Task Planning using Microsoft Project

hello everybody now we're gonna look at task planning within Microsoft Project okay so the very first thing that we need to do is insert the tasks into our project schedule bearing your mind we've already done the first video where we were setting up our project so we already have a start date we've already set up our project options so now that I've set my project options up when I create a new task within my project it will be auto scheduled as that's the default that I've now selected just bear that in mind out of the box it will be manual so you won't necessarily see the same results as what I'm seeing I'll explain the difference in shortly okay so I'm gonna keep this very simple I'm just gonna put in here task 1 task 2 easier I'm doing this I'm just typing names and pressing enter there is another way you can come to the task ribbon and in the insert section of the tasks room and you can click insert task like so that's one way to do it some people like that but then you've just still got to rename it so my preferred method is just clicking in the cell and type in an end like so so you can see that Microsoft Project has its guests for me the duration and the dates so out of the box marks a project has a default duration of one day it has a default start date for each task of the project start date and it goes on for one day so it finishes on the same date ok let's take a look at those manual scheduled tasks so let's come down to the bottom left hand corner and click manually scheduled all right so now when I type a task name task by for example so we can see in the task mode column we have a blue pin which represents that this task has been manually scheduled you can see that it does not get any default duration or start-finish dates the way I like to think of manually scheduled tasks is you are in charge of the dates whereas if man with auto scheduled tasks are Microsoft Project is in charge of this and it will handle them for you so let's leave that task by the now and see how we get along all right so I'm actually gonna now put a milestone into my schedule milestone one oh it's manually scheduled again all right so you need to come down to the bottom left-hand corner and select Auto scheduled that won't change that one they've already created because that's just a toggle for new tasks so for this one I can actually do this in the task mode column switch it to auto scheduled or I could have done it in the tasks section of the task ribbon you could now see as soon as we make it auto scheduled Microsoft project aims to guess the dates for you and the duration one last thing then I want to add a summary task to do this again you can use the insert loops under a task that works as well I'm gonna do an insert summary here in the insert section of the task ribbon and we can see we now get this summary task the way that you can see that a task is in fact a summary task is in the table you'll see that it's actually bold go at bold text on the Gantt chart you can see this kind of parentheses okay which means this is this things that I'm summarizing and you can see it gets this little icon here where we can collapse that up I actually want to delete that task - to delete a task highlight the entire row and press Delete like so and there we go oh actually that's made this one a summary task now because when you delete a all there all of a summary tasks subordinate tasks that task that summary task then becomes a task alright so you can see how that happened they're actually going to delete that one as well so I'll highlight the entire row press study I'm gonna insert a summary task so I actually just inserted a task they're my preferred method is just insert a task and then indent the tasks that you want to be part of that summary task I'm gonna collapse the summary tasks you can see how that works so summary tasks are great for grouping together related activities within your project so you can summarize them it will tell you that the overall duration of those tasks tell you that start dates of those tasks so it's just one problem with my schedule I'm figuring this out by looking on the Gantt chart about there's two problems so on the Gantt chart the blue lines represent a task so this milestone is actually not a task so I'm actually to make this one a to a milestone by decreasing the duration to 0 days like sir there we go we can see it we now have the diamond on the Gantt chart this manually scheduled tasks interviewing anything though so I'm actually gonna give that a default duration of one day ah there we go you can now see this kind of blue light blue tasks and you see the dates are kind of hazy like the start and the finish are hazy that's kind of to represent this is my new schedule we're not sure what's going on with this one it still haven't given us the dates either ok so I'm gonna have all my tasks in my schedule in fact I'm gonna switch to a different schedule that I have alright so here we have my nice schedule that I created earlier what I'm gonna do is make this task 5 manually scheduled now I can do that you can see on the Gantt chart then it doesn't have those hazy start/finish dates like we saw in the previous screen that's because we've actually inputted dates for this so because it was auto schedule when you make it manually scheduled it'll assume that you know what was previously there is still accurate alright so what I want to do is not only estimate the duration of tasks but I've actually inserted the work column as you remember from the presentation here it is this is not there by default you have to insert this con so I'm going to come in here and first of all estimate my durations how long is this task going to take in terms of when's it going to start and when's it going to finish okay so when you come in here and give this one three days you'll notice when you've actually come in here and given the task a duration that you've specified yourself those question marks go away so the question mark represents hey this is an estimate of the estimate I like to think okay as soon as you actually type something it goes away and you see that if I get its previously won I give it just one just a question mark goes away where's that manually scheduled and let's give that a duration of five days it's our six maybe four days three days seven days two days one day and we see the milestones stay at zero days because a milestone is a zero day duration task okay so what we're seeing now I'm gonna move my gun shot over slightly we can see that the summary tasks are summarizing the duration of our overall phases so you can see that the summary tasks are phase two is seven days because the longest task there is task eight and that is seven days and phase one summary task is representing task 5 at the moment because that is the longest task in terms of duration okay next thing I want to do is estimate work hours so not only are we gonna estimate the duration we're going to estimate the work so the actual effort involved in each task a task can take three days as task one is doing right now but within that task there might not be full-time work there it might just be that we need to you know do a couple of hours work so for task one I'm going to say opposed to being 21 hours we're saying well maybe there's only 16 so you know just two days of actual full-time work put in there to over in a two day period in a three day period sorry Qatar's - I'm gonna say well there's just four hours work there task 3 maybe hmm 27 task force one day maybe that's 8 hours task 5 well we'll say it's 5 day let's just give that 40 days 40 hours I mean there we go task 6 4 days and we'll just give that 150 hours rule in a four day period let's see what happens mm-hmm interesting so it's got 50 hours in a four day period you'd have thought that the duration would increase that but didn't that's because we're not talking resources yet at the moment when we descend that it's 50 hours worth to do in a four day period that's it it can be done you know you have two guys all right I think for the rest of the work effort we'll just leave those blank and see how they behave okay the next thing I need to do is link my tasks together so for the purposes of this demonstration we're gonna make it very easy and we're gonna have kind of a linear project okay so we're just going to click through like so and I'm gonna say that task 1 happens then task to then task 3 then touch ball then to us right then milestone 1 okay so I'm gonna click on the first task drag down to the milestone 1 then click link tasks you'll notice when I did this I'm not linking summary tasks that's a big no-no in the Microsoft Project world ok as the best practice do not link summary tasks together just link the tasks within them now if you correct if you do link the summary tasks the other and bearing in mind Microsoft Project will allow you to do it you can create circular logic within your schedules and really mess things up samaya bit my bye says do not do it also when linking from milestone one if you want to link to master at our six here well what you can do to me to that you can click on mouse and one then hold down the control key and click on task six be always be careful when using the control key though because if I was to do this like so I'm cooking in random orders here and then link you'll see how the tasks are linked let's let's click on the view ribbon and let's let's click selected tasks we can see those in the Gantt chart now so they're all over the place that's because I use the ctrl key so best not to use the ctrl key or use caution when doing it so I do need to use it from our someone to task 6 I'm gonna link those two together and then without using the ctrl key I'm gonna go from 6 down through to last end to like so now they're all linked together so what I like to do you might see no I did this a minute ago I like to see everything in my Gantt chart and one girl whenever I'm doing linking it's pretty important to me for the way that I like to work to see what's going on within the Gantt chart so for this reason I'm going to click on the View ribbon and click entire project this is going to adjust the time scale to show me everything all in one go okay looks like Saint strange is happening here I think I may have forgotten to delete my predecessors all undoing for okay well what you'll notice in the predecessor columns when I've been doing these things and linking Microsoft Project has been pup populating the predecessor column for me so any of you link to tasks together all that really happens behind the scenes is the predecessor column is updated so theoretically if I click delete here we're back to normal and there we go way back to normal so let's show you that again milestone one to toss six I'm gonna click the task ribbon and then link them using the link task button in this schedule section of the task you can see they're linked perfect the next thing I want to do is link or the rest in order I don't you in a different way this time you don't have to use the visual way of clicking and then pressing the link tasks button you can if you're a numbers person go into here and what you're going to enter into the predecessors column let me expand this out slightly you're gonna enter the number the ID number of the task that you want to link to for example task six we wanted to link it to master one well I understand one it's in line seven right now so princess column it says seven well I want to link tar seven to tie six so I'm gonna put nine which is this one here 9 and then obviously ten eleven twelve thirteen like so and again and then in my view entire project and I can see that everything is linked in order which is really why I like to see my Gantt chart to do a quick sanity check and make sure I'm happy or everything it really does help you to catch anything that goes wrong okay so we have linked everything in the scheduled finish to start okay now what I do want to do however excuse me is change a couple of the tasks dependency types okay I'm not going to go into a deep dive in task dependencies but what I'm going to show you is how you can change the way that the relationship between the two different tasks for example between task 3 and 4 I might like them to start at the same time for whatever reason to do this I'm gonna double click on the link between the two tasks which gives me the task of dependency dialogue this is the only way to get this particular dialogue up is to click on the link between the two which can be kind of difficult ok what I'm going to do is change that to start to start both these tasks must start on the same date and I'm gonna press ok you see what happens ok so task 3 and task 4 now have this same start dates by modeling that relationship Microsoft Project has calculated the dates for us we can see that the finish date has just been updated we know this because we have the blue change highlighting and we can see the same thing in the start date so that really change highlighting represents what was affected by the last change that you made ok so one other thing that I'm going to show you is how to add a lag between two tasks alright so I'm going to save between tasks 8 & 9 down here but I need to have a lag you know I want to say well after task 8 is finished perhaps that's painting some walls we need to wait 5 days but before we can start prepping for the decoration or whatever ok so to do this I'm going to double click on the link between the two tasks and again in this lag dialogue I'm gonna say 5 days so let's see what happened that entire project again so you can see how instead of increasing the duration of task aid which would increase the overall effort potentially if you add a resource assigned to it we just added a lag you can see that it's modeled with it as this small line which means there's no effort here there's just an external you know constraint that we can't help and there's a lag before we can get the next task started that's the correct way to model that don't be tempted to increase the duration of a task to model something outside of the control and the scope of the project because if you assign a resource to that there's going to be work involved there and therefore cost alright one more thing I'm gonna double click on the link between tar six and seven and I'm gonna say that when task 6 is 50% of the way through I want to start task 7 well to do this I could look at the duration of tar 6 and decrease my lag to negative 2 day lag and we can see now that works however what happens if tar 6 goes from 4 to 8 days now we're now starting with 75% way through not what I wanted so I'm actually gonna double click on that and I'm gonna say as opposed to just doing a number of days I'm gonna say negative 50 percent ah nice I really like this method because it keeps it the schedule dynamic and things change durations push out we can see those things happening and marks of project will recap we schedule accordingly pretty nice okay that is actually it for this video so what are we done we've come in we put our tasks in with estimated duration zone and work effort we've seen how the dates are calculated we have a link to our task together we have done that in a variety of ways we have had it some different types of dependencies so we did a start to start we've also put in some lags between our tasks using + lacks negative lengths and negative percentage lacks to model detailed scheduling situations now those kind of things a little extreme you know quite rare that might happen but certainly good to know how to do those things it's what I recommend is you have a play with the different task dependencies there are various videos online they go deep dive into these things take a look at those and figure out those more they're quite important if you really have a a detailed model that you want to create well thanks for watching this video and click on the next one thank you

Channel: Tom Henry

Views: 11,962

Keywords: Microsoft Project, managing tasks in microsoft Project, ms Project, Project Online, linking tasks, linking tasks in project

Id: 5Azuapcnovc

Length: 19min 50sec (1190 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2016