Little Tip: On Hold Tasks for Project Dependencies

Here is a little workaround for those of you (maybe not that many?) who miss built-in functionality for making one project dependent on another project, or making one project a part of another. (I am talking about normal real projects now, implemented as sequential projects as Nirvana. They begin somewhere and end somewhere. Although you may be able to do some of the things in a different order there is an overall sequential tendency - first things first.)

Let's say you have four such projects on your list, e.g. Spring Catalog, Distributor X, Pricing and Budget. They may seem like "independent" enough projects, and each one is largely sequential in nature.

The situation is that such that some of these projects are dependent on some of the others, maybe not straight away, but somewhere down the line. For example, you can probably do most of the artwork and texts for the catalog, but before you can do the final proofreading and print it, you must do the final pricing and fill it all in. This is an example of a dependency. (And Pricing may also affect your discussions with Distributor X, which, in turn, may affect your Budget project.)

Ideally, I would like to have functionality for this built in some day. It could be very similar to how you handle sub-projects. When your project arrives at a point where another project is needed, then your Unified Next list lines for these projects would converge onto one single line, showing the common Next task for both projects. See this thread http://help.nirvanahq.com/discussions/suggestions/1261-sub-projects...

But here is a workaround you can use even now, if you have this type of situation and do not want to re-analyze your dependencies over and over again:

Just put a dummy Next task at the appropriate place in the sequence of your Catalog project saying something like "ON HOLD UNTIL AFTER: Pricing" This task then will show up in your Unified Next list sooner or later, so that you know that at this point you can "ignore" the Catalog project, and must now concentrate on Pricing. Also, when you visit your Project page, you see these dependencies, and do not have to rethink them over again. (When you finish your Pricing project you must remember to complete all such dummy tasks in other projects, of course).