Zoom in further! Detailed "day view" for small tasks...
The closest you can zoom is "days", but that seriously limits the potential for detailed planning of smaller tasks.
1. Planning task with short duration is sometimes cost inefficient for project management activities. For example : We have a project schedule includes some tasks with the duration like 9:00 – 10:00, 10:00 – 12:00 and etc.
More short of task duration will bring more changes on schedule
- Suddenly there is a meeting at 9:00, your boss asks all or part of your project members to join
- Some project member take leave
- Some predecessor tasks has been delayed
- Or something wrong (like power off, …)
Shorter duration means more changes to the planned schedule, and the additional PM efforts/cost to manage the changs may be much more higher than expectation (sometimes, it may be higher than the effort/cost of the task itself). For the project following management process, it’s requested to update the project schedule if change coming. What we will do for a small change (such as delay one hour) for a team which following a standard process (such as CMMi…):
- Meet with team for review
- Ask team to discuss and re-estimate
- Update project schedule
- Communication with customer/boss …
2. When we are talking about “Task” of a project, we may think about different concepts.
2.1: The scheduled tasks in project schedule document
2.2: The todo task in action registration or just record somewhere
2.3: Or the tasks not planed and tracked
For the tasks of project schedule:
Tasks should be planned before execution
Tasks should be updated when executing if schedule need to be changed (or has changed)
The progress of tasks should be tracked well (not like todo task, people only care about the status of the todo task) – team should be initiative to know what to do, what’s the process and what changed.
We need cost to manage the project schedule – such as regular meetings to review progress, discuss with team and re-schedule, reporting and etc. (compare to todo task, the PM cost is much more high)
For some cases, it’s useful to schedule task with duration of hour, but most of the time, the cost on task maintenance will be very higher if we plan project tasks duration so short. Too accurate schedule means unacceptable management efforts.
3. Majorly there are two type of tools to manage project tasks (of cause there are some other tools related to tasks, such as risk management tool)
3.1 Project schedule
3.2 Action registration
The project manager need to balance the use of the tools
4 The project manager may need some other tools for short term activities
4.1 Define suitable process for the workflow of short and related activities
4.2 Using tools like agile board or kanban for short duration cycle.
5. I’d like suggest that
5.1 In QuickPlan, input the task work (effort) column for short task (such as input work as 1)
5.2 Using other to-do/action registration tool to manage the actions of the project task