Microsoft Office Project 2003 Inside Out

Overview

As a project manager, you juggle time, money, resources, and tasks to carry out and complete a project successfully. Often, however, you're juggling not only multiple elements of a single project, you're also juggling multiple projects ”each with its own associated challenges. The following are three typical scenarios involving multiple projects:

• Katherine manages a large project containing many phases or components for which other project managers are responsible. In Microsoft Office Project 2003, she can set up a master project with subprojects representing those subphases. She can keep an eye on the overall picture while the project managers responsible for the individual phases have complete control over their pieces of the project.

• Frank manages several unrelated projects and keeps the information for each in separate project files. Occasionally, however, he needs to see information about all of them in relation to one other. He might need to print a view or report that temporarily combines the projects. With Project 2003, Frank can consolidate information from multiple related or unrelated projects, and can do so either temporarily or permanently.

• Sarah, Dennis, and Monique are project managers in the same organization. Although they manage different projects, they use many of the same resources. Sometimes, their projects conflict with one another because of demands on the same resources at the same time. In Microsoft Project, they can create a resource pool file that contains the resources they all use. They can then link their individual project files to that resource pool. The resource availability and usage information is available through that resource pool. When one project assigns tasks to a resource in the resource pool, the resource pool is updated with that resource's allocation information.