I'm a new user of MS Project. I have been tasked with developing a project
plan that crosses many differnet departments. Does anyone have a sample of a
project plan that demonstrates it broken down by function?

Note: Our plan includes tasks from IT, HR, Accounting, Facilities
Operations, Marketing etc.
--
Dawn

Project isn't designed to organize tasks by function in the manner you
describe. The task list is a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) that is
organized by project deliverable - decomposing the project's final
deliverable into smaller and smaller units until you get to the level of
tasks that describe the physical activities being performed by the
resources. Since a given deliverable might require activity by people drawn
from a number of different departments, organzing the tasks in an outline
structure based on administrative divisions leads to massive confusion. For
an example of the reason it's a problem, consider a task that is being done
by two resources working together, Joe from Marketing and Bill from
Engineering. The task is only one task and needs to be listed just once in
the plan to avoid duplicating the work ... so where does it go in the
outline, the group of tasks being done by Marketing or the group of tasks
being done by Engineering? It needs to be in both yet it can't be in both
or else you'll have it scheduled twice and potentially at two different
times.

It is possible to produce the kind of output I think you're looking for in a
report. After organizing the basic task list as a proper deliverables
oriented WBS you'll be assigning resources to them. When you define those
resources, utilize the "Group" field to indicate which department/division
the resource comes from - Joe is from HR while Mary is from Marketing, that
sort of thing. Then you can use the grouping tools to report of tasks being
done by resources from the various departments.

HTH


--
Steve House [Project MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm for the FAQs



"Dawn" <Dawn@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:A7AC320B-3551-41BB-8CB1-7D60FA388170@microsoft.com...
> I'm a new user of MS Project. I have been tasked with developing a project
> plan that crosses many differnet departments. Does anyone have a sample of
> a
> project plan that demonstrates it broken down by function?
>
> Note: Our plan includes tasks from IT, HR, Accounting, Facilities
> Operations, Marketing etc.
> --
> Dawn