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Break a Large Project into Smaller Projects

It’s usually relatively easy to develop, track, and manage projects that contain several dozen or even a few hundred tasks. But very large projects — those that include many hundreds or even thousands of tasks — can stretch anyone’s ability to manage well. If you’re dealing with a very large project, especially one that consists of logically separate portions or phases, or involves several project leaders, you may want to break the project into smaller projects that are combined in a consolidated project.

When you break down a very large project, you typically want to show the dependencies between the inserted projects. This makes sense because the inserted projects are often closely related portions of a larger project. You show dependencies by ordering the inserted projects logically (for example, Phase 1 before Phase 2, and so on), placing them at the correct outline level (for example, Subphase A under Phase 1), and linking individual tasks between projects to show scheduling dependencies (for example, Task 9 in Phase 1 must finish before Task 6 in Phase 3 can begin).

To break a large project into smaller projects

  1. On the View Bar, click Gantt Chart .
  2. Hold down CTRL, and then click the row heading of each task you want to break out as an inserted project.
  3. Click Cut Task .
  4. Click New .
  5. In the Start date box, enter the date you want the inserted project to start, and then click OK.
  6. In the Task Name field, click the first row.
  7. Click Paste .
  8. Click Save .
  9. In the File name box, enter a name for the inserted project, and then click Save.
  10. On the Window menu, click the project into which you want to insert the new project file.
  11. On the Insert menu, click Project.
  12. In the Look in box, click the drive, folder, or Internet location that contains the project file you want to insert.
  13. In the folder list, click the project file you want to insert.
  14. Click Insert.
  15. Repeat steps 2 through 14 for each project file you want to insert into the consolidated project.

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