The Guidelines below were written with the Microsoft Office Project Professional tool in mind, but can be adapted to other scheduling software tools as well.

1) As much as possible, Summary tasks should be deliverables, in noun form, and CAPITALIZED.

2) The last line of each section which has 3 or more tasks should be ‘<deliverable name> complete’ with a duration of 0 days, making it a Milestone. Recommendation: Make the milestones italic and color them green to make them stand out more.

Benefits:

- Easy to see the deliverables when browsing the plan, since they’re in caps

- Easy to recognize Milestones in project reports

- By having a Milestone at the end of every section, you have a line item where you can assign a Resource who is responsible for the whole section, since assigning a Resource to a Summary Task is not advised. This makes it easy to see who’s responsible for each section when you look at a milestone report.

Examples:

3) Never assign a Resource to a Summary task. This can cause circular references, if the tasks inside a linked Summary task are linked to other sections. If you want to show who’s responsible for the whole section, assign a resource to the milestone task at the end of the section (see ‘Benefits’ above.)

4) Detail tasks should start with a verb, preferably have an object, and be doable by the resource doing the task.

Example 1: ‘Success criteria’ should be ‘Define & document success criteria’.

Example 2: ‘Test’ should be ‘Test VeriSign Integration’ or ‘Test VI’

Example 3: ‘Signoff on success criteria’ should be ‘Obtain signoff on success criteria’. (The executive signing off isn’t responsible for getting the task done, the project manager (or other) is – so it’s ‘obtain’)

5) Detail tasks should ideally have a duration range of 1 day to 2 weeks. There are exceptions, but it’s harder to track and control progress on a 2-month task than on a 2-week task…

6) Create the Detail tasks to the level of granularity that you want to monitor. There may be Detail tasks too granular for putting in the project plan. These can go into a checklist. You can attach a Note to a task name referring people to ‘Checklist x’. Alternatively, just put the checklist right into the Task Note.

7) Detail tasks Task Names should be unique within your project, and specific to the summary section they’re in. Instead of ‘Design’, the task name could be ‘Design Release 1′, for example. If you repeat a group of tasks over several sections, add a prefix or suffix to the task name which reflects the Summary task.

Benefit: When you’re reporting on a list of tasks which may or may not have the summary tasks listed, it’s clearer what the task is. When you’re referencing cross-project dependencies or doing portfolio-level reporting, unique task names are imperative for identifying the task.

8. As a general rule, do not enter Start date or Finish date on any task. MS Project will calculate that for you, based on the task priority, effort, dependencies, resources assigned, calendars, etc. Enter the Work estimate (in the Duration column for duration or the Work column for work effort), Task Dependencies and Resources, and let Project calculate the Start date and Finish date.

Reason: If you manually enter a Start date, for example, MS Project will set a ‘Start no earlier than’ constraint on the task. If a predecessor task finishes earlier than scheduled, the task with a Start date constraint will not be rescheduled to start earlier than planned; the constraint date will be honored. You will lose visibility into which tasks can start/finish earlier than originally scheduled.