Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016 Advanced.
In this section we’re going to set up a master project for the charity event and we’re
going to start with our original project, the one that’s called CharityEvent_All and
the Sports Day Project that we’ve already created.
Remember that those two projects are now both sharing a resource pool called CharityEvent_Resources.
And really when it comes to splitting a large project or program into a number of constituent
projects or subprojects the key area where there is usually the most effort is in restoring
any links that existed in the original program or project.
And this goes right back to a point that I made a couple of times already on the course.
It’s a good idea to decide whether you’re going to split a program or project into a
number of separate files as early on in the process as you can or you do finish up with
quite a bit of work to do.
Now what I’m going to do here is to demonstrate how to deal with that one project and then
what I’m going to do is to set you Exercise 01 on the course where you’re going to split
off the other projects that make up all of the charity event.
Now the first thing I’m going to do is to open CharityEvent_All.
You need to look carefully at what happens when I do this.
Now it says, This file shares resources from a resource pool.
What do you want to do?
You can open the resource pool to see the assignments across all sharer files or do
not open other files.
Now if I open this project on its own although I’ll be able to see the list of resources
that it uses I won’t be looking at the resource pool and all of the sharer projects.
So I won’t get an accurate picture of resource usage.
So what I’m going to do here is to select the first option.
Now it’s very interesting, if you go to the View tab here on look at Switch Windows
because what you’ll see is that we have the Charity Event All project open normally,
we have the resource pool open read only, we don’t have the Sports Day project open.
Now let me just move this across here.
Now although I don’t have the Sports Day project open the resource pool is aware of
the resource assignments in that project and I can see them here on the Resource Sheet
in Resource Usage View.
So that’s a very important point.
I can see how the resources are being used even though I don’t have all of the projects
open.
I do however need to have the resource pool open.
So having pointed that out let me now go back to the Gantt Chart for the All project.
Note that I have the Planning summary task expanded here.
The Gala Dinner and Fashion Show and Buffet Lunch summary tasks are both collapsed, and
the Sports Day and Barbeque summary task is expanded as well.
Now as you can see from this there are links, dependencies, between the Sports Day and Barbeque
summary task tasks and the Planning summary task tasks.
And what I need to do is to replace the Sports Day summary task with my separate project
and then reestablish these links.
Now I need to explain a couple of things as we go through this, but the first thing I
need to do is to insert the Sports Day project into the All project.
I select an empty row and I go to the Project tab.
And on the left I have an Insert group with the option Subproject.
Insert Subproject, Insert a related project as a subproject.
Click on that, browse to the course files folder and select Sports Day, click on Insert.
Now you can immediately see that this is an inserted subproject because you see the icon
there in the I column.
But note that as usual when you insert something into a table it assumes the indentation of
the task above.
So this particular project although we’ve inserted it as a separate project is currently
within the Sports Day and Barbeque summary task 46.
So one of the first things I need to do, if I go to the Task tab, is to out dent it so
that it isn’t part of that summary task.
Now let me expand the subproject and return to a point that I made earlier on in the course.
When I selected the tasks to make this I selected the summary task Sports Day and Barbeque.
And that has been included within the subproject.
It may well be that when you do that, you want to do that, it may well be that you don’t
actually select the summary task when you create a subproject in the way that I did
earlier.
Now if I hadn’t selected the summary task when I did that copy then I would have only
had the tasks here two to eleven in the subproject.
And in fact I could lose the Sports Day and Barbeque summary task within the subproject
now if I wanted to.
Having selected two to eleven if I out dent them all and then get rid of that one.
I’ve still got everything I need within my subproject.
I’ve got everything within it that I need but of course the scheduling is very wrong.
And the reason it’s very wrong is that I don’t have the correct dependencies.
Within the subproject I have internal dependencies but I don’t have the dependencies relating
to the Planning summary task in the All project.
The other thing to notice here is that if you look at the All project note the ID numbers.
They go down, right down to 56.
And in fact task 58 is the inserted subproject.
But within the inserted subproject it has its own ID numbering.
So you have tasks 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on.
So when you look at the dependencies within the subproject, for instance, the dependency
here, task 2, Obtain Insurance.
Its predecessor is task 1, Perform Risk Assessment.
Whereas in the All project task 48, Obtain Insurance, its predecessor is 47, Perform
Risk Assessment.
So although we need to establish all of the correct dependencies bear in mind that the
numbering system within the subproject is different.
Having said that, all of those internal dependencies are there so that’s fine.
So it’s only the dependencies to the All project that I need to establish.
Now the great thing about leaving the original Sports Day and Barbeque summary task in there
for the moment is that I can use the dependencies there in order to build the dependencies to
the subproject.
So for instance, let’s start at the beginning, task 47, Perform Risk Assessment, has a predecessor
of task 10.
If I go up to task 10 it’s actually Book Venue.
So I’ve selected Book Venue.
Now I’m going to go down to my subproject and I’m going to select Perform Risk Assessment
there and I’m going to create that equivalent link.
Click on the Link and now I can see some of the tasks in my subproject are correctly scheduled.
But interestingly if I look at the predecessor, the predecessor is expressed in a different
way to the other predecessors that we have because it doesn’t as with here, task 47
has a predecessor of 10.
Because the predecessor for task 1 in the subproject is in a different project the predecessor
is now expressed in a more complex way.
So where we’re dealing with dependencies between projects, we have the Project Path,
the Project File Name and the Task ID within the project as part of the dependency.
Now I can up follow exactly the same principle now.
For example, if I go to the next task down, Prepare Draft Sports Day Program of Events.
That relates to task 4 which is Meeting 1.
Select Meeting 1, come down here, select the equivalent task within the subproject and
click on Link.
That task is also now scheduled correctly.
Now there are a couple of more of those.
I’ll do those and join me again.
So basically now I have specified hopefully correctly all of the predecessors for the
tasks within the subproject.
But as you’ll see from the Gantt Chart, the bars and lines, there’s also some dependencies
in the other direction.
So for instance, if we look at the final task in the Sports Day summary task up here, 61.
It has at least one successor.
So I also need to make sure that any successors are set up correctly as well.
So for example, we have Sports Day and Barbeque, 61 has as a successor Task 15 which is Vacate
Venue.
I need to set up that as a successor to task 14 in the subproject.
Now Sports Day and Barbeque, select it first to make sure that it is the predecessor, then
go to task 15, select that second, Vacate Venue, click on Link, and just go back and
check that the successor is set up correctly.
And then what I need to do is to go through and set up any other successors that are needed
for the tasks in the subproject.
So again join me again when I’ve done that.
So having made sure that I’ve set up all of my predecessors and successors correctly
the next thing that I’m going to do is to delete the Sports Day and Barbeque summary
task as it is now completely replaced by the subproject.
So I’m going to select the summary task, hit Delete.
Sports Day and Barbeque is a summary task.
Deleting it will delete all its subtasks as well.
That’s okay.
And it is now deleted.
And it has in effect been replaced by the subproject.
Now one of the things that you’ve probably noticed by now, particularly if you look at
the IDs within the Sports Day subproject is that the numbering has got gaps.
It goes 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.
You may also have noticed as we’ve been going through doing the work in this section
that the numbering of tasks in the All project has changed as well.
There are some numbers missing.
All of the tasks are still there but the numbering goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 and there
are various gaps.
Now don’t worry about the gaps because I’m going to talk about those a little bit later
on in the course.
For the moment I’ve replaced the summary task by the subproject and the scheduling
of the Sports Day is correct and as it was.
However the other thing you may have spotted there is that even though we have dependencies
between the subproject and the rest of the project you can’t see any lines representing
those dependencies.
And in fact there should be lines there.
Now at the time of recording the course this is a known issue with Project 2016 and although
it was reported some time ago we don’t have any date for a fix to this particular issue.
Now it doesn’t stop the dependencies actually being effective.
And of course you can still see the dependencies by looking at predecessors and successors
in various places.
You just can’t see the lines that we normally see representing dependencies.
Now hopefully Microsoft will come out with a fix for that very soon.
In the meantime you can always check that the dependencies are there but you won’t
be able to see those clear lines that we normally see when dependencies exist.
So the last thing I’m going to do in this section is to close down Microsoft Project.
So I’m going to click on Close.
Do you want to save your changes to All?
Yes, I do.
Do you want to save your changes to Sports Day?
Yes, I do.
Do I want to update the resource pool to reflect the changes for all the open sharer projects?
That’s important that you read this particular message carefully because it explains what
to do in situations where you only want to save some of the changes in the sharer projects.
But for the moment we’re going to save everything so I’m going to click on OK.
And that is finished.
That’s the end of this section.
I’ll see you in
the next one.