Understand project timelines

Transcript

Here we have a project in the process of being planned. Parent tasks are not usually assigned to a person when they are used to group several tasks, like here in Create, Copy, and Layout. Each sub-task has a job role assigned to it, and will later be assigned to a user who has the needed skill. When the work done in one task is required as input to another task, predecessors are used to show this sequential relationship. When two tasks or parent tasks can be done in parallel, no predecessor is used. This is the case with Photo Shoot. Create, Copy, and Layout does not have to even be started before Photo Shoot can start. You can see this by looking at the start on dates of both tasks. They are the same. A good way to get an overview of your timeline is with the Gantt chart. Clicking here will show both the Gantt chart and the task view together. Here it’s a little more obvious that the Photo Shoot subtasks are independent of other subtasks. You can collapse tasks in the task view to improve the overview. You can turn on Critical Path to see the critical path in your project. To do this, click on the gears icon. If any task on the critical path slips, the planned completion date for the project slips. Photo Shoot would have to slip a lot before it becomes part of the critical path.

We’re using the standard view right now, which is good for creating your project plan. When you’re monitoring your plan, you might want to use the status view, which shows you a status column and a flags column. The flags give you a quick look at several interesting points for each task. Hover over a flag to see what it shows. The first flag shows the progress status.

The next shows notes or comments made on the task. Click on it to add a comment or read a comment.

If there are any notes on the task, the flag will indicate it by not being grayed out. Next is a document flag. If there are any documents attached to this task, it will not be grayed out, and you can click on it to go to the documents area for this task. Next is open issues. There may be issues on this task that have already been resolved. Resolved issues will not turn this flag on. But if there are any unresolved or open issues, then the flag will indicate it. Again, clicking here will take you to the issues tab. If the approval flag is grayed out, there is no approval required for this task. If it is lit, then there is an approval required. The next flag is on if this task is on the critical path, and off if it’s not. The diamond flag appears if the task is a milestone, and hovering over it will tell you the name of the milestone. Recent activity is another useful view.

It shows the last update date and the last note, along with the name of who made the last update. Should you schedule your project from a start date or a completion date? You can set this in project details. When you create a project, you have the option to choose the schedule mode. If you choose start date, you’ll enter the planned start date here. Then Workfront will calculate the planned completion date based on the task durations and predecessors in your project. If you choose completion date, you’ll enter the planned completion date here. Then Workfront will calculate the planned start date based on the task durations and predecessors in your project. A common misconception is that you should choose to schedule from a completion date if you need your project to finish by a particular date. This is not true. Either schedule mode will help you work toward the planned completion date. Scheduling from a completion date simply means you tell Workfront your desired completion date, and it will calculate the latest possible date that you can start and still get it done according to your plan. If one task on your critical path slips by a day, you’ll miss your planned completion date by a day. If your completion date is critical, it’s best to schedule from a start date, where your planned completion date calculates to a little before the particular date you need to be done. Then you have a little slack in your timeline in case something takes longer than expected. Back to our tasks now. There’s another thing that Workfront does that you need to know about. It’s something called a task constraint that each task has. We can change to a task constraint view to see this. In this view, you can see the task constraints. There are 11 of them. For now, we’re only concerned about two task constraints, as soon as possible and as late as possible. When you choose to schedule from a start date, which is what we have now, Workfront sets the default task constraint for each new task created to as soon as possible. But if you choose to schedule by a completion date, Workfront sets the default task constraint for each new task created to as late as possible. This is important to be aware of if you ever change the schedule mode after you’ve created your project. You can see the difference it makes in the calculated plan dates for task 11 when I change the task constraint to as late as possible. The planned completion date changes from December 27th to January 27th. This is because task 11 was not on the critical path, and the schedule mode is set back to start date. But as you can see now in the Gantt chart, it’s been moved up to complete as late as possible without changing the planned completion date of the project. If you want to see a task constraint column like this, you can create a custom view. This is all there is to it. Go to the View tab and select New View. Then click on Add Column. Start typing constraint. And select Task Constraint under the task object. Name the view and click Save View.