Project Planning and Identifying Project Tasks

Guide to Define Tasks for Project to Ensure Complete Project Plan

Jan 13, 2009 Roger Lever

Project planning must identify project tasks at a level of detail allowing a project manager to capture all significant tasks and so ensure a comprehensive project plan.

The detailed project planning process ensures that all stakeholders are engaged as needed to define the project plan. However, it is a question of judgment as to what level of detail is used to define the individual project tasks of the plan. Consequently, the project plan tasks can vary in detail unless a consistent approach is taken. The importance of consistency is to enable the project manager to capture all significant tasks.

Key Characteristics of a Project Task

A project task can be:

• Any defined project activity such as installing software, writing a document or attending training
• Resources assigned to complete the activity can be one or more people
• Defined activity can be any length of time or duration from a few hours, to days or weeks
• Cost involved with the task can be small or great

Project tasks will also have relationships to other project tasks:

• Activity can have zero, one or many inputs
• Activity can have zero, one or many outputs
• Activity must start before or after another task
• Activity must finish before or after another task

SMART Project Tasks

Since project tasks can be virtually anything and have possibly multiple relationships with other tasks it is important to try and be consistent and work at a level of detail that ensures all significant tasks are captured. The following guide to project tasks is intended to help project managers select an appropriate level of detail and use that consistently for project planning. Project tasks should be SMART:

1. Specific - a single, well defined, discrete activity
2. Measurable - it should be an activity that can be measured such as a deliverable produced, an elapsed period of time or number of iterations
3. Achievable - it should be something that can be done as a single task and can be defined as being completed or done such as a document being produced
4. Results-oriented - some deliverable or output is produced by the activity
5. Time-bound - defined period of time for task to be done

Resource and Time Component of Project Tasks

Given this SMART delivery focus, project tasks should be assigned to an individual and if a group must be involved then one person is selected as being responsible for the completion of the group task. Secondly, as a rule of thumb, the time allocation for any single task should be:

• Elapsed Time - one week but no greater than two weeks and probably no less than 1 day
• Effort - 2 to 4 days - no greater than 5 days and probably no less than 0.5 day

Adjust elapsed time or effort in either direction depending on the overall length of the project. However, the important point is to consistently use the time allocation and to break down larger tasks into subtasks. For example, if a single task is expected to take a month then it should be broken down into four smaller sub tasks. This process is essential to defining "missing tasks" and often results in a more complete and comprehensive set of project tasks.

Effective Project Planning

Project planning is essential to a successful project and identifying project tasks is critical to producing a complete and comprehensive project plan. Use this guidance as a starting point to performing effective project planning.

The copyright of the article Project Planning and Identifying Project Tasks in Business Management is owned by Roger Lever. Permission to republish Project Planning and Identifying Project Tasks in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Project Task	Project Planning	Successful Project
Project Manager

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