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User Guide

Task Management

A task is a planned work intended to put in the estimate prepared by the project manager. A task
is a part of a project that needs to be accomplished within a defined period of time. It
represents actual work that will be done in the project. A task has a beginning and an end. A
project can be presumed to be completed if all the assigned tasks are successfully done. So, task
management plays a vital role in the completion of a project.

To manage a project effectively, project managers need to divide project into tasks of individual
blocks. The ValleySpeak Project Server has the facility to monitor tasks and provide more
assistance to the project manager and his team members.

The concept of a project team allows you to control access to information within a project. All
users assigned to tasks for a project constitute its team. There may also be others who need
access to the project but are not assigned any tasks For example: stake holders. You can add such
members to the project team.

Adding tasks to a Project through ValleySpeak Project Server
A new task can be added only by the Project Owner. Adding the task involves the following fields.

  • Task Name is the name of the task added. The task should be named with sufficient
    description so that it can be communicated to Team Members and Stakeholders
    what the task is about. A Task Name called simply “Task” or “Edit” will not provide enough
    information.
  • Start Date is the date on which the task is assumed to commence. The date can be
    specified manually or by clicking on the calendar icon present at the side.
  • Task Duration it is the total amount of working time required for the completion
    of the task. This is generally the amount of working time from start to finish of the
    task. You can also specify duration in months, weeks, hours and minutes by using the
    Task Duration     drop down. By default the Task Duration is days. The ValleySpeak
    Project Server calculates the Finish Date by itself making use of the Start
    Date     and Task Duration fields.
  • Resource Names this gives the list of all the members involved in the project. The
    task created can either be assigned to the Team Member using the resource names
    listed in the Assigned To scroll bar or can be left unassigned. By default the
    Resource name is set to None.

Since task is a part of the project, before creating any task you need to select a project. Steps
for adding a task are as follows.

  1. Click Projects tab.
  2. Click List Projects in the action bar.
  3. Click one of the project from the project list for which you want to add a task. If
    there are no projects then a message “There are no Projects to display. Click here to
    create a New Project.”     is displayed . You can add a Project by clicking on the link
    “Click here to create a New Project.”.
  4. Click New Task action.
  5. If you have selected an archived project then a message will be displayed.
  6. Fill in the appropriate fields (as described above).
  7. If you select a date for Start Date filed of a task which falls on a non working
    day (Sunday or Saturday) then an alert message will be displayed. If you want to shift to
    next working day then click OK button or if you want to select other working
    day click Cancel.
  8. Click Save & Close button to add a task or Click Cancel to
    cancel the task creation for the project.
  9. To undo the field values typed, Click Reset button.

Suppose you want to change the project for task creation after the New Task action
has been clicked. Then follow these steps for creating a new task in a different project

  1. Choose the appropriate project from the Projects drop down list in the left corner
    of the action bar
  2. Follow above steps from step 4.
Note: Adding a task to a project in the ValleySpeak Project Server will not add the task
in the project file too (MPP). To get the new task in the Microsoft Project file
(mpp project file), open the project in Microsoft Project application. Then under the
ValleySpeak menu, click on the Get updates from Server menuitem. This will update
the local project (mpp file) with the information from the server.

Adding a task through Microsoft project
To add a new task through Microsoft project, open the project file (mpp) in the application. Once
you have created a new task, selct the Publish to server menuitem under the ValleySpeak
 menu. This will publish the changes to the server. Once the operation is successful, the new
task can be seen under the List Task action under that project in ValleySpeak Project
Server.

Deleting tasks in a Project
The task can be deleted only through Microsoft Project. Once a task has been deleted in Microsoft
Project, the changes have to be published for it to be reflected in ValleySpeak Project Server. To
do this, click on the Publish to Server menuitem under the ValleySpeak menu in
Microsoft Project application.

Editing Tasks
Editing tasks involves several attributes. The task attributes are:

  • Project Name of the Project to which the task belongs to.
  • Name The name of the task.
  • Priority The priority of the task.
  • Start Date The date on which the task is started which is mentioned while the task is
    created.
  • Finish Date The day the task is expected to finish. This is calculated using the
    Start Date,Task Duration     and the Duration Format.
  • Resource Names The list of all the Members involved in the Project for which
    the task needs to be edited.
  • Deadline The date on which the task is expected to complete.
  • Percentage Complete The amount of work completed for a task assigned in terms of
    percent.
  • Created on The date on which the task was created.
  • Actual Cost Shows the cost of the completed task.
  • Remaining Cost Shows the cost of the in-progress task.
  • Actual Work Done Total number of work hours completed on a task so far.
  • Remaining Work Done Total number of work hours remaining for the completion of the
    task.
  • Actual Cost of Work Done The amount of budget that should have been spent by now on
    this task.
  • Task Cost The total scheduled cost for a task, including expected costs and those
    already incurred.
  • Critical Shows whether the task is critical(task near to completion).
  • Effort Driven Work Shows whether the task has effort driven work.
  • Overallocated Shows whether resources have been assigned work beyond their work
    capacity or availability.
  • Recurring Specifies whether the task is recurring.
  • Milestone Specifies whether the task is a milestone. Any task with 0 duration is
    automatically set as a milestone.
  • Task Notes The notes which annotate the individual tasks. A task note is a
    description about the changes made to a task. It is used to provide a detailed information
    to other Project Members or the Team Member associated.A task notes field is the read only
    field and can be added only when the project is opened in the microsoft project and Task
    Notes field cannot be edited

To edit a task that is already created, first you need to select a task of a particular project
which needs to be edited. Follow these steps to edit a task:

  1. Click Projects tab or Tasks tab.
  2. Click List Tasks action available in the action bar.
  3. Select a project from the Project drop down list for which you want to edit the task
  4. List of tasks will be displayed for the project selected from the Project drop down.
  5. Click the task row for which you want to edit.
  6. Fill in the appropriate fields.
  7. Click Save and Close to save the changes made or Click Cancel
    to discard the changes made to the task.
  8. Click Reset button to undo the changes made to the task information.
Note: A task can only be edited by the Admin, the Project Owner or the Team
Member to whom it is assigned.

Task Scheduling
Now you have finished adding the tasks for a project. Also created a good list of tasks. Now you
need to schedule the tasks for efficient task management.

Task management and time management are most related to development of your project schedule.
Project schedule is the road map for completing tasks, handing off deliverables, passing
milestones, and finally achieving the goals of your project in a timely manner.

For developing an accurate and efficient project schedule, you need to do the following things:

  • Identify the task duration.
  • Identify the relationships and dependencies of the tasks.
  • Schedule the tasks to specific dates.
  • Once these three things are done, you can see a clear picture of project schedule. You
    can now know the period of completion for a particular task and how long will it take for a
    project to complete.

Entering the Task duration
You can enter the task duration using the Task Duration field followed by duration format
present in the drop down list (see Figure: 5.1). The following are the different Duration
Formats that can be specified for the Task Duration:


task-duroptions User Guide


Figure: 5.1 Selecting durations in task.
  • Minutes
  • Hours
  • Days
  • Weeks
  • Months

You can use different Duration Format throughout your plan. One task might be set with a
duration of 2 weeks, and another task might be set for 3 days and so on. By default the Task
Duration is set to days.

  • If you enter a Start Date and Task Duration for a task, the Valley Speak
    Project Server will automatically calculate the Finish date. Calculating the
    Finish Date     is not simply a matter of adding the duration to the start date because the
    company may not work on certain days, may have holidays etc. ValleySpeak Project Server
    will have to schedule tasks around these days.
  • For example, assume that a company works full-day on Saturday and has a holiday on Sunday.
    If a task having duration of 1 day is scheduled to start on Saturday then, you will expect
    the task to finish on Monday, not on Saturday or Sunday.

The Task Duration estimates are formatted with a question mark when you list the tasks to
remind you that they are not yet confirmed by the Project Owner.

Establishing Task Dependencies
Now task durations are entered, you need to schedule the project by identifying the task
dependencies.

A dependency is a relationship between tasks in which the start of one task is dependent on the
start or finish of another task.

In a project not all tasks can be started simultaneously. There is an inherent order to tasks.
Usually, one task cannot begin until a previous task has been completed. Sometimes, several tasks
are dependent upon the completion of one task; sometimes, several tasks must finish before a
single later task can begin. You can establish task dependency between a predecessor task and a
successor task.

When you list the tasks, you can see whether any task is dependent on any other task or not. This
can be verified by looking at the Predecessor column which lists all the task id’s on which the
current task is dependent on (see Figure: 5.2).

Note: Predecessor tasks can be added only through Microsoft Project.

task-listtasks User Guide


Figure: 5.2 Task listing.

Milestones
Milestones are special type of tasks. Milestones often indicate the beginning or ending of major
phases or the completion of deliverables in your project. Any task with 0 duration is
automatically set as a milestone. Milestones do not involve any extra calculation in the schedule.
As you complete a milestone, you are near to the completion of the project.

A milestone task is a task that depends on several preceding tasks to be completed before it can
be be completed. It is imperative that several tasks be completed before the milestone task can
be worked upon.

Note: A Milestone can be created only through Microsoft Project.

Assigning the Tasks to Resources
You have tasks. You have resources. Now you need to assign the tasks for resources. With human,
equipment, and material resources assigned to tasks. Assigning resources is a critical job. You
need to first identify the capabilities of the resource either by expert consultation or by the
previous experience.

When you assign a work resource, you are attaching the resource name to a task and then the
resource’s total availability is to be devoted to this task.

When you assign these resources to tasks, one resource will be available full time to perform one
task. When that’s finished, he/she’ll be assigned full time to the next task, and so on. Upon
assigning this resource to the task, you therefore indicate 100 percent assignment units for this
resource.

Let us look at the case of the three graphic artists whose max units are 300 percent. When you
start to assign tasks to a consolidated resource such as this one, ValleySpeak Project Server does
not assume that you want to use all three on one task. You can, but the default assignment units
are 100 percent.

You can assign one resource to a task, multiple resources to a task, or multiple resources to
multiple tasks.

You can assign resource for a task by following these steps:

  1. Click Projects tab.
  2. Click List Projects in the action bar.
  3. Click one of the project from the project list in which a task resource needs to be
    assigned. If there are no projects then a message “There are no Projects to display.
    Click here to add a Project”.     You can add a Project by clicking on the link “Click
    here to add a Project.”    . For creating a new project please refer to Project chapter
  4. Click List Tasks action available in the action bar.
  5. Click the task for which you want to assign or change the resource from the list of tasks.
  6. A page will be displayed with all the information of the task .
  7. You can change or assign a resource by selecting one or more resources from the
    Resources     scroll down list.
  8. Click Save & Close to save the changes made or click Cancel to
    discard the changes.
  9. Click Reset button to undo the changes done.

Monitoring the Task Progress
Once you have added a task, you need to monitor its progress. Monitoring the task progress
involves listing of all the tasks of a projects, view the details of a particular task, updating
the tasks.

List Tasks
This feature helps you to view the list of tasks present. You can either view a list of tasks
present in all the projects you are involved or a list of tasks for a particular project.

To list out all the tasks in a selected project, follow these steps:

  1. Click Projects tab.
  2. Click List Tasks action available in action bar.
  3. List of all the tasks for the project selected in the Project drop down list will be
    displayed. If there are no tasks in a selected project then a message “There are no
    tasks in the project.”     will be displayed.
Note: In task list when you hover on a task which is assigned to you then
the task row will be highlighted with yellow background.

To list the tasks for all the projects you are involved:

  1. Click Tasks tab.
  2. Click List Tasks action available in the action bar.
  3. List of all the tasks for all the projects in which you are involved will be displayed. If
    there are no tasks assigned to you then a message “There are no tasks to display.” will be
    displayed.

The list page will provide you the following information:

  • First column indicates an alert notification which is displayed to whom that task is
    assigned. There are different alert notifications
    • Exclamation mark This alert notification symbol (!) in red color is displayed for
      the tasks which are not yet opened by the Team Members.
    • Approval icon This alert notification symbol is displayed when the percentage
      amount of work updated by the Team Member has been approved by the Project
      Manager      .
    • Disapproval icon This alert notification symbol is displayed when the percentage
      amount of work updated by the Team Member has been disapproved by the Project
      Manager      .
  • Second column indicates the task id.
  • Third column have square icon with different colors indicating the type of task.
    • the dark green color indicates the tasks which are starting today.
    • the light green color indicates the tasks whose end date is today.
    • red color indicates the overdue tasks, i.e their end date is over but the task is not
      completed yet.
  • Fourth column indicates the name of the Task.
  • Fifth column indicates the name of the project of that task.
  • Sixth column indicates the duration of the task. The Task Duration can be specified
    in terms of minutes, hours, days, weeks and months. By default the duration format is days.
    The Task Duration estimates are formatted with a question mark when you list the
    tasks to remind you that they are not yet confirmed by the Project Manager. The
    confirmation is done only through the Microsoft Project.
  • Seventh column indicates the Start Date of the task .
  • Eighth column indicates the Finish Date of the task mentioned during the creation
    of the task.
  • Ninth Column indicates the amount of work completed in terms of percentage for the task.
    Once the Team Member has updated the amount of work the status of the task would be
    set to Pending (see task-8.jpg). The Pending status is
    displayed beside the %completion value in the list page for both Project Owner and
    Team Member. When the Project Owner approves the amount of work done by the
    Team Member then the new updated value will be shown in %Completion column of
    list page and it is reflected in the task history. If the Project Owner rejects the
    amount of work done then a disapproval icon will be displayed in the first column of a list
    page for a Team Member and the previous value will be shown in %Completion
    column of list page and the disapproval process will be reflected in task history of that
    task.
  • The last column lists the names of the resources assigned to the task.

The number of tasks displayed per list page depends on the the value of Num of records per page
 preference (available in Preferences tab under Global settings
action) set by you. If the number of tasks in a project exceeds the value of Num of records per
page preference then the task entries are handled by pagination scheme (see Figure: 5.2).
For example, If you have set the above preference value as 10 and the number of tasks available in
the selected project are 20 then the tasks are displayed in two pages (i.e. 10 tasks per page).


task-list-selectedpage User Guide


Figure: 5.2 Selecting a different page to view.

To navigate between list pages, select the page number in the Page number drop down
available in the filter bar and as you select a page number from the drop down a task list for
that page will be displayed. The Page number drop down will be displayed only when the
number of tasks to display are more than the value set in the Preferencestab.

Filters for task
A filter contains instruction called criteria. The criteria specifies the rule, based on which the
tasks are listed. Filters help you in displaying only part of the information that is preferred.
Their purpose is to bundle, sort, and list tasks for the selected criteria. In addition, you can
have multiple filters performing multiple actions that might effect the same task in several ways.

The different criteria are:

  • Status filters according to the status of a task. The status can be:
    • Overdue Tasks the tasks that have not completed yet even though the Finish
      Date has crossed.
    • Completed Tasks the tasks that have completed on time.
    • Incomplete Tasks the tasks that are under completion.
    • Needs Approval the tasks that are updated by the Team Member needs approval
      by the Project Manager.
  • Assigned to filters according to the Assigned resources.
    • Any Start filters according to the Start date of the task.
    • Any Finish filters according to the Finishing date of the task.

    • Involves Any       filters the tasks if any task is scheduled for todays date.

Whenever you would like to view a filtered list of tasks, select the the appropriate filter
options and click Apply Filter button. For example: If you want to view all the
Overdue Tasks, then you need to select the Status Overdue value in the
Status drop down filter and click Apply Filter. The result would the list
of all the overdue tasks.

Note: Filters will be displayed only when you are in List Tasks page.

Pending Tasks
Team Members need to update the position of the allocated task indicating in percentage of
work done. This will be shown as “pending” until the Project Owner approves the work done
by the Team Members. In other words all tasks assigned to Team Members needs
approval from the Project Owner. Further the Team Members can continue their work on the
same task and update the progress until the Project Manager approves the percentage of work done.
If the Project Manager is not satisfied with the work done, he can disapprove the work. If the
percentage of work done has been disapproved by the Project Manager, then the percentage
completion would be the previous value.

The Project Owner can directly edit the percentage of work completion. But if a Team
Member edits the percentage of work done, the team member will continue to see the old value
of Percentage Done field, but with the word pending adjacent to it, indicating that it
still has to be approved by the Project Owner.

The Project Owner receives an alert for pending approval. Also there will be an alert
displayed in the Dashboardfor every modification done for the Percentage
Completion field. The Project Owner can approve or disapprove the team member’s
modification request. Only after the task is approved by the project owner, the team member can
see that the change has taken effect. Also after approval from Project Owner the Team
Member gets an alert saying task changes approved.

For example: If you want to change the Percentage Done from 20% to 30% for the task
assigned to you, the following steps have to be followed:

  1. Click Tasks tab.
  2. Click List Tasks action available in the action bar.
  3. Click the task from the list of tasks for which you want to update the percentage of work
    done. This will display the selected task with all the information.
  4. Select the new value for Percentage Complete field from the Percentage Done
    drop down.
  5. Click Save and Close button to modify the Percentage of Work Done .
  6. This will take you to the list of task , with old value in the % done field but with the
    word pending adjacent to it.
  7. After it gets approved by the Project Owner the new value will be displayed in the
    Percentage Completion column.

A Project Owner can approve or disapprove progress of a task assigned to a Team Member
 by clicking Approve or Disapprove button.

Steps to approve/disapprove a task:

  1. Click Projects tab.
  2. Select a project from the Project drop down list.
  3. Click List Tasks action available in action bar. List of tasks in that
    project will be displayed.
  4. Select a task which needs approval/disapproval (i.e, a task with Pending
    status) by clicking the required task row from the list displayed.
  5. To approve the progress of a task updated by a Team Member click Approve
     button.
  6. To disapprove the progress of a task updated by a Team Member click
    Disapprove     button.

Log History
In ValleySpeak Project Server, log history is associated with all operations you perform on tasks.
ValleySpeak Project Server has an automatic mechanism to record the changes made to a task and
display it to the Project Members. Task history is displayed at the bottom of the view
task page. It provides following information:

  • Log Date-Time: The date and time when a particular change is made to a task.
  • User Name: Name of a Project Member who made the change.
  • Field Name: The field whose value is changed by the Project
    Member    .
  • Change: Actual change made to a task.

Whenever a new task is added to a project, the ValleySpeak Project Server will record it into the
task history as “New Task” which will be shown in the Field Name column of the Task history.

Changes made to Field Name such as Resources, Percentage Complete are all shown in
the Change column with the format “oldvalue => newvalue”.

For example: Suppose a Team Member updates a %Completion value of a task assigned to him
from 53% to 62%, if the Project Owner disapproves %Completion updated by a Team Member
 then Change column of history will show the changes as 53=>62 (Disapproved).