Summary Tasks

Toby: Welcome back to our course on Project 2013. In this section we’re going to take our first

look at summary tasks. And in the context of this building project, it’s a way of grouping a whole related set of tasks together so that we can effectively see the wood for the trees. We can look at a group of tasks as one particular part of our project and then in some situations look at them as a group together and in other situations look at them as separated out into their individual tasks again.

So the first thing I’m going to do is to look at one of the tasks we already have which is Prepare site, the first task in that schedule at the moment, and what we’re going to do is to break it down into what might its constituent parts.

So what I’m going to do first is to select the task after it, task number two, right click on task number two, and click on Insert task. I’m going to put a new task in there where it actually says now New task, and the first task is going to be Demolition. Hit the Enter key and my new task is in place. Now you’ll notice, of course, that we’ve got the one day estimate. I’m not too worried about that at the moment. But let me now select that task, the one that’s just been inserted, and then what I’m going to do is to select the Task tab. And then on the Task tab in the Schedule Group, one of the options just here, an arrow pointing right, is indent task. And if you look at the screen tip for that, This task becomes a subtask. When I make Demolition a subtask of Prepare site, several things happen.

First of all, although the duration of Demolition doesn’t change, it’s still one day with a question mark; it is indented. And Prepare site becomes a summary task. Now you notice that before we did that, Prepare site task had a duration of 10 days. Once a task becomes a summary task, it no longer has its own duration. Its duration is determined by the total duration, the total elapse time of all of its constituent subtasks. So if Demolition is one day question mark, then Prepare site is one day question mark.

Let’s suppose that I think the demolition is actually going to take five days. So let me just set that at five days, tick on the entry bar, and as you can see the summary task, Prepare site, also has a duration of five days. So we have our first summary task which is Prepare site.

Now at this point I always get a little bit concerned because I know there’ll be at least on builder in one country following this and he will basically disagree with what happens next, but I’m really demonstrating here how to use Microsoft Project not how to build a house. So I apologize for the obvious errors in what comes next. I’m just going to put two or three other constituent subtasks within the Prepare site task. So the first thing I’m going to do is put in the next task which is Set out site which basically means that having demolished whatever was there we are going to basically mark out and measure out exactly which bits of the house are going to go where on the site. So now I select Task 3 and this time I’m going to put as my task Set out site and I only need to allow one day for that so I’m going to click on that. Notice that it inherits the level of indent of the task above. So it assumes that this is also a subtask and all I’m going to do here is delete the question mark because I’m happy with one day, click on tick, and I’ve now got a one day task. Now, of course, we know that Set out site won’t happen until Demolition is finished. So let’s select two and three and in the way that we did earlier, let’s make a link between them. And now notice what’s happened to Prepare site, our summary task. It now has a duration of six days because it’s five days followed by one day.

The other thing you may already have noticed about Prepare site is that there’s a little wedgy thing there next to the word Prepare and if I click on that wedge what happens is the summary task is collapsed and it just appears as a summary task. Now you’re going to always know it’s a summary task because it’s bold, it’s got that little wedge to indicate that it’s a summary task, and in fact the shape that appears in the Gantt Chart is different. Now as we’ll see later we can certainly customize the way that summary tasks look in the Gant Chart but for the moment by default they’re the tell-tell signs that tell me that I’m dealing with a summary task here. Let me just expand it out again because I want to put in another subtask within the Prepare site summary task.

So I’ve selected Lay foundation. In fact, I’m going to put two more tasks in here. This time I’m going to use the command in the Insert Group on the Task tab. I’m just going to click it twice to insert two new tasks. The first new task is In ground plumbing, so this is basically all of the pipe

work that’s going on underneath the house; that’s the first part. And then for the second one I’m going to put the task Excavation. That just covers anything else that needs to be done underneath the house before I start working on the foundations. Now the In ground plumbing, I’m going to allow just two days for and the Excavation two days for as well. Tick that and notice that because I haven’t put the dependencies in yet, I still need to set those up. Link and my Prepare site task now has its original duration of 10 days. But I’ve now got all of the constituent tasks that make it up.

Now what I want to do is to look at some of the dependencies that exist within this schedule now.

If I select Task 6 which is Lay foundation, what I want to do now is to put it into Split View so that I can look at some of the properties of Task 6. So on the View tab click on Details and that shows me by default the task form. You probably noticed before that the task form can take different forms. If I right click within that form while it’s displayed, I can choose which of the tables or combinations of tables of data are shown. If I wanted to say see resources and predecessors, if I select that on the contextual menu I see here the resources that are used. There are none currently used in Lay foundation, and the only predecessor is Prepare site. Now the important thing here is that prepare site is itself a summary task and since all of these other tasks, subtasks, Demolition; Set out site; In ground plumbing; Excavation, are all subtasks of Prepare site, there is no need for me to setup a dependency between those individual subtasks and the task Lay foundation. Now I certainly wouldn’t want to lay the foundations of my house before I’d done the in ground plumbing, so I put in all the waste pipes, water supply, etc. But I don’t need to worry about that because these subtasks are all within the Prepare site summary task and the whole of the Prepare site summary task is a predecessor of Lay foundation.

Now I need to point out one or two other important things to you about summary tasks, but one thing I want to point out now, although we will be coming back to it in more detail later on, is that when you’re dealing with a summary task like this one, Prepare site, you wouldn’t normally work out what resources you need for Prepare site itself. You would normally work out the resources you need for each of the subtasks, and then effectively the resources for the summary task are the sort of rolled up total of all of those resources; but more on resources later on. For the moment, I want to concentrate on actually setting up the summary task and in particular

looking at dependencies. So I’m just going to get rid of that task form for the moment and I’m going to now turn my attention to one of the other tasks which is Fit windows and doors.

Now I’m going to split that job up into two parts. I’m going to have a Fit windows part and a Fit doors part just to demonstrate something in particular. So I’ll select Task 9 and then on the Task tab, I’ll click on Insert task twice and I’m going to say Fit doors and I’ll say Fit windows. Now I’m going to select Task 9 and Task 10, both of them, and then I’m going to indent them to make them subtasks. I can select as many of those I like and indent them. What I’ve now got is that Fit windows and doors is a summary task and it has two subtasks.

Now let me select the Fit windows task, right click, click on Insert task, and this time I’m going to say Ground floor doors, tick, indent, and now Fit doors is actually itself a summary task within Fit windows and doors. Let’s put another one of those summary tasks in there. You can probably guess what’s coming next, and this demonstrates that you can have summary tasks operating at multiple levels. So in this case we could separate out the task of fitting the ground floor doors and fitting the upper floor doors and, of course, those two tasks could be further broken down into the individual doors if I wanted to. What you choose as the level to which you’re preparing this schedule is a very subjective thing and if I say now split out the ground floor doors and I put in six separate subtasks there for Ground floor door 1, Ground floor door 2, Ground floor door 3. There’s absolutely no reason I shouldn’t do that but it’s going to start to become quite an unwieldy project. Whether you need to do that or not will be very subjective. It will very much depend on your approach and the requirements of your particular project. But clearly you could do that and you can have summary tasks operating at multiple nested levels. So having split Fit windows and doors into the subtasks of Fit doors and Fit windows, and then further subdivided each of those, what I’m now going to do is to put in the proper time estimates for each of those jobs. So I reckon the ground floor doors to be four days work. I reckon the upper floor doors to be two days work. The ground floor windows three days; the upper floor windows three days, giving me a total of 12 days work for our carpenter. Now the number of doors we set at nine so we’re now talking about five doors on the ground floor and four doors on the upper floor. And the number of windows is 12; that should be six windows on the ground floor and six windows on the upper floor, so an even split.

Now the next thing that I’d like you to do, this is your exercise. I’m going to save this as example_09. I would like you to allocate those resources to the subtasks. They won’t be allocated to the summary tasks at either level. They’ll be allocated at the subtasks. So the doors are five on the ground floor, four on the upper floor. The windows are 12 in total and there are six on the ground floor and six on the upper floor. And then in the next section what we’re going to do is to look at the scheduling issues here because in theory, we could be fitting say the upper floor doors while we’re fitting the upper floor windows; ground floor doors while we’re doing the ground floor windows. But there is another factor. It isn’t only down to dependencies. It’s also down to resources and if we’ve only got one carpenter on the job, we’re going to need to make sure that we get the carpenter working on those jobs in the right sequence. And so we’re going to look at scheduling next.

But just to summarize that task again. I’m going to save this as example_09 and you’re going to allocate the windows and doors as I just said. Don’t worry about putting the tasks in sequence because that’s what we’re going to do in the next section. My answer to this question is example_10 in the supplied files.

Chapter 15 – Scheduling

Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2013. In this section we’re going

to start to look at scheduling which is probably the fundamental aspect of Microsoft Project 2013 for most people. And what we mean by scheduling is to take all of the information we’ve got about our project and the tasks in it, and coming up with a sequence of events that satisfies all sorts of criteria. Even if we don’t have an end date in mind, let’s take our building project for example. If we’re not specifically aiming at an end date, when we start it will normally be the case that we’ll want to get the job finished as quickly as possible. If you’re building houses, it’s obviously a high priority to get those houses on the market, sold, and moving on to your next job as quickly as you can. So what scheduling is about is taking a load of facts and producing a working schedule that makes best use of the resources available and gets the job done in a timely manner. So let me talk first about some of the key factors that come into play when we’re scheduling, and let’s start with resources.

Whatever sort of project you’re working on there will be limitations on resources. If you look at our house build example which is still pretty straightforward, if you look at this row here, the Build walls task, we have a brick layer allocated. Now if I had two or three brick layers maybe I could get the building of those walls done more quickly. But if I really have only one or I’ve got two, then it really is going to constrain you quickly I can do some parts of the job. Having said that, putting just dozens and dozens of brick layers on won’t necessarily reduce the time taken to build walls proportionally. There’s a balance. There’s an ideal number. And sometimes other factors will come in when it comes to the availability of resources. For instance, if I wanted to get those walls built more quickly, I might put my brick layer on overtime pay, but then obviously that’s going to increase the cost of building the house. So resource availability itself is quite a complex issue. If you look at the question of bricks for example, then assuming that we’ve got a good supply for bricks, the number of bricks available isn’t generally going to be a constraint as such, but it is important that the bricks are available on site by the date that we need to start using them.

Another very important factor in scheduling is the presence of dependencies. So for example, at the moment we’ve got a pretty straightforward dependency between building walls and fitting windows and door, and that is that we can’t start fitting the windows and doors until we’ve built the walls. That’s actually a bit over simplistic and we’re going to review that dependency later on. But it’s certainly true that you can’t start fitting any windows and doors until you’ve done a certain amount of brick work. You couldn’t start fitting the windows and doors at the same moment that you started building the walls because you’d have no walls to fit the windows and doors to. So dependencies can play an important part as well.

Another factor that we haven’t looked at, at all yet but which we’ll come to in a later section is what are generally referred to as constraints. Within a project you may, for example, have a constraint whereby a certain task has to be finished by a certain date or some external factor which occurs at or by a certain date will affect your project. When this happens, you may have one or more tasks with constraints on them. So for instance, something can’t start until the 1st of May or something has to be finished by the 30th of June.

Perhaps the most important factor to bear in mind when you are looking at scheduling a project though is that it is potentially a complex process. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s difficult to do but what it does mean is that you need to understand many of the factors involved in scheduling in order to do it in a way that suits your project and your requirements. What I’d like to do in this section is to look at some of the important underlying factors, and then in the next section we’re going to look at something called leveling. But let’s begin with those important factors.

And the first thing I want to look at is this copy of example_10 which is the building project where we’ve got a couple of summary tasks, and within those summary tasks I’ve correctly allocated some of the physical resources that are needed. Now if I look in Fit windows and doors and just expand that summary task notice something. I allocated carpenter to all four of those tasks. I’ve got the right numbers of doors and the right numbers of windows and in the left hand column in the table with the Gantt Chart, the entry table in this case, notice the little red person symbols. Now in that I column, this is basically indicators column that I haven’t mentioned before, that’s going to show us any issues, any problems that we’ve got and we can