Add Tasks to the Project

Quick reference

• 00:04 At this point, we have a project.
• 00:07 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,
• 00:25 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
• 00:35 who exactly's going to do the work, and how much time they need it.
• 00:38 The best thing to do is to just sit down and
• 00:41 ask people from train of thought, what needs to get done on your project.
• 00:47 Now, what you want to do is have people think from beginning to end.
• 00:51 In other ends not just throw out, here's a bunch of tasks,
• 00:55 but 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, we just go to a new line, and
• 01:07 we start right underneath task 0.
• 01:10 And we start typing a task, like acquire land.
• 01:14 That's something we need to do to build our new house.
• 01:18 Now notice when I created this task, I created this as a verb at the beginning.
• 01:26 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.
• 01:33 Land.
• 01:34 And as we create more tasks,
• 01:37 we really want to focus on using that same structure.
• 01:40 Such as, create architectural design.
• 01:47 Acquire a loan.
• 01:50 When we're creating these tasks, we wanna make sure that they are clear,
• 01:56 they're succinct, and they're not too run on.
• 02:01 And what I mean by that is you don't want to have to write a paragraph of text here,
• 02:05 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
• 02:23 cap of C and then architectural and design start in lowercase letters.
• 02:29 It's usually a good idea to do that.
• 02:31 Because it will be easier for you to read in the future.
• 02:35 Now you might be tempted to start asking people how they might group
• 02:40 these tasks together and asking your team to estimate the duration for
• 02:44 the tasks and they might be linked together with predecessors.
• 02:49 You might be tempted to ask what resources you should add, but
• 02:52 again just focus on the key activities.
• 02:56 We can always add that detail later.
• 02:58 And if you need to you can move things around as well.
• 03:01 And I'll show you how to do that in future lessons.
• 03:04 So I'm going to go ahead and finish creating this project.
• 03:18 Now we essentially have a project schedule, or
• 03:20 at least the beginnings of one.
• 03:23 You can see I've kept the number of tasks to about 21.
• 03:26 We're building a house here and
• 03:28 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'll wanna 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.
• 03:42 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.
• 03:54 and 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,
• 04:04 you're going to find yourself scrolling, moving around, zooming in and
• 04:08 out of the Gantt chart, trying to find particular tasks, and
• 04:12 you’re going to end up letting Microsoft Project manage you.
• 04:17 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.
• 04:24 So I think this is a good start.
• 04:26 We now have the key tasks for building our new house.
• 04:30 And then the next section we're going to estimate the duration for these tasks.

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