You are right. We currently don't support nested projects.

One important fact to consider is that project areas and their team area
hierarchies are about functional teams that not necessarily correspond
to the organizational structure. (We don't provide support for defining
the relationship between the organizational structure and the functional
teams.)

Using team areas to mimic subproject is generally not recommended. As
you point out it is hard for users to understand what the structure they
see actually means. Also, if your subprojects are not on the same
schedule, you would have to use different development lines for each of
your subprojects. By doing so, you would have multiple development lines
and multiple root team areas for a single subproject. So, you would have
to use naming conventions to identify all those pieces that form one
subproject with even a higher risk to confuse team members. You would
also loose the ability for customized work item workflows, reports, etc
per subproject. All those elements would then be the same across all the
subprojects since the are defined on a project area level.

You are also right that there are reporting implications when using
multiple project areas since we currently don't allow reports that span
multiple project areas. Pls file an enhancement request for
cross-project areas reporting.

Having said all this, I think it gets back to the question of how your
organization structure compares to the structure of your functional teams.


Kai
Jazz Process team


peterkeeler wrote:

We are currently implementing/customizing RTC to meet our internal
requirements and we are experiencing some difficulty in the
following:-

Your HELP input experiences would be
appreciated.

How do we define Projects/ sub-projects.

We want to represent the Organization structure in Project/
sub-project hierarchy.

Looking at the tool and Jazz.net it doesn't look as though we can
define a hierarchy in the way we want and so we will have to work in
another way:

1. Separate projects -- which will have reporting implications to an
overall view of the data I suspect
2. Attempt to define the DC projects within the RTC Project Area using
Team Areas, etc. I think this is dangerous and could lead to confusion
and chaos if we don;t use great care.

I think the key question is what use cases you hoped to achieve/support
via the "sub-project" relationship?

Cheers,
Geoff

Kai-Uwe Maetzel wrote:

You are right. We currently don't support nested projects.

One important fact to consider is that project areas and their team area
hierarchies are about functional teams that not necessarily correspond
to the organizational structure. (We don't provide support for defining
the relationship between the organizational structure and the functional
teams.)

Using team areas to mimic subproject is generally not recommended. As
you point out it is hard for users to understand what the structure they
see actually means. Also, if your subprojects are not on the same
schedule, you would have to use different development lines for each of
your subprojects. By doing so, you would have multiple development lines
and multiple root team areas for a single subproject. So, you would have
to use naming conventions to identify all those pieces that form one
subproject with even a higher risk to confuse team members. You would
also loose the ability for customized work item workflows, reports, etc
per subproject. All those elements would then be the same across all the
subprojects since the are defined on a project area level.

You are also right that there are reporting implications when using
multiple project areas since we currently don't allow reports that span
multiple project areas. Pls file an enhancement request for
cross-project areas reporting.

Having said all this, I think it gets back to the question of how your
organization structure compares to the structure of your functional teams.


Kai
Jazz Process team


peterkeeler wrote:
We are currently implementing/customizing RTC to meet our internal
requirements and we are experiencing some difficulty in the
following:-

Your HELP input experiences would be
appreciated.

How do we define Projects/ sub-projects.

We want to represent the Organization structure in Project/
sub-project hierarchy.

Looking at the tool and Jazz.net it doesn't look as though we can
define a hierarchy in the way we want and so we will have to work in
another way:

1. Separate projects -- which will have reporting implications to an
overall view of the data I suspect
2. Attempt to define the DC projects within the RTC Project Area using
Team Areas, etc. I think this is dangerous and could lead to confusion
and chaos if we don;t use great care.