Structure large projects

Model your project covers the shape most projects need: a project bar and a lane of stages underneath it, two levels, and done. That's still the right default for a single-building commission like Riverside Apartments. This article is for the projects that outgrow it: a big enough programme that two levels stop being enough to plan or report against, and you need real structure underneath the stages themselves.

We'll build one for Marina Quarter, a multi-building residential development at Northlight Architects, five levels deep: the project, its towers, a level within a tower, the areas on that level, and the design stage inside one of those areas.

When a deep tree earns its keep

Two levels are enough as long as a stage is the smallest thing you plan or report on. A large programme changes that. Marina Quarter has two towers, each tower has dozens of levels, and each level has areas that get designed, documented, and delivered on their own timetables. Flattening all of that into a single lane of stages would work for a week and then become unreadable: dozens of same-named bars with no way to tell which building or level they belong to.

Going deeper buys you something two levels can't: a stable planning and reporting layer at every size of thing you actually manage. Expand to the tower level and you see each building's overall span. Expand further and you see a single level's programme, then a single area's, then the actual design stage. Collapse back up and everything folds away into the number above it. The depth is there because the programme itself has that many meaningful layers, not because deeper is inherently better.

Build the hierarchy, level by level

Each level is drawn the same way you drew the project and stages in build the work programme: expand the row above it, then drag a dated bar in the lane that appears. The only difference here is doing that four more times, once per layer, each nested inside the one before it.

1. 1

   Create a fresh project, Marina Quarter, with the code MQ, kept separate from Riverside Apartments and anything else already on the schedule.

2. 2

   Click Edit, switch to Monthly, and drag across Marina Quarter's row to set its overall span, August through next June.

3. 3

   Expand Marina Quarter and draw two branches underneath it: Tower A and Tower B, each with its own dates.

4. 4

   Expand Tower A and draw Level 30 beneath it, a third level nested inside the tower.

5. 5

   Expand Level 30 and draw two areas beneath it: Penthouse and Lobby.

6. 6

   Expand Penthouse and draw Concept Design as the fifth and deepest level, the actual stage of work.

7. 7

   Click Save. All five levels write to the schedule together and persist there the next time you or anyone else opens Marina Quarter.

Notice what didn't change: every one of those five levels is a task, drawn and dated the same way. Monument doesn't have a separate concept for "building" or "area", it's tasks nested inside tasks, as deep as the programme needs.

Move between overview and detail with Gantt depth

A five-level tree is only useful if you can also not look at it. The Gantt depth control, labelled Lvl next to the chart, sets how many levels of the hierarchy render at once: level one shows only the project bar, level two adds the towers, and so on down to level five, where Concept Design itself appears.

1. 1

   Use Lvl to pull the depth back to level one. Only Marina Quarter's overall bar shows, everything underneath folds away.

2. 2

   Climb the depth back up one level at a time and watch Tower A and Tower B appear, then Level 30, then Penthouse and Lobby, then Concept Design at level five.

A one-line overview for a client update and a fully expanded construction programme are the same data at two different depths, not two different views to keep in sync.

Troubleshooting

• A level doesn't count without dates. The depth control only counts dated tasks toward its ceiling. An undrawn, undated task doesn't occupy a level, so if a branch seems to vanish at the depth where you expected it, check whether it actually has a start and end date yet.
• Deep names get squeezed. Each level indents further into the task list, and the panel doesn't grow to compensate. Marina Quarter, Tower A, Level 30, Penthouse, and Concept Design all read cleanly at five levels because they're short; a name like "Level 30 Residential Fit-Out and Services Coordination" won't.
• Dependencies only link siblings. You can chain Concept Design to the next stage inside Penthouse, the same way build the work programme links stages, but you can't drag a dependency from a task in Tower A to one in Tower B. Cross-branch sequencing has to be modelled at the level where the two things actually share a parent, or tracked outside the dependency chain.

Where this fits next

Most projects should stay at the two-level shape in build the work programme; reach for a deeper tree only when the programme genuinely has that many stable layers to plan and report against. Once the hierarchy is built, finding your way around the schedule covers filtering and saved views for keeping a large tree navigable day to day.