Project Numbers in the Work Breakdown Structure

When you plan your work breakdown structure, you establish a project number structure.

Numbering Format

A project number, or the first level of your work breakdown structure, can be a total of 30 characters long, including two delimiters. The minimum length is three characters. You can also choose to have Vision supply leading zeros for all project numbers, which would pad numbers to the firm-wide length you establish during implementation.

Some valid project numbers are as follows:
  • 4583
  • 0005104-00
  • CH.0415.871

For example, the project number, 12345.78, consists of five characters, followed by a period (.) delimiter in the sixth position, and ending with a two-character sub-number. This project number is a total of 8 characters long.

Distinguishing Regular and Overhead Projects

Deltek recommends that you develop a project numbering system in which you can easily distinguish regular projects from overhead projects.
  • For regular projects, one possibility is to embed the year of the project’s inception into the project number (for example, 2016014.00 for the fourteenth project in 2016). Another possibility is to include an office code as part of the project number (for example, 10-0004.00 in which 10 represents a particular office).
  • For overhead projects, many firms set up a project for General Overhead and a series of projects for Vacation, Sick, and/or Holiday. Often they number them 00001.00 to 00099.00 (for example, 00001.00 for General Overhead, 00002.00 for Vacation, 00003.00 for Sick, and so on). This means that overhead projects always appear first on project-related reports, which are generally sorted in project number order.

Project Templates

After your firm decides how to structure your WBS, project templates are an efficient way to ensure that projects created by users at your firm conform to this structure. Templates provide a baseline for new projects.

Project templates have a pre-defined work breakdown structure (WBS) and field values. You can modify them to meet the needs of individual projects.

You create project templates in Configuration > General > Project Templates.