Managing a Project Across Summary Tasks

[mrennolds]

MS Project traditionally captures information on a "Summary Task" level (e.g., Cost, Duration, etc.).

How can MS Project track across Summary Tasks? For instance, if a set of tasks I wanted to track traversed more than one Summary Task, is MS Project 2003 capable of tracking this complex workflow? If so, how?

Thank you for your time!


Mike

 

[PDQBach]

Duration in a Summary task is not captured or rolled up. It is calculated for the Summary task at the Summary task level based on the earliest start and latest finish of the lower level (i.e., indented) Tasks.

Cost and Work in a Summary task are the sum of the Cost and Work in the lower level (i.e. indented) Tasks and plus any Cost and Work in the Summary Task itself.

A task can *only* be in one summary task.

A task can be in a summary task and that summary task can be in a higher level summary task. Is this what you mean when you say a task "traversed more than one summary task"?

How would you track the tasks? The same way you always do: you track the tasks, not the summary tasks. Tracking via Summary task is simply an indication that you don't understand how to use Project. For example, tasks are on the Critical path, not Summary tasks so tracking by Summary task means you are ignoring the most important part of project schedule: what's critical and what isn't?