Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016 Advanced.
In this section we’re going to look at recurring tasks.
Now the use of recurring tasks may not be something that you have come across before
and if you are going to use the technique of recurring tasks you need to be a little
bit careful about one or two of the limitations that apply.
You also need to understand quite clearly how to set recurring tasks up correctly.
Now let me start by giving you an example of where you might use a recurring task and
I’m going to create a little project here comprising just of recurring tasks.
But of course you can create recurring tasks within any kind of project.
And the example that I’m going to use is an example of a progress meeting and it’s
going to be in our case on a certain day of the month.
It’s going to be on the 29th of the month each month and it’s going to be a three
hour meeting on the afternoon of the 29th.
So it’s going to run from 1400 to 1700.
Now given that sort of pattern if you were managing a project that say lasted about the
year you’d be looking at about a dozen progress meetings.
Now this is the first very important point to bear in mind.
If you’re going to set those up as a recurring task you need to be in a situation where you
will not often vary from that pattern.
In fact you’re in a situation where you pretty much stick to that pattern all of the
time.
Now there are some natural variations.
So for instance, the 29th of the month isn’t always on a working day.
Project 2016 can cope with that sort of natural variation.
So that’s fine.
But if what in fact happens is that every month you decide what time of day you’re
going to have the meeting or more often than not the boss decides that it’s not going
to be on the 29th, it’s going to be on the 24th or some other apparently fairly random
change each time then recurring tasks are definitely not the way to go.
You need something that really is pretty consistent, although as I say, Project 2016 can deal with
some of the more obvious, natural variations.
Now before we do this I just want to demonstrate one other thing and that is something that
a surprisingly large number of people don’t generally get to do with Project.
And that is to use times as well as dates in start and finish.
Quite often you don’t need to do it.
People tend to schedule in terms of whole days.
But let me just adjust these column widths and then I’m going to go into the Options
and on the General page I’m going to reset the date format to include the time.
Okay.
Now what I’m going to do is to create my recurring task.
So on the Task tab in the Insert group on the Task dropdown one of the options is Recurring
Task.
That brings up the Recurring Task Information dialog.
I’m going to give my recurring task a name.
Now the duration of the task in this case is just three hours.
Of course I could have any standard duration that I like there, number of days, but in
this case it’s just three hours.
And the recurrence pattern is what I define next.
This is going to occur monthly.
When I select Monthly I can either say the day of the month, so for instance the 14th
as it says here and then the frequency, every one month, two months, three months, etcetera,
or I can say I want, for example, the second Tuesday of every fourth month or something
like that.
So you can set up some pretty sophisticated recurrence patterns.
On this occasion it’s going to be the 29th of each month.
Now I specify the range of recurrence.
Now although the start date here is actually today’s date which is not one of the days
for a project meeting that doesn’t matter.
But I do need to put the correct time in here.
So I’m going to say.
Now I can either specify how many occurrences I want.
So I can check here and say six occurrences.
Or I could just choose an end date and time.
Now I’m going to use the end date and time on this occasion.
In fact I’m just going to go for the end of the calendar year.
Let’s assume my project is going to finish by December the 31st.
As I say Project 2016 will work out the actual dates for me between that range of dates.
Do I need to use a particular calendar for this task?
Well I’m just going to use the standard calendar.
Then I click on OK.
Now what happens is that Project 2016 tries to schedule these project meetings for me.
And if it runs into problems on any of them it will tell me here and give me options of
what I want to do.
Now in this case what has happened is that one of the 29th’s between now and the end
of the year is not a working day.
And it really gives me three options.
The first option, to reschedule the one task occurrence, so that’s the one occurrence
of the 29th not being a working day.
I can choose the first option, click Yes and it will reschedule it for the next available
working time.
Now in this case that may well be at the beginning of a Monday morning.
If the problem here is it’s hitting a weekend day then the meeting will finish up scheduled
for early Monday morning.
Now we’ll address that in just a moment.
If on the other hand I decide that all that happens that month is we won’t have a meeting
then I click No and then that particular task occurrence will not be created.
The third option, to stop the operation, so basically I’ve seen this problem and I thought,
“Oh I don’t know what I’m going to do about that.
I better not proceed creating these tasks” then I just select Cancel.
Now on this occasion I’m quite happy for it to create the Project Meeting Task on the
next working day so I’m going to click Yes.
And what you can see now is that I have my seven in this case meetings scheduled.
You see that each of them is three hours in duration and you’ll see that one of them,
the one in October, has actually been scheduled for October the 31st.
Now unfortunately for the one that’s scheduled on October the 31st it actually makes it from
8 to 11 in the morning.
But I can in fact go in and edit an individual task.
So that, that is now an exception but it is correctly scheduled.
Now that in itself would probably save me quite a bit of time.
That’s certainly better than creating seven different meetings.
But going back to something that I said earlier on, if each of those meetings did have a very
specific difference from the others, so each of them had some particular features, then
it might well turn out better in the long run to schedule them individually.
And another aspect of that is that if, for example, we change their minds and decided
that it was going to be a two hour meeting from three till five on the 29th, if I select
that recurring task itself which effectively works as a sort summary task, right click
and click on Information and then changed the time from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. and the duration
to two hours, click on OK, it would delete and recreate all of those individual tasks
again.
So what will happen is that my exception, the one that I just demonstrated, that Monday,
October the 31st one I would need to put in place that exception again.
So it can’t take into account, if you like, any changes you made to individual tasks if
you make changes to the recurring task itself.
So that’s another one of the limitations of this approach.
So I’ve covered there the main points in relation to recurring tasks but there are
a couple of other things to add.
One of them is that when you’re creating a recurring task and specifying how many times
it’s going to recur or when it’s going to stop recurring there is no limitation based
on the end date of the project.
So you can easily schedule this recurring task way beyond the end of the project.
If that happens you will actually then extend the project up to the end of these recurring
tasks.
So you need to be careful that you’re not actually scheduling too far off into the future.
And another useful thing to note is how to collapse and expand.
If you double click in this case on the recurring task itself, one, then it’s collapsed.
Note the little icon there.
This task occurs seven times is the screen tip.
Double click again and you see that all of the individual tasks, in this case the individual
project meetings.
Note also of course that in the task names what Project has done here is to add a number
to the end of the task name for each of the project meetings so they do have different
names.
And of course you can mark individual project meetings as complete.
And perhaps the final thing to point out here is I haven’t assigned resources here but
supposing I were to select the recurring task itself and say Assign Resources, choose one
of the resources, maybe two of the resources from my resource pool.
I’m going to assign team member one, team member three.
Note that they are then assigned to each of the tasks.
By adding them to the recurring task itself they get assigned to each of the individual
tasks.
And just perhaps one other thing, going back to when we actually created this task.
One of the options towards the bottom, Calendar for scheduling this task.
Scheduling ignores resource calendars.
Let’s suppose that you actually assigned the resources to this task and one of the
resources was on holiday on a particular day.
They were having some annual leave, perhaps off sick or something like that.
If all of the resource calendars were taken into account then Project 2016 wouldn’t
be able to schedule that meeting for that day.
If you want to follow the principle, which will often be the case in things like project
meetings, that basically you’re going to schedule the meeting and anybody who happens
to be on holiday isn’t going to be there then you can check this box, Scheduling ignores
resource calendars.
But obviously whether or not you do that will depend very much on individual circumstances.
So that’s it on recurring tasks.
I’ll see you in the next section.