can i link other projects through tasks

[NatalieGr1]

I would like to build a project and have "sub projects" that link to the "parent project". Has anyone done this?

[Heather_Kulbacki]

Hi Natalie,

We've done something that may be similar to what you're looking to do. We have campaign projects for the overall look and feel of a campaign, then separate projects for each tactic within that campaign and wanted to tie them all together.

We've created a custom form that is on every project, some of the fields on the form are Year, Campaign, Project Number - we do manually number each project.

For those campaign projects and any tactics related to that campaign, they all have the same number in that Campaign field so they are easily searchable

We also set up a request queue for each campaign so that incoming requests related to that campaign route directly into the main campaign project and are all stored together.

Then when those issues are converted to their own projects, they can easily be found either by going to the issues on that project where have a view that shows the resolving object, or we have a report with a prompt for Campaign number so we can quickly have a list of all projects with that same campaign number.

[ljanz]

How do you keep track of those manual numbers? Your method of campaigns and tactics seems very similar to what we do / are trying to do.

Our numbering system includes some custom forms for the project's department/division and project's campaign where that is selected. Then the project number is just the reference number, but now we are at 6 digits for that and it is getting unwieldy.

We also have a campaign project for the overall look/feel and separate projects for each tactic. We are trying to revise our request queue set up so that each campaign can have requests and they can route directly to that campaign project.

[Heather_Kulbacki]

We started out using the reference number as well - and found it quickly became unwieldy! :)

We use a couple reports to pull in all projects that need a number - one report for the campaign projects since they all use a specific template and another report for the tactic projects (anything that doesn't have that campaign template). We include a column on the report for the project or campaign number and can fill in the number right there on the report.

Since there are relatively few campaigns, our project managers assign the campaign number and we don't seem to run into too many issues where two people have grabbed the next number at the same time. But since there are so many tactic projects, those all run through our traffic team to assign the next project number.

[AnthonyIm]

Did you mean link via reporting? (Like what Heather described) Or were you talking like cross-project predecessors? Sometimes people don't know about those so wanted to bring that up just in case.

Like for direct mail marketing, there is the one main project but then there is a data project manager working on their piece. For both projects, we use cross-project predecessors to help the two stay in sync.

There are great: https://one.workfront.com/s/article/Understanding-Cross-Project-Predecessors-638211475