Task Trouble

Michael is a computer scientist and IT projects officer/projects officer with hands-on project and leadership management experience across multiple IT domains: application development, database, security and infrastructure. He has a master’s degree and advanced federal and industry certifications.

  Schedule Management   Scheduling   Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)  

Over the years as a practicing PMP-certified project manager, both as a career employee and contractor (including some large world-class organizations), I have seen and used different project management tools—from the default MS Project to some industrial-strength tools like Primavera and Clarity.

A common model is the list of work to complete: activities, tasks or work packages, with naming depending on the local practice—vertically listed in rows down the left side, with some single columns with additional information on the item (start, end, duration, etc.); and time-period columns (months, days, etc.) across the right side for a visual time scale on the duration. MS Project calls this the Gantt Chart view, though my research and reading suggest Gantt intended this model for a high-level visual display of major project phases or stages, not mind-boggling detail.

Too often in MS Project and other tools, the vertical list of activities downward is mixed up with schedule organization and work breakdown organization—two distinct views of a project. Or the listing may be a true WBS, but is then distorted by artificially adding the schedule dimension with the connecting dependency lines; this is Microsoft’s awkward solution. And there can be way too many items. This is a fundamental problem of mixing work breakdown structures with time scheduling, two…

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