Let’s start building a schedule with a blank slate.
To add our first task to the project schedule we will click the blue plus icon along the tool bar, which will pop open a window for us to add our first task.
You have 3 different task options you can use for adding a new task, regular tasks, Project Level Tasks & milestones.
I like to organize my project schedules with a hierarchy that organizes tasks into an overall project schedule which is broken down into exterior work & exterior work.
To create a hierarchy and group tasks together you will want to first start by using a Project Level tasks.
The first task I am going to add is a task for the Overall project schedule which will help me track the finish and start dates for the overall project & count the overall project duration.
You'll notice that when you use the Project Level task, the duration is grayed out, that is because the duration is dependent upon the subtasks that we will be adding to that project grouping.
So I like to organize my schedules by Exterior Work & Interior work. So now I am going to add a Project Level task for Exterior Work & a Project Level task for Interior work. For these two items I am going to click the plus sign next to the overall project task, so it will add the task as a subtask to the overall project task.
Okay, now that we have added in our Project Level tasks we can start adding in regular tasks and milestones as subtasks to our Project level groupings.
For exterior work, we will be adding a new roof, new windows, new doors, & exterior painting.
Because we are wanting roofing to be a subtask for the Exterior work, we will click the add icon next to the Exterior Work task.
For roofing I am going to use the regular task option, and the roof should take only 2 days to complete.
So now that we have added in this task you should see both the Overall Project Task & the Exterior Work task durations are 2 days, because the Project Level task durations are calculated based upon the subtasks in their grouping.
Let’s add the new windows, new doors & exterior painting subtasks and schedule the items and set the dependencies on our schedule. Windows will happen after roofing, exterior painting will happen after the windows are installed.
Now that we have added in the subtasks you should notice that the duration of the Overall project and the exterior work has increased to 8 days, because again, Project Level Task durations are based upon the subtasks start and completion dates. The beginning of our exterior work starts on the 12th of november, and the end of the exterior work isn't completed until the 20thth of nov, so our overall duration for the Exterior work is 8 days.
To show you an overall picture of how the hierarchy works once you build out a complete rehab schedule, let’s just load our Gut Rehab Schedule.
As you can see on our Gut Rehab Schedule, we have an overall project timeline of 59 days. In our gut rehab timeline, we our exterior work is going to take 21 days and we will also be working on the interior work at the same time which will take around 57 days.
But what would happen to our overall schedule if we didn’t start the interior work until the exterior work was completed? Okay, we are going to remove the existing connection and change the interior work so it starts after all of the exterior work has been completed. When we turn on auto scheduling it automatically shifts everything down schedule.
And now look our overall project duration is now calculated at 78 days because we aren’t starting the interior work until after the exterior work has been completed.
So to wrap it all up, Project Level task are a powerful tool that can be used to create project hierarchies and organize your project tasks into groupings to get a better understanding of overall project durations and schedule breakdowns of exterior work, interior work or any other groupings that you need to better manage your projects.
