Audience

System administrators, project managers, project schedulers

Benefits

• Create a summary task
• Input tasks belonging to a summary task
• Add a predecessor to a task

Transcript

Let’s create a summary task and call it Phase 1. Click the clipboard  icon in the ‘action options’ column. Select ‘is summary’ check box, then click ‘save.’

Summary tasks do not require any duration, work or resource assignments as they are roll up tasks that represent the total amount of duration and work from tasks nested underneath them. PMI does not recommend putting resources or predecessors on summary tasks. While Project Insight permits these functions, as a best practice, we do not recommend it.

Now that you have a summary task in place, you may input tasks that belong to that phase or summary. Notice that the triangle next to the task name is pointing downward. This means that any tasks you create will nest automatically under this summary as child tasks.

Let’s create our next task and call it ‘Define project scope.’ We’ll give it 5 days of duration and 10 hours of work. Skip over start and end dates and allow Project Insight’s intelligent scheduling to calculate that.  Assign it to the skill set (resource type) of a Project Manager. Skip over the resource column since we are making a template.

We’ll add a predecessor. Click on the blue ‘Add Predecessor’ link. This brings up a layer to edit predecessors. Select the task from the pull-down menu. You may choose one of the four task dependency types, click the ‘+’ sign and Save.

If you wish to add more summary tasks, you may. Just click on the triangle to collapse Phase 1 and enter your next summary task, ‘Phase 2.’  Again, click the clipboard  icon in the ‘action options’ column. Select ‘is summary’ check box, then click Save.