Senior Projects Manager | Field & Marten AssociatesNew Westminster, British Columbia, Canada
Besides MS Project, Primavera can be very useful in this case. I like it more than MS project although MS Project came a long way recently. Saving Changes...
At the program level, each project is often kept at a high level showing the inter-dependencies between projects, and the lower level details of the projects themselves are managed by the project managers in a separate tool or file. In that case, simple is better. MSP and Primavera are both more than capable, but many times I have seen program level plans managed as PowerPoint graphics, albeit by very skilled people. Creating the schedules from scratch and editing them can be painful, but the graphics are infinitely customizable for presentation purposes.
If you need the program to manage constraints and not just show them graphically, then I would start with MSP and Primavera if I was actually linking between the individual tasks of 10 large projects. The graphics aren't as nice, but they are much better at finding conflicts between plans. Saving Changes...
Vladimir LiberzonR&D Director| Spider Project TeamMoscow, Russian Federation
If you need a tool for modelling project portfolio with interproject dependencies, resource, financial, space and other constraints then look at Spider Project (www.spiderproject.com).
It also includes risk simulation and a lot of unique features that help to optimize project and portfolio schedules.
Spider Project was and is used for managing large project portfolios. One example - portfolio of 386 construction projects with $51bln budget for preparing 2014 Winter Olympic Games. Saving Changes...
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