Projects & Tasks Configuration Options Overview

Video explains the configuration options that are available in the Projects & Tasks add-on in Project Insight.

Transcript:

In this video, I am going to explain how to configure your projects and tasks. There are a lot of different options in Projects and Tasks. At the top, you can decide the types of views you would like to enable for the system, whether you want the task list, the Gantt chart, the planning board, the status board, assignment board, or calendar views. If you uncheck these boxes, they will disappear from all of your projects.

This other option here has a whole separate video on it: intelligent scheduling. That's what most people want—intelligent scheduling turned on. Work effort input allows you to enter work as hours, which is our typical option. For example, a task may take four hours or two hours to complete. However, we do offer optional story points and t-shirt sizes for those who are familiar with Agile and Scrum. I won’t get into the details of what those terms mean, but usually, everyone just enters their work hours, which is pretty straightforward.

Next, there are work adjustment hours for multiple resources. Typically, when you have a task set up and say that this task is eight hours, if you assign someone to it and then add another person, it would give the second person eight more hours of work. However, you can choose to have the work divided between the two people. You can set this up as your default for when you add a new person to a task. Normally, you would want the add and remove options to be the same, meaning when you remove someone, the existing work would be divided evenly among the other people or the work would be added proportionally. This configuration typically depends on how you are managing the assignment of someone to a task.

At the bottom, there are a couple of options at the project level to show all related items of a summary task, or to show the description. This means that if you have a summary task, any attachments to that summary task will appear on every child task. The same goes for the description, which will appear on the child tasks. These options are defaulted to off, but you can turn them on or off as needed.

There are also task default settings. In the task default settings, you have options to auto-populate work from duration. This means that when you input the duration, it will assume one day is eight hours. You can also have it auto-populate the duration from work, effectively doing the reverse. These two settings are on by default; if you want to turn them off, it is typically only for advanced project managers.

I have a whole other video on what the default calculation type is. Normally, when a task is created, you provide the duration—five days, eight hours—and the system will calculate that to represent 20% of someone's workday across the week. There is also a task constraint type default. Usually, ASAP after task creation is our standard default, which means if you start a task today and there are no predecessors, the task will start today if you add one in today. Another default, which is more like Microsoft Project, is ASAP after the project start date. However, our default is that it takes into account both the project start date and today’s date when the task is created. This prevents you from adding a task if your project was set three months ago and ensuring it doesn't automatically calculate that task to start back then.

Task predecessor defaults to lag. You can turn it on so that it's either lead time or lag time when you put a predecessor in. Typically, a predecessor has no lead or lag. However, if you input five days of lag, it means the next task will start five days after. If you want lead time, that means that task will start and overlap with its predecessor.

You can change that option here for time entry and expense entry options. If you have those turned on in your system, you can enable or disable capturing time for tasks. This option is usually active, but clients may choose whether or not the billable flag is on by default for a task. If you are consistently logging billable time for a client, you would generally have this billable flag turned on. However, if that is not the case, you can turn it off. This setting only matters if you are using billable time and actual time entries.

The third option is whether or not the user can actually toggle the billable status. If you want the project manager to dictate the availability of these tasks, this setting will prevent the individual from turning it off. The same options regarding expenses on tasks are also available here. When you want to go back to your project configuration, just click the button here, and it will take you back to the screen I just explained a moment ago.

[Music]