There have been times throughout my career that I was given a “project,” but soon realized that it was really a group of related projects or a portfolio. In MS Project, a master project (or consolidated project) is the easiest way to work with a group of connected, large projects (or sub-projects) at the same…

  Project Management Institute (PMI)® Professional Development Units (PDUs): This Webinar is eligible for 1 PMI® PDU in the Technical category of the Talent Triangle.   Event Description: With many people now using Project through Office 365 or Project Online in conjunction with Project Desktop, the need for reporting, dashboards and / or editing multiple…

As a MS Project MVP for the last 15 years, I am passionate about sharing knowledge and helping people maximize their project to portfolio management capabilities with technology, especially when they are using MS Project. I’ve seen a growing set of questions surface regarding Master Projects, so with MPUG’s help, I’m looking to share some…

A question asked occasionally in the Microsoft Project and Project Online user forums is this: “How can I link a task in one project with a task in another project?” The heart of this question is that the project manager needs to know how to create cross-project dependencies. This question is relevant to almost all…

One of the key skills that we hear about in project management is gaining a handle on multiple projects and viewing the integration among them. This can be a pain point for project managers who don’t have access to an enterprise system such as Microsoft Project Server or Microsoft Project Online, but who still want…

Project Server is a great tool for showing data from multiple projects. In fact, that’s what makes it so good to use when you’re working with a portfolio of projects. In Project Server 2010 there were open source tools you could install called “Solution Starters,” extensions to Project Server that provided additional functionality. One extension…

Sometimes when you are using Microsoft Professional and you insert a Subproject, the Subproject is “Read Only” when you try to save the Master Project. This quick post is how to resolve that issue. In this example, I have a Master Project, which is titled the highly original name of “Master Project,” and I have…

Dale shows us the fastest way to create a temporary master project in order to combine and analyze multiple projects on a bigger scale. The best part is that when you close out of your master project, all of your original projects will remain opened and untouched. Take a look at our other quick and…

A “Master” project is great for modeling a program but takes time to create and refine. (If you do not know about this capability see my other article, “Do’s and Don’ts: Creating Subprojects”) If you are pressed for time and just want a high level initial assessment of resources, work and cost across all the projects, consider a…