Project Management

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Dependency management

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Aleem Khan Director Training and Consulting| 360PMO Project Management Consulting Milton, Ontario, Canada
I am currently managing a program and there are number of dependencies within and external to the program(inbound/outbound).

anyone is having good template that graphically illustrate list of dependencies, their relationship.

thanks
Aleem
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Hans Robbers Senior Director| Salesforce Vlissingen, Netherlands
Aleem

Using MSP would be an option. Inbound dependencies are milestones at the start of a task/activity, you can not start before, so a predecessor, Outbound dependencies you have at the end of an task/activity, the other can not start before you finish

If necessary you can create a more abstract view by having the milestones at phase, sub-project or project level

hopes this helps
Hans
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Imran Manir Senior Project Manager Burton On Trent, United Kingdom
At a basic level Aleem, create a table with four columns:
Column 1 = Task ID
Column 2 = Task Description (state Internal/external)
Column 3 = Predecessor (insert Task ID of predecessor task)
Column 4 = Successor (insert Task ID of successor task)

This table will typically contains a number of rows related to tasks and deliverables, which can be manually input into, say, for example MSP. This would display the table info diagrammatically as a dependency chart. Obviously, play around with this idea to suit.....create your own template :0)
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Ravi Anand Project Manager| Fujitsu Consulting Pune, India
WBS or Tree will help you.....
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Kevin Hartford Project Manager| Olgoonik Specialty Contractors Arlington, Va, United States
I suggest that you use a precedence diagram. You can do one in Microsoft Project and it should tell you if you have broken dependent relationship. For external dependencies, I would build dummy activities to account for that.
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Rajesh Shankaranarayana General Manager| Mindtree Limited Bangalore, Karnataka, India
Aleem - would suggest effective usage of MPP for this as it allows you to link the tasks to external/internal dependencies and then be able to highlight the impact of any dependency change on your tasks/milestones. With the various reports and Views you get on mpp, this would be a very logical choice if you have this license.

If not, I have tried using excel or show it via Powerpoints but these are not that effective and difficult to maintain and use. And would be difficult to justify or relate a change to a dependency and corresponding impact on the project/timelines
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Linda Hill Program Manager| Microsoft Renton, Wa, United States
Consider using MS Project. You can use your program as a master project and all dependency projects as subprojects. I have done this in the past and it works well as it can help align stakeholders with the program and / or project.
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Gary Harvey VP Technical Services| Pinnacle Vienna, Va, United States
Where you are managing the cross-project dependencies between multiple subcontractors or organizations I would include the following items in a Cross-Project Dependency List (in Excel perhaps):

- what is that is being delivered between the projects
- who is building it
- who is receiving it
- any hardware (or otherwise) identification for it
- cross references to the WBS and/or schedules

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