Project tasks page allows viewing and editing tasks for a specific project.
Please note: In this article, we will review the project tasks page for the internal PPM Express tasks. Tasks synchronized from external systems are located on separate pages that can be opened from the Schedule Project section.
To get to the Project Tasks page, open the project where you need to add or review tasks and click on the View Tasks or the Task Management icon in the upper right part of the Project Dashboard.
Also, you can access the Project Tasks page by clicking the View PPM Express Tasks option on the Schedules section of the Project dashboard.
On the Tasks page, you can review the project name and overall status of the project that you are working on. The link projects button is available here, along with the days remaining for your project.
Please note: Tasks imported from external systems and tasks created manually in PPM Express are not mixed or merged. You will be able to review them separately on the Project Dashboard.
The project tasks page consists of the Tasks statuses section and PPM Express Tasks section where you can add project tasks.
The task statuses section consists of four cards:
- Tasks Statuses
- Tasks Progress
- Task Summary
- My Assignments
If you click on the task number next to each status on the cards the tasks list will be filtered according to the selected value (for example, if you click on the number of Late tasks, the tasks list will be filtered by late tasks).
The PPM Express Tasks section allows adding new tasks to your project, creating task groups, and importing tasks from the .csv file.
There are two views available for the PPM Express Tasks section in the right upper part of this section: table and timeline.
To find out how to add, group, and manage PPM Express tasks, please refer to the Creating and managing project tasks article.
When at least one task is created, you can use the available options on the taskbar to edit tasks one by one or in bulk:
- Create new tasks using the New task button;
- Edit the selected task using the Edit Task button;
- Delete the selected task using the Delete Task button;
- Import/Export tasks to/from .csv files using the File button;
- Outdent (moves tasks a level up in the hierarchy level).
- Indent (moves tasks a level down in the hierarchy level).
- Create new groups using the Manage Groups button;
- Assign to button is used to assign tasks to Resources;
- Set Progress button is used to set the progress for tasks. If there are Summary tasks in the automatic mode, progress will not be changed using the bulk update option. Only those tasks that have Progress editable should be updated;
- Set the baseline for your tasks using the Set Baseline option;
- Using the Calculate progress feature includes on-demand rollup calculation of the summary tasks and horizontal calculation for non-summary tasks;
- Link/Unlink options allow setting predecessors/successors for the selected tasks. If edited in bulk, the dependency type will be Finish to Start. If the predecessor conflicts with an existing one during the bulk edit, it will be skipped;
- Move to Group option allows moving tasks to a certain group;
- Using the Set Mode feature you can change the calculation mode to Manual or Auto;
- Clone option allows cloning all the tasks in the hierarchy (they all should be selected). If you select one task from the hierarchy, only one task will be cloned.
A roll-up calculation of the summary task fields will be implemented for the following existing fields:
- Effort
- Completed Work
- Remaining Work
- Original Estimate
- Story Points
To hide/show all tasks in the tasks hierarchy use the Outline button. It is applied to all tasks at once, you can either Expand all tasks to show subtasks or Collapse all tasks to show only the parent task.
You can change PPM Express task start/finish dates on the timeline view directly (by dragging the timeline to the required date).
Also, you can change the timeframe on the timeline view and select to review the task timeline by days/weeks/months/quarters/years.
Each task has the ellipsis button on the right using which you can open the tasks menu and perform the following:
- Edit the task
- Delete the task
- Move to group
- Copy the task
- Set progress for the task
- Assign the task to your resources (only active resources can be assigned to tasks, inactive resources do not appear in the list of available resources)
- Set Baseline
- Add subtasks
- Outdent (moves tasks a level up in the hierarchy level).
- Indent (moves tasks a level down in the hierarchy level).
- Insert task above (adds tasks above a chosen task). The task will be added to the same hierarchy level as the selected one.
- Calculate progress (performs the recalculation process and roll-up data to the selected task (option is available only for summary tasks).
- Set Mode: Manual or Auto calculation.
Use the default and create custom views for your tasks. Filter your tasks out using the default prefilters and filters or creating custom filters.
Tasks statuses can be quickly reviewed in the Statuses section.
The tasks can be filtered out from the Statuses tasks section by clicking on the task number.
On the My Assignments section, users can review information for their tasks. All the numbers are clickable and will filter data in the table below accordingly.
Also, the 'All' option will be added to the cards to review the full list of tasks. The buttons to go back to the project or open tasks from the connected system, if any, are at the top right corner.
Please note: All default fields in Task Management are enabled for editing. Some of the fields are more widely used in integration scenarios. For example:
- Area Path filed is automatically mapped from tasks synchronized from Azure DevOps.
- Parent field is used in Jira and Azure DevOps connectors and displays the ID of the parent item.
- WBS field defines the WBS hierarchy of tasks synchronized from Project Online.
A common tasks control panel is used for all Tasks Pages. The fields that are automatically filled in on data synchronization are also displayed on the Projects Tasks Page. If you do not add external connections to PPM Express, you can add values to these fields for internal tasks. In case you find these or other fields irrelevant to your internal tasks, please just keep them hidden from your views.
The tasks section can be opened in full-screen mode for better viewing and editing.
