How to track large number of similar projects and tasks?

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I work in a university unit helping develop online courses. Upper administration wants a way of reporting these out there and how long our people are working on things. Each semester we are tasked with development of around a total of 20 new & updating old courses. Attempting to look for a system/methodology to track these - including time, tasks, emails, etc. We have a staff of around 30 people organized into 4 teams that each take a subset of courses each term. Then on top of those 20 new courses we have ongoing support for the courses after they are developed that should be tracked as well.

The problem that keeps coming up is that the number is far too large for most PM systems to handle at one time it seems like. We tried products like Microsoft Project, Jira, Asana, Trello, Zoho and others but the volume of what would be considered "tasks" (e.g. "get course syllabus", "input quiz 1") ends up quickly exceeding the limits of each system. The structure most commonly used in the past has been:

Project = Course Development
+---Main Task = Develop Course ABC 101
    +---Subtask = Course Task
Project = Course Support
+---Main Task = Support Course ABC 101
    +---Subtask = Support Task

We did try creating each course as a project but in most system this doesn't take too well. Microsoft Project seems to require separate files, web based ones are slow to handle that many projects or organizing like tasks is near impossible. Thought of trying to label things as college, department, etc. as projects, but not sure if that would alleviate much.

Would it be common to lump course developments as one large project? Or is there some way to break it down into smaller to handle areas? any ideas or possible past practices would be appreciated.

manpreet 2 years ago