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Creating a new task
Firstly choose a task name at the top of the form, if you don’t choose one a ‘task 37’ type name will be assigned automatically. Use description to provide any details about what the task involves.
Next select whether the task in Normal ((where you decide scheduling, resources and % complete) or Summary (used as a summary of a set of underlying tasks which will determine scheduling, % complete etc). Then select if the task is to be in one of the existing summary groups or at the top level of the plan.
Finally the duration section, here you can determine and start and end dates of the task either fixed from Calendar or moving depending on predecessors and durations.
This is the essential information for the task, you can proceed to Resources and costs tab or create the task.
Adding Resources and Costs
Depending on its purpose the Planner file you open may have all three tabs visible or some other combinations. Typical combinations are as follows:
Small project -
Large project -
Other -
The appropriate tab combination can be set up in the Options-
Updating tasks
Planner is designed with personalisation in mind, users can (if the file hasn’t been locked) change the resource model, mode of % complete calculation, risk and issue types, categories and calculation basis. This can be changed in individual files and also in your template versions of files so that the same personalisation's are used every time on each new project.
Thats great in terms of getting Planner to work the way that you want it to and the same applies to this guidance. You can produce your own guidance and host it yourself on an intranet site, Sharepoint or something similar and then in Planner just change the link location that the Guidance button should point to.
You can find the link locations in Options -
What can I now do with my Plan and tasks?
If you are using Planner standalone or as a template from Community Edition then you can analyse your plan using views and export or print your results as required.
If using a PIAB commercial product your data will be available to be shown at project, programme or portfolio level combined with plan information from other projects.
If using Small Team or Enterprise Editions you will be able to produce resource profiles and generate user specific task lists accumulated across all plans in the system as well as send people reminders based on the status and content of their tasks by email.
‘This basic scheduling and risk management package provides all of the functionality that many users require. And its free!’
Steve Cotterell, Project Manager Today
Read the full review here: PMT July 2012
The perfect companion planning tool simple to layout, schedule your projects and even resource them. Then share the files with anyone you want. Easy to pick up and use even if you haven’t used MS Project before...if you have..well it’s like MS Project made easy.
Simple Plan Features
It does the following for free!
- Transfer your plan from MSProject
- Transfer your plan to MSProject
- Task name and further details
- Unique duration setting by fixed dates, start plus days or predecessor plus dates
- Add resources and allocation %
- Creates project resource list
- % complete by task
- Group tasks into summaries
- Auto calc summary dates and %
- Task budget and cost control
- Task colours, comments and tags
- Move and copy tasks
- View interactive Gantt
- Click to edit and custom order tasks
- Alter display time frame
- Gantt as image in one click
- Save your plan and share for free
- Bundled with Community Edition
- Upload into PROJECT in a box to integrated into organisation wide resource and task management
- Risk logging, management, analysis and communications
- Issue logging, management, analysis and communications
- Import or export risks via Excel
- Completely FREE!
Or view full PIAB product matrix