In today’s global and competitive environment, time to market is one of the most crucial factors in projects.

Projects become more and more complicated and dynamic. Project related activities have to be executed concurrently by different units in the organization or even externally to meet time constraints. As a result, the project environment becomes complex and hard to manage.

 

Modularization of projects and placing dependencies across different projects, is one way of simplifying the management of this complex project environment.

Following are some characteristics of a complex project where we would recommend dividing the project  into several sub-projects:

You might need to create dependencies between loosely dependant projects or even un-related projects which still can have several points of impact / dependency.

Use Shortcuts to critical milestones or tasks of the different project that you want to track. You will then be able to view progress of the original work items of the other project directly in your project view, either on the roadmap or in the work plan.

You can then use Progress Impact  and Schedule Dependency  links to create the appropriate completion and scheduling dependencies between those shortcuts and different tasks or milestones in your project.
Example of the Loosely Related Projects

Use Project Hierarchy relations to build a tightly related projects’ structure.

Use Progress Impact dependency and Schedule Dependency to create the appropriate completion and scheduling dependencies between different tasks or milestones of the different sub projects.

Suppose you run a project for a specific customer and you would like to share a roadmap of the project with specific milestones and their progress. You do not want to expose all details of the project.

A Shortcut is a reference or a pointer to a work item.

You can add a shortcut to a work item in the Work Plan grid of the Current Project view. To do so use the Add Shortcut menu item in the Add Sub command in the grid toolbar or via the right – click context menu.

Upon clicking on the Add Shortcut menu a small form opens allowing the users to search for the work item they want to add as a shortcut within all the projects they are authorized to view.

The system will alert the users when they attempt to delete a work item used as an original item for shortcut in other projects with the following message:

“This work item is or contains work items used as a shortcut in other projects and has an impact on their progress. Deleting it will stop influencing these projects.”

The user may choose to delete the original work item in spite of this message, resulting with the following: