Project 2010 Bible

Chapter 4. Building Tasks

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Establishing timing for tasks

• Assigning task timing

• Using recurring tasks

• Establishing constraints and deadline dates

• Manipulating the Gantt Chart to view timing

• Entering task notes

• Establishing dependencies among tasks

• Viewing dependencies

• Deleting dependencies

Hesiod, that classic Greek project manager, once said, "Observe due measure, for right timing is in all things the most important factor." You could do worse than to use this truism from around 700 B.C. as your personal project management mantra today. When it comes to projects, timing is, indeed, everything.

In Chapter 3 you created several tasks and used the outlining feature of Project to organize them. If you used automatic scheduling, every task in your schedule has the default length (one estimated day), and they all occur on the same day. If you used manual scheduling, no task has any length. In essence, you have listed the steps to get to your goal, but with no related timing information, and your schedule is more like a to-do list than a project schedule.

You have to add durations to your tasks. In other words, you must establish how long (or how many hours of effort) each task will take. However, timing consists of more than determining how many hours, days, or weeks it takes to complete each task. Timing for your project becomes clear only when you've set a duration for each task and when you've established the relationships, called dependencies, among the tasks. Only then can you ...