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Learn best practices for adding tasks to a project.

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Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:

2013, 2019/365.

Quick reference

Add Tasks to the Project

When you are building a project, it is a good idea to focus on the particular topic at hand. For example, if you are adding tasks to the project, just add the tasks. In most cases, you will be in meetings where you ask your team to tell you what tasks to add to your project. If the team starts telling you task names, durations, resources, and other estimates, you can get lost in the minutia and forget important tasks.

Steps

Follow these steps when adding tasks to a project:

  • Focus on creating the tasks themselves. Worry about the durations, predecessors, resources, and other details after you get the basic list in place.
  • Whenever you can, have the tasks follow a waterfall approach so the tasks go from top to bottom with the tasks you start with first, to the tasks you do to complete the project.
  • Avoid using long task names.
  • Start a task name with a verb.
  • Only capitalize the first letter in a task name, rather than capitalizing each word. You will find it is much easier to read when you only capitalize the first word.
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  • 00:04 At this point we have a project, and we can start adding tasks.
  • 00:09 Now as a project manager,
  • 00:11 you might think that your job is to start entering these tasks into the plan.
  • 00:16 Well, in reality you probably want to talk to the project team.
  • 00:20 The project team members are the people that really are familiar with the project,
  • 00:26 what needs to get done, and how long it needs to get done.
  • 00:30 Before you start asking questions around how long is it going to take, and
  • 00:34 who exactly is going to do the work, and how much time they needed?
  • 00:39 The best thing to do is to just sit down and ask people,
  • 00:42 from train of thought, what needs to get done in your project?
  • 00:47 Now, what you want to do is have people think from beginning to end.
  • 00:51 In other words, not just throw out here's a bunch of tasks, but
  • 00:56 really think through the order of those tasks.
  • 00:59 You can always rearrange them later.
  • 01:03 When we enter tasks, it's quite simple.
  • 01:05 We just go to a new line, and we start right underneath tasks zero,
  • 01:10 and we start typing a task, like acquire land.
  • 01:13 That's something we need to do to build our new house.
  • 01:18 Now notice when I created this task,
  • 01:21 I created this as a verb at the beginning.
  • 01:25 It's a very good idea to always start the beginning of a task with the verb.
  • 01:30 So we are acquiring, that's the verb, land.
  • 01:34 And as we create more tasks,
  • 01:37 we really want to focus on using that same structure,
  • 01:43 such as create architectural design, acquire a loan.
  • 01:50 When we're creating these tasks, we want to make sure that they are clear,
  • 01:56 they're succinct, and they're not to run on.
  • 02:01 And what I mean by that is, you don't want to have to write a paragraph of text
  • 02:05 here when you're creating these tasks.
  • 02:08 So tasks that people perform should always start with a verb.
  • 02:13 You can decide if you want to capitalize all of the letters after the first word.
  • 02:18 So you can see here I have Create architectural design with the first cap
  • 02:23 of C, and then architectural and design start in lowercase letters.
  • 02:29 It's usually a good idea to do that, because it'll be easier for
  • 02:33 you to read in the future.
  • 02:35 Now you might be tempted to start asking people how they might
  • 02:40 group these tasks together.
  • 02:42 And asking your team to estimate the duration for the tasks and
  • 02:46 how they might be linked together with predecessors.
  • 02:49 You might be tempted to ask what resources that you should add.
  • 02:52 But again, just focus on the key activities,
  • 02:55 we can always add that detail later.
  • 02:58 And if you need to, you can move things around as well, and
  • 03:01 I'll show you how to do that in future lessons.
  • 03:04 So I'm going to go ahead and
  • 03:09 finish creating this project.
  • 03:18 Now we essentially have a project schedule or at least the beginnings of one.
  • 03:23 You can see I've kept the number of tasks to about 21.
  • 03:27 We're building a house here, and
  • 03:29 there's a whole lot of work that gets done every single day when you build a house.
  • 03:33 One of the things you want to do is make sure that when you're asking your team to
  • 03:37 give you estimates for tasks, they're thinking about the big picture.
  • 03:41 What are the key things that need to get done?
  • 03:44 If you need to add detail later, you always can add more detail.
  • 03:48 I like to try and keep things very simple and concise, and
  • 03:53 not put every single task, every single detail into my schedule.
  • 03:59 The reason for that is because if you have a project with too many tasks,
  • 04:03 you're going to find yourself scrolling, moving around.
  • 04:07 Zooming in and out of the Gantt chart trying to find particular tasks,
  • 04:12 and you're going to end up letting Microsoft Project manage you.
  • 04:16 So you want to avoid Microsoft Project managing you.
  • 04:19 You want to spend as much time as you can working with your team.
  • 04:23 So I think this is a good start, we now have the key tasks for
  • 04:27 building our new house.
  • 04:29 And in the next section we're going to estimate the duration for these tasks.

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