The enterprise project structure (EPS) represents the hierarchical structure of all projects in the database. The EPS can be subdivided into as many levels or nodes as needed to represent work at your organization. Nodes at the highest, or root, level might represent divisions within your company, project phases, site locations, or other major groupings that meet the needs of your organization; projects always represent the lowest level of the hierarchy. Every project must be included in an EPS node.
The number of EPS levels and their structure depend on the scope of your projects and how you want to summarize and aggregate data. For example, you might want to define increasingly lower levels of EPS nodes, similar to an outline, to represent broad areas of work that expand into more detailed projects. Specify as many projects as needed to fulfill the requirements of your operations executives and program managers.
Multiple levels enable you to manage projects separately while retaining the ability to aggregate and summarize data to higher levels. For example, you can summarize and aggregate information for each node in the EPS. Conversely, you can use top-down budgeting from higher-level EPS nodes down through their lower-level projects for cost control.
User access and privileges to nodes within the EPS hierarchy are implemented through a global organizational breakdown structure (OBS) that represents the management responsible for the projects in the EPS. Each manager in the OBS is associated with an area of the EPS, either by node or by project, and the WBS of the particular level of the hierarchy.
Once you have added users and associated them with OBS elements and project profiles, you can define the EPS and assign a responsible manager (OBS element) to each level. You must specify a responsible manager for each node of the EPS.