Sometimes projects aren’t isolated; they are related to other projects. In some cases, tasks of one project depend on the completion of another project or a task in another project. In other cases, projects become interrelated because they need to use the same resources, sometimes at the same time.

Project Server, in conjunction with Project Professional, provides organizations with the capability to manage many projects simultaneously and to share resources among those projects. When you use Project Server, you create projects in Project Professional and then load them into a central database—the Project Server database. The Project Server database is located on a Web server or in a server farm on your company’s local area network or intranet. Team members can use a browser to connect to the database and provide updated information about task progress. Project managers can take advantage of the global resource pool available in the database to find available resources for projects. Management can view a project’s Gantt chart and deal with risks and issues that arise.

Organizations that don’t use Project Server but use the same resources to work on multiple projects simultaneously can take advantage of the resource pool feature in Project. You set up a project that contains nothing but the resources available in your company—this project is called the resource pool project. Different managers can work on various individual projects; those projects don’t need to be managed by the same person. To share resources, a project manager connects an individual project to the resource pool to make resource assignments.

Whether your organization uses Project Server or simply Project, you can connect projects using consolidation. You use consolidation to help you make a large, complex project manageable. I think of consolidation as the end result; you create and save projects that are smaller, more manageable chunks of a large project, and you work with the smaller, individual projects on a daily basis. You set up the individual projects as if they truly are independent; you create task dependencies, assign resources, view the project’s critical path, and track the project. When you’re ready to look at the bigger picture, that’s when you consolidate. Essentially, you combine the smaller pieces together into one file; that is, you consolidate them. And you can build links between the individual projects so that you can see the effect each project has on the other projects and on the overall schedule for the unified, complex project. In the consolidated project, you can view the critical path for the large project that takes into consideration each individual project—a reason why Project Server users might want to consolidate. You see, although Project Server views can "roll up" information, you can’t see one critical path across projects in the Project Server database.

Connecting related projects is a wise step to take, but don’t take it too early in the game. If you need to manage a large, complex project, start by focusing on one phase of that project and establish the tasks and dependencies. You might even save information about that phase in a single Project file, without worrying yet about other phases. This approach helps you simplify the large, complex project into manageable chunks that won’t overwhelm you. While you’re working on one chunk, a thought related to another chunk might pop up; just open another Project file and jot it down—then go back to work on the original chunk.