Using Boards and the Gantt Chart

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About this lesson

Learn how tasks and boards are related, and how tasks appear on various kinds of boards including the Gantt Chart.

Quick reference

When you create new tasks in Microsoft Project, they do not automatically link to other tasks. If you want a critical path on your project, you will have to link new tasks using predecessor and successor relationships.

If you create new tasks on the Task Board view, you will have some other issues. New tasks appear at the bottom of the schedule and does not have additional details like durations and predecessor/successor relationships.

Steps

When you add new tasks in the Task Board and want a critical path:

  • Go to the Gantt chart view.
  • Update the task by moving it to the location you want it, update the duration, and add the predecessor/successor relationships.
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  • 00:04 Whether you are on the Task board, the Planning board, or
  • 00:08 the Sprint board, you're going to notice this New Task item.
  • 00:13 Click that, and then you can create a new task.
  • 00:15 I'll just type New task, and then click the Add button,
  • 00:19 I could also press the Enter key.
  • 00:23 Now that I've created it here in Sprint 2, and they go to the Planning board,
  • 00:28 you'll see there it is, that New task item right there.
  • 00:32 If I go to the Task board, I'll have to find it in this list.
  • 00:39 And there it is, that's the new task.
  • 00:42 So this is good, I have the ability to create a new task and
  • 00:46 put it into the project, but what about the project schedule itself?
  • 00:50 If you're just using these planning views and sprint views as a way to communicate
  • 00:56 with your team, but still want to have that whole, interconnected project.
  • 01:01 Then we have to come back here to the View menu and
  • 01:05 go to the Gantt chart, and see what happened.
  • 01:09 Let's go find that new task.
  • 01:12 I happen to know that anytime you create a new task using that board or
  • 01:17 any one of those boards, it'll always put it down here at the bottom.
  • 01:22 Now notice just visually at the Gantt chart,
  • 01:25 you can see it's not linked up to anything.
  • 01:27 If I go to the View menu, go to Tables and go back to Entry,
  • 01:33 I can see the predecessor successor column.
  • 01:37 There's a number of things that are wrong with this task.
  • 01:40 First, it's only estimated, it doesn't have the number of days,
  • 01:46 I might want this to be a five day item.
  • 01:48 And it's not linked to anything, I might want to take this new task and
  • 01:53 let's just say throw it under here, under add furniture.
  • 02:00 Okay, and then maybe I'll just go ahead and Finalize,
  • 02:07 Furniture, Installation.
  • 02:15 And then just link that up to task number 25.
  • 02:19 And now we're starting to get this back into our work breakdown structure,
  • 02:24 so we have a full critical path on our project.
  • 02:28 So this is how the Agile elements work.
  • 02:31 It doesn't care really how long something takes,
  • 02:35 it doesn't really care where it is in your project.
  • 02:39 Those boards are designed to just display the items, so you can drag and
  • 02:43 drop them around.
  • 02:44 If you want to keep the structure, you have to manually update that yourself.
  • 02:51 So if I come back now to the Sprints tab, and
  • 02:55 I tap the Sprint icon, you can see that new task was
  • 03:00 renamed to Finalize furniture installation.
  • 03:05 Nothing happened to it, everything's just fine, but
  • 03:09 now it's at least linked into the project.
  • 03:13 So if I drag and drop this to Done, you see it makes it 100% complete.
  • 03:19 So now let's go to the Task tab and click the Gantt Chart view.
  • 03:24 And you can see, sure enough,
  • 03:26 Finalized furniture installation is done with that checkmark box next to it.
  • 03:32 And just to verify, if I double click,
  • 03:34 I can see that the percent complete is set to 100%.

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