ProjectLoad Blog

Each project can be broken into distinct phases to track the work or to organize the project into distinct deliverables. It is now possible to further subdivide a phase by creating phases within the phase. This capability is particularly useful when control of a phase has been delegated to another manager. The phase manager can then divide her or her portion of the project into more phases if needed.

Activities can only be assigned to a phase that had no sub phases. This means that once activities are attached to a phase, that phase may not be broken into sub phases. Conversely, once a phase has sub phases underneath it, activities may not be attached directly to the upper phase.

The administrator controls how many layers of phases are available from the System Settings page of the Administrator Menu. Note that changing this setting controls how many layers of new phases may be created, but does not modify existing phase structures.

It is usually best to keep a project hierarchy as flat as possible. When a project has too many layers of depth, it is more difficult to maintain and track compared to projects that have simpler, flatter hierarchies. This new capability should be used with caution to avoid unnecessary complications. The most common use for sub phases would be when a phase is assigned to another manager or on very large projects where a phase may represent several different functions or deliverables.