Identifying activities or tasks

All projects are broken down into a number of activities, or tasks. A task is a unit of work that defines a discrete process at an appropriate level of detail. Too much detail can be difficult to maintain, but too little can prevent effective project management. When you start a project, one of the first steps is to make a list of the tasks in your project and estimate the duration of each task.

You may want to repeat a task. In the example above, if you want to visit several garden centres but can only do it at weekends, you may want to repeat the task over two weekends. You may also want to subdivide your tasks with subheadings. For example, you could divide the list above into Preparation and Construction.

In Asta Powerproject, each task is drawn on a separate line or bar in a bar chart. The length of a task shows how long the task takes to carry out. You can represent each activity as one or more tasks on a bar if required, to show intermittent work on a task. For example, the Visit Garden Centres task could be represented by two tasks, showing that the event is repeated on two weekends.

In Asta Powerproject, you can draw and edit tasks in working or elapsed time. Working time does not include any non-working periods such as lunch breaks, nights, weekends or holidays; elapsed time includes all non-working periods within the day. For example, imagine that your working day is 9:00-17:30, with one hour for lunch at 13:00. If you draw a task from 09:00 with a working duration of six hours, it will finish at 16:00. If you draw a task from 09:00 with an elapsed duration of six hours, it will finish at 15:00.

Planning a project	Creating relationships between tasks

Related topics:

Creating bars and tasks