource Usage View, I’ve got unassigned and you’ll notice a second half
of Resource Usage View.
I’ve actually got two resources called Northern Farm Foods.
Northern Farm Foods is used in requirements definition, analysis and design, test script,
and testing, and then this Northern Farm Foods is used in requirements definition.
I can’t emphasize this enough.
At the moment, we have two projects.
We have the overarching NFF Proposed Implementation and then we’ve inserted a project called
NFF Requirements into that project as a subproject.
At the moment, the resources the two projects we are using are separate.
So that Northern Farm Foods and that Northern Farm Foods as far as Project 2013 is concerned
are completely different resources.
They’re used in different tasks.
They’re different things.
And until we actually share those resources, they’ll continue to be so.
So if I click back on Gantt Chart now, remove the original summary task.
So I’ve selected those four and I’m going to click on Delete Task.
Let me now go back into Resource Usage View again.
In Resource Usage View, let’s just go down there again and, of course, the first Northern
Farm Foods, the one in the overarching NFF Proposed Implementation project is only used
in three tasks now and the other one, Northern Farm Foods; the second one, is the one that’s
used in the inserted project.
So I’ve taken a significant step away from the original project.
I still have the original project, NFF Proposed Implementation.mpp.
I’m going to keep that one safe.
The new project which now has most of the original tasks but where one chunk of the
original task has been replaced by an inserted project, a subproject, this new project, the
master project, I’m going to call NFF Master.
So I’m going to do File, Save As.
I’m going to choose my scratch folder and I’m going to call this project NFF Master.mpp.
Note that while I’ve been working on that, Project has been making changes to the open
NFF Requirements project as well.
So it’s also been recording some of the changes that I made.
We’ll take a look at those in a moment.
So do I want to save the changes to that as well?
Yes.
And I’ve now got my NFF Master project which I’m going to carry on working on in the
next section.
Now finally I want to show you something that’s both interesting and important in the requirements
project.
Let’s just click into requirements and note that with that project which only really has
that one big task, requirements definition, followed by the little milestone.
You can also see a sort of ghostly presences.
These are the two tasks within the master project that are dependent on tasks within
the requirements project.
Now they’re only shown here as sort of placeholders.
If I look at the information, bring up the task information for that, almost everything
is grayed out.
You can’t actually change it in here because this is a task that’s in a completely different
project.
But what you can change is anything to do with the relationship.
So if I wanted to change here the relationship between requirements definition which is in
this requirements project and the graphical resource related task which is in the master
project, I could change the relationship here but I couldn’t change anything about the
graphical resources related task itself.
I’d have to go into the master project to change any of that type of information.
So what Project 2013 does here is to give me information about the dependent task or
tasks although I can’t actually change it here.
I could only change information about that dependency.
So that’s it for this section.
In the next section we’re going to carry on here.
We’re going to really basically replace virtually everything else in our master project
with another couple of subprojects, and then we’re going to turn our attention to how
to work with a number of projects at once.
I’ll see you in the next section.