Tightly Dependant 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.

Examples of the Tightly Related Projects

Example 1

One of the best examples of tightly dependant projects is a New Product Development (NPD) project running in several departments / teams of the Engineering division:

• Product team provides requirements and definitions of the new product
• Implementation part of the project is run by the development team
• Testing team provides quality assurance of the new product

These three activities on the one hand can start at different times, but on the other hand should run concurrently to ensure most effective usage of time. They are tightly related, have a lot of dependencies, main milestones and achievements are shared between the working teams.

important Note:

It is recommended to create correspondingly three sub-projects under the Master project that unites their activities and gives an overall view on the project progress and health.

 Learn more on how to build project hierarchies in Create Multi-Departmental Project section.

 

Example 2

Suppose your project is your house renovation. You have decided to put new flooring, change the kitchen, put new doors in all the different rooms of your house and finally also paint.

Different contractors are working on the different kinds of jobs that you are involved.

• The main contractor is responsible for everything but the new doors (however, he needs to take out the old ones).
• The second contractor is responsible for building the new doors and installing them for you. To do that, he would need to take the right measurements at your house and only then he will be able to start building it.

The doors’ contractor cannot start his measurements before the old doors are removed and the new flooring is in place. The main contractor cannot finish the floor panels before the new doors are properly installed.

Thus, the door contractor must be able to track the old doors removal and the flooring progress to be able to plan when his project should begin.

The main contractor needs to plan well the rest of the job he has, especially the panels installation, thus he would need to track the progress of the new doors building and finally the setup. In the meantime, he may do other unrelated work (such as working on the new kitchen) and finally when the new doors are installed, he can finish up with the panels and painting.

The two contractors, though working on totally different parts of the renovation are tightly related to each other.

important Note:

It is recommended to create correspondingly two sub-projects for each contractor under the Master project that unites their activities and gives an overall view on the project progress and health. Main contractor will be also project manager for the Master project.