Tasks are the most basic building blocks of any project—tasks represent the work to be done to accomplish the goals of the project. Tasks describe project work in terms of sequence, duration, and resource requirements. Later in this chapter, you will work with two special types of tasks: summary tasks (which summarize or “roll up” the durations, costs, and so on of subtasks) and milestones (which indicate significant events in the life of a project).

In this exercise, you enter the first tasks required in the video project.

A task’s duration is the amount of time you expect it will take to complete the task. Project can work with task durations that range from minutes to months. Depending on the scope of your project, you’ll probably want to work with task durations on the scale of hours, days, and weeks.

For example, a project might have a project calendar with working time defined as 8 A.M. through 5 P.M. with a one-hour lunch break Monday through Friday, leaving nonworking time defined as evenings and weekends. If you estimate that a task will take 16 hours of working time, you could enter its duration as 2d to schedule work over two eight-hour workdays. By starting the task at 8 A.M. on a Friday, you should then expect that it wouldn’t be completed until 5 P.M. on the following Monday. No work would be scheduled over the weekend because Saturday and Sunday have been defined as nonworking time.

When working in Project, you can use abbreviations for durations.

Project uses standard values for minutes and hours for durations: one minute equals 60 seconds, and one hour equals 60 minutes. However, you can define nonstandard durations for days, weeks, and months for your project. To do this, on the Tools menu, click the Options command, and in the Options dialog box, click the Calendar tab, illustrated here.

The exercises in this chapter use default values: eight hours per day, 40 hours per week, and 20 days per month.

In this exercise, you enter durations for the tasks you’ve created. When you created those tasks, Project entered an estimated duration of one day for each task. (The question mark in the Duration field indicates that the duration is an explicit estimate, although realistically you should consider all task durations to be estimates until the task is completed.) To enter durations:

In addition to tracking tasks to be completed, you might want to track an important event for your project, such as when the pre-production phase of the project will end. To do this, you will create a milestone.

Milestones are significant events that are either reached within the project (such as completion of a phase of work) or imposed upon the project (such as a deadline by which to apply for funding). Because the milestone itself doesn’t normally include any work, milestones are represented as tasks with zero duration.

In this exercise, you create a milestone.

It is helpful to organize groups of closely related tasks that represent a major portion of the project’s work into phases. When reviewing a project plan, observing phases of tasks helps you and others to think in terms of major work items and detailed work items. For example, it is common to divide a film or video project into major phases of work such as pre-production, production, and post-production. You create phases by indenting and outdenting tasks. You can also collapse a task list into phases, much as you can work with an outline in Word. In Project, phases are represented by summary tasks.

A summary task behaves differently from other tasks. You can’t edit its duration, start date, or other calculated values directly because this information is derived or “rolled up” from the detail tasks, called subtasks (these appear indented under the summary tasks). Project calculates the duration of a summary task as the span of time from the earliest start date to the latest finish date of its subtasks.

In this exercise, you create two summary tasks by indenting tasks.

Projects require tasks to be performed in a specific order. For example, the task of filming a scene must be completed before the task of editing the filmed scene can occur. These two tasks have a finish-to-start relationship (also called a link or dependency) that has two aspects:

In Project, the first task (“film the scene”) is called the predecessor because it precedes tasks that depend on it. The second task (“edit the filmed scene”) is called the successor because it succeeds tasks on which it is dependent. Any task can be a predecessor for one or more successor tasks. Likewise, any task can be a successor to one or more predecessor tasks.

Although this might sound complicated, tasks can have one of only four types of task relationships.

This task relationship	Means	Looks like this in the Gantt chart	Example
Finish-to-start (FS)	The finish date of the predecessor task determines the start date of the successor task.		A film scene must be shot before it can be edited.
Start-to-start (SS)	The start date of the predecessor task determines the start date of the successor task.		Reviewing a script and developing the script breakdown and schedule are closely related, and they should occur simultaneously.
Finish-to-finish (FF)	The finish date of the predecessor task determines the finish date of the successor task.		Tasks that require specific equipment must end when the equipment rental ends.
Start-to-finish (SF)	The start date of the predecessor task determines the finish date of the successor task.		The time when the editing lab becomes available determines when a pre-editing task must end. (This type of relationship is rarely used.)

Representing task relationships and handling changes to scheduled start and finish dates is one area in which the use of a scheduling engine, such as Project, really pays off. For example, you can change task durations or add or remove tasks from a chain of linked tasks, and Project will reschedule tasks accordingly.

Task relationships appear in several ways in Project:

You create task relationships by creating links between tasks. Currently, all of the tasks in the project plan are scheduled to start on the same day—the project start date. In this exercise, you use different methods to create links between several tasks, thereby creating finish-to-start relationships.

First you’ll create a finish-to-start dependency between two tasks.

You can record additional information about a task in a note. For example, you might have detailed descriptions of a task and still want to keep the task’s name succinct. You can add such details to a task note. In that way, the information resides in the Project file and can be easily viewed or printed.

There are three types of notes: task notes, resource notes, and assignment notes. You enter and review task notes on the Notes tab in the Task Information dialog box. (You can open the Notes tab by clicking the Task Notes command on the Project menu.) Notes in Project support a wide range of text formatting options; you can even link to or store graphic images and other types of files in notes.

Hyperlinks allow you to connect a specific task to additional information that resides outside of the project plan such as another file, a specific location in a file, a page on the Internet, or a page on an intranet.

In this exercise, you enter task notes and hyperlinks to document important information about some tasks.

To conclude this exercise, you create a hyperlink.

At this point, you might want to know how long the project is expected to take. You haven’t directly entered a total project duration or finish date, but Project has calculated these values based on individual task durations and task relationships. An easy way to view the project’s scheduled finish date is via the Project Information dialog box.

In this exercise, you see the current total duration and scheduled finish date of the project based on the task durations and relationships you’ve entered.